Nuno Felting Workshop

This Saturday we hosted Clare Bullock again, this time she led a very interesting workshop on Nuno Felting.

She was very hands -on, easy to communicate with and made the whole day great fun. She showed us many samples of her beautiful felting work and described the various applications it can have, as well as the types of materials that can be incorporated.

She then demonstrated the basic method as follows;

First placing a mat of non-slip plastic on the table, a sheet of bubble wrap on top of that, then layering the Merino tops in pinched wisps of overlapping rows flattened across the bubble wrap leaving no gaps.

Then strips of various cottons, silks, lace materials are placed across the flattened fleece, also overlapping at the edges and leaving no gaps.

A liberal sprinkling of water over this to wet it down, then a sheet of thin plastic (builders plastic sheeting widely available) on top of the fleece, carefully squash this plastic sheet onto the wet fleece.

Apply sprinkled water, smooth over surface with olive oil soap and keep sliding the hands in circular movement over the plastic. This smoothing is continued with the occasional re-watering, re-soaping and peeling of the top plastic sheet to turn it over or check if the fibres of Merino could be seen  coming through the strips of material.

Eventually the ‘cloth’ seems to ruck up and shrink, and when it is felt that it looks finished, it can be rinsed and is completed.

We were all very pleased with the Nuno cloths we produced and it was amazing to see how the look of the textures changed so much with the shrinking reaction of wool combining with cloth, and the beautiful colours that were produced. A great day was had by all.