I’m catching up with my Stitchbook Collective – this is the series of on-line workshops which Helen of Untangled Threads is organising. Each month I get a box with everything I need to try a new kind of textile media…only I was about three boxes behind! This week I tackled the kunin felt box.

There are three types of felt apparently, wool, acrylic and polyester. Kunin felt is a polyester felt, it’s totally eco-friendly as it’s made from recycled plastic bottles. The technique we tried was using the way it melts rather than burns. We cut shapes out such as flowers, hovered them over a candle until they started to curl and melt – it sort of reminded me of the craze of shrinking crisp packets under the grill when I was a teenager!

Helen provides everything – even a tea-light and a pair of tweezers so we don’t burn our fingers! I made some flowers to start with. They are simply made from a circle with snips in – we didn’t shape the petals at all, it’s just how it melts. I then tried strips and squares with holes. I then had to create something!

I stitched the red, yellow and oranges flowers onto the black felt with a leaf each, adding dots of kunin felt or beads for the centre. I found the braid in my stash which colour wise matched perfectly. It still needed something else, I rummaged in my button box and found buttons which echoed the flowers in someway…

I was left with the strips, purple flowers and holes!! Helen had provide some fabric samples and lengths of coloured cords to help us a long. The fabrics were mainly floral and not purple (!!!) but one was a soft purple check with lines of orange, blue etc. It gave me a starting point…

I couched some of the cord along the fabric lines,, running stitch along the orange one.

I quite like the flowers, I’m just not sure where I’d use them, maybe for vintage looking brooches…if I was into vintage looking brooches!! It’s fun trying all these things though and it is certainly pushing me out of my comfort zone as I try to create a piece of work from each box 🙂