There you have it, the 2 sides of washed fair isle. I did try pulling it apart and its not coming apart although I didn't try real hard. This is a hat and I think needle felting it might even make it a little warmer since its adding some fuzzy stuff to the inside. Maybe I'm wrong and I'll never know because it doesn't fit me, its the cement goose's hat

Well I suggest after this experiment, if you do something in fair isle, maybe you should try this on the swatch first. It didn't hurt my hat on the front, or the back, but this is only one piece. I do know Charlene Shafer suggested it originally in one of her newsletters and in one of her afghan books and I think its a great idea. As a reminder, I started it with a single needle and ended up buying a Clover Tool which is much faster to use for this sort of project.

Needle Felting Fair Isle Floats

OK, it was emailed to me that it is possible to contain floats in a fair isle design by needle felting them. Of course, thinking about it, you'd have to needle felt from the front so that the fuzziness of felting would land on the inside (where the floats are). I tried it on a hat that I once made for Goosie Porter (my cement goose). I just did a little area, after all I just wanted to know if it would work. The hat has about 5 white stitches and then a red stitch, 5 more white and a red so each white square is bordered with red. Actually the floats on this design aren't all that bad anyway but it was all I had unless I wanted to get out the machine and make something (not a good idea when I'm in the middle of packing. The hat was made out of 100% acrylic. Here's the front, the felting was done on the left side. This is the front AFTER I did the needle felting. Click on it to see the close up.

Here's the back and you can definitely see the area I needle felted (you can also see where it is in relation to the seam so you can really compare the 2. The question arose on the MKEmbroidery group, what happens after you wash the felted piece? Well--I'm washing it now and I'll post a picture when its dry. I'll also try pulling the fuzzies back to the front, it was mentioned on the group that you can "un-felt" by pulling the fuzzies back out the way they went in (pulling from the front). So we'll see.

Where Have I Been?

I've been training Biscuit to live in a crate when I'm not home (he hates it) and sitting in the car with him for about 30 minutes twice a day trying to get him over his phobia of riding in the car. Poor thing got so sick the first couple days I had him, all my visions of riding around the world with him vanished. Well---for the time being anyway.

We now sit in the car and talk. I sometimes sing, accompanying the radio, to him--they say dogs love their masters no matter what so I'm sure he doesn't mind my singing. We have graduated this week to starting the car and me driving forward and backward up and down our short driveway. That makes him so nervous that he won't even take a "good Boy" treat. When we get out of the car I try to make the whole thing fun by letting him roam around the yard a bit, smelling everything to make sure nothing has changed while we were on our 30 minute journey.

When I'm not sitting in the car feeling like an idiot when someone goes by I've been cleaning out the cupboards in the loft. All I've found were an old pair of my husband's boots and a collection of little ducks that I once thought were sooooo cute and now wonder why I thought that. I'm keeping them though, I'm thinking they would make great models for needle felting.

I've thrown out 7 bags of shredded paper, carefully camouflaged in 2 layers of garbage bags. I took them to the recycle center and tossed them in household garbage rather than paper, because I had visions of a criminal carefully taping the shredded stuff back together to get my credit card or social security number....ok, so I have an avid imagination!!!

Hopefully I'll finish all the cleaning this week and I can get back to what I really want to do--embroider Biscuit a new blanket, needlefelt one of those ducks, finish knitting the sweater I started last winter, so that I'll have it for next winter when hopefully I'll be moving to Wisconsin where its considerably colder than South Carolina. Then I also have a shawl on the LK 150 that I really want to finish so I can get something else on it. In fact if I would hurry up and finish it I could put the HK sweater on it and finish that. I think that's the first project I'm going to do next week AFTER I finish the loft this week.

Why is it that life has to get in the way of fun? Confucius says: It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop. OK Confucius, I'll stick with the job this week!!! Can't promise I'll keep it up next week though.