Wet Felting Over The Weekend

This past Saturday I took a wet felting workshop.

On the agenda was making a beautiful felted square... for lack of a better description, to learn the basic techniques of wet felting.

We also made a felted bead and a rock. I'm surprised at how much I like the rock. It's so interesting from a texture and weight standpoint having the light spongy wool covering the heavy rock. I've already collected a few more rocks with the intent of felting them as well.

I came home and made a few more squares.

(This ones my favorite)

(It makes me think of the ocean a little bit)

I even gave my mom a quick tutorial on Mother's Day- and this is what she ended up making.

If you're curious about wet felting here's a nice tutorial I found. Some of the details of the process are a little different (we used water with soap already dissolved in it and didn't use the sushi mat- we just tossed the felt around on the bubble wrap) but the basic techniques are the same.

So I tried paper quilling...

I've been following Ann Martin's blog- all things paper for a while now and have really been inspired to try quilling because of the lovely examples and tutorials she's always posting.

Mother's Day seemed like the perfect opportunity to give this a go-

Just one tiny snag- I couldn't find any proper paper quilling tools or materials. I know I could have ordered them online- but of course I thought of doing this last minute and had to improvise.

I cut some strips of paper from larger sheets and used a pin tool from a scrapbook tool kit to roll the coils. I'm not sure if it effected the results at all- or if it was more a matter of having no experience in quilling but some of the curls are a little wonky. But for a first try I was really happy with how these turned out (more importantly the mom's love them).

Here's the card for my mom-

The card for my mother-in-law (which for the record was the first card I made)

And the card for my sister's very 1st mother's day.

I had some ribbon in the studio I knew she'd like and thought it might be nice to match the quilling to it.

Making these was really fun- although I have to admit my fingers were a little sore after making all three cards.

I'll definitely be trying this again!