A Day With the Girls, Showing Off What I Learned

I have this friend, her name is Denise. She taught me to spin on a drop spindle. She tried to teach me to spin on a spinning wheel, but I'm afraid my brain wasn't ready yet, so I spun the same piece of fiber for about an hour, making absolutely no progress. So she kindly let the subject drop.

At any rate, Denise and her friend Channyn live in a house filled with children. You're probably thinking four children. But no. There are more than that. When everyone is there, there are 10 people in the house. When I contemplate feeding 10 people, I feel a little guilty, because I don't extend myself much for the people in my house when it comes to cooking. "Cheese and crackers for everyone!" I am known to shout. And sometimes, I look at my son and say, "So, what are you going to eat for supper?" And he says, "Cheese and crackers?" And I think to myself, "What a lovely child."

On Sunday, I was invited to bring my stuff from my nuno felting class over, so I filled a laundry basket with all my supplies and my books and my magazines. It turns out that Denise is one of those people who has pondered every art form imaginable. So we went upstairs, and didn't Denise have a nuno felting kit, amongst many other treasures? So we got all MOTIVATED and decided that we would make a nuno felted scarf.

The kit turned out to have just the right colors for Channyn, who likes oranges, but not blues. So we decided to make a scarf together, we three. We collaborated, and turned out the loveliest scarf you can imagine. We think we should organize ourselves and call ourselves a guild, or a guildlet, or a club, or a collaborative team... but we haven't thought up a good name yet. So I'll leave it to you, dear readers, to ponder the scarf and our artsy ways and suggest a name for our collaborative obsessive gathering of girls who are passionate about fiber.

So the kit had a nice length of silk scarf that was dyed in different colors, mostly orange, with some green and yellow. No instructions, so we used what I could remember from class. And it had some fiber, about an ounce, also in different colors, mostly orange with some green and yellow. We covered the kitchen table with a big sheet of plastic that I brought. Then we put down a shelf liner and put the scarf on that. Then we laid out the fiber. Channyn had some orange silk fiber, and some green silk fiber, so we put that on too. We tried making curleycues and circles with the silk. Then we sprayed it down with a water and soap mixture, laid a length of tulle across it, and started working on it. We used baggies to scrub in circles.

So we assaulted it some more, and then rolled it up inside a damp towel, tied the towel with panty hose (yep, I brought those!), and stuck the whole thing in the dryer on no heat for 10 minutes. Tried it again for another 10 minutes.

It looked pretty nice when we were done, but we weren't sure the silk was going to stick, so Channyn pulled out some more fiber, and we added maybe half an ounce ot it. The other fiber had the oranges and yellows and green, but also some red. That turned out really nice.

We rolled up what we had and then dipped it in hot water, then cold, to get it to felt some more. Then we squeezed it out, ironed it, and, voila, a finished scarf: