Nicole Alderman

Do chives count? They have bulbs, and the flowers are pretty and purple. AND, they're yummy!

If chives don't count, I'll go for daylilies. Yummy flowers, and the leaves are great for making twine and baskets with!

Today, another permie asked me how to wet felt with kids. This is a very serendipitous question, because I just taught wet felting to 4 groups of elementary-aged kids today (and taught 4 other groups on Monday). I'm dead on my feet right now, and rather worn out, but I'm going to try to congeal my thoughts on teaching wet felting to kids.

"Ingredients"

• Bubble wrap! You want it long enough to fold over your project, and wide enough that your project will stay inside the bubble wrap. With my students, I used 1 foot by 3 feet pieces of bubble wrap.
• Liquid soap. I like Dr Bronners. One student had a reaction to the mint Dr. Bronners, so I switched to using unscented. Felting can be done without soap, but the soap helps lubricate the wool, and the alkalinity speeds up the felting. It also helps the wool not stick to your hands.
• Spray bottles. You want at least 1 spray bottle per 4 kids. Kids are not patient waiting for other kids! 1 bottle for 4 kids is a good minimum.
• Warm water (in the spray bottles). If you don't have warm water, cold water will work. Warm water is just faster.
• Wool. You want something like Romney or Corriedale. Those have nice long fibers that are "grippy." I don't like to work with Merino, as it's so "slippery" and doesn't felt well. I can also attest to Llama wool does not wetfelt. I like to order my wool from Weir Crafts, but the Corriedale roving from the Woolery is also good. I prefer to buy colors individually, rather than in "assorted" sets, as the amount of wool in those sets is really small.

"Instructions"

• Step 1: Have the students work on one half of their bubble wrap. Kids really like to make their creation REALLY BIG. I told my students today to make it about the size of their hands. This helped ensure there was enough wool for everyone. But, you can totally go larger.
• Step 2: Lay out the wool in thin layers. I tell the kids to pull the wool apart gently to make a sort of "web" and lay it down vertically. Make a complete layer of vertical wool. Then do a layer of horizontal wool. Then a layer diagonal in one direction, and then diagonal in another direction. Have the kids check to see if there holes or thin spots and layer more wool accordingly. These layers can all be in one color (I generally used the plain cream wool that I had donated to me for this....because I had a lot of it. But, kids can also do these layers in different colors)





I didn't get any pictures today. This is my daughter 3 years ago when she was in kindergarten. Here she is layering the wool.



• Step 3: Add designs (optional): My students this week make snails, cats, dogs, flowers, sunsets, axolotls, people, stars, hearts. and just fun colors in stripes and swirls. This isn't necessary, but it's fun. Remind students that wet felting is like and experiment. The wool will wiggle around and change shapes. That's okay! It's fun to see how it turns out!
• Step 4: Add water and soap. You can do this by drizzling a few drops of soap and then spraying with water (this is what I did) or mix up water and soap. Premixing might help prevent kids from adding too much soap! /list]
  

  

  Here's my daughter spritzing with water. Her project was larger than what I had my kids make today. But, we wanted to turn it into a pouch.

  
  [list]Step 5: Once their project is wet, have the kid double check that there aren't any holes or thin areas. Add more wool as necessary. The spraying with water might also disturb the kids' designs. Have them double-check and fix their felting[
• Step 6: Fold the bubble wrap over the design and begin the felting. You can either use a rolling pin over the bubble wrap, or you can just roll the bubble wrap up and wiggle/agitate it with your hands. When my daughter was little, we started with the rolling pin and then moved to rolling it up. With my students today, I didn't have enough rolling pins, so we just started with rolling up the bubble wrap and agitating it





using a rolling pin



Rolling it up and aggitating it



• Step 7: Open it up the felt and check on it. See how it's felting and adjust if necessary. Then fold the bubble wrap back over it and roll it the other direction and felt for a while.
• Step 8: Repeat Step 7 until the wool is firmly felted. You can test this by putting your hand on the felt and pushing gently at the wool. If individual pieces move around, felt more. If they don't, move onto step 10!
• Step 9: Once the project is well felted so that the strands don't move independently, pick up the felt and roll it/scrub it in your hands to really felt it down. Do this for at least 30 seconds.
• Step 10: Rinse it cold water! Rinse and squeeze until the soap suds all come out.
• Step 11: Have the kids squeeze as much water out of it before they leave the sink! If you don't tell them this, they will dribble water EVERYWHERE!

For the life of me, I can't find the video I learned from years ago. This one shows the basic principles:


If you want to show them how felt was done in ancient times, below is a video about felting on the Eurasian Steppe. Most of my classes that I taught felting to today were my ancient history classes. So I showed them the video below and paused it multiple times, explaining that we were using bubble wrap instead of a "mother felt" and that we were going to roll it with our hands, rather than it getting rolled by horses. But, just like how the horses had to roll the felt for miles, we're going to roll/agitate ours for a long time!

She has a book, too! Book of Earth: A Guide to Ochre, Pigment, and Raw Color

Bumping this, because it's amazing! I stumbled across this same article today, and came to post about here on permies...only to see you'd already beat me to it by over 5 years!

I want to post the first image on her website, because it's so impressive. Look at those blues and purples!

Here's some really good resources on this subject: Promoting Your Stuff on Permies for FREE! and advertising for free (and not-free) on permies.com. Even if you're not trying to advertise anything, they help explain how to not be spammy. Here's some quotes:

How to avoid looking like a spammer:

Make one thread about your service/product/event. Make this thread look nice and professional using formatting tags, and post replies, updates, new pictures, etc to that thread. Multiple threads saying the same thing look spammy.

Add your one thread to multiple forums by using PIE &/or Thread Boost. This allows your thread to show up in multiple forums.

Make your thread a wiki. This allows you to edit whenever you like to add new pictures or update information. You can make a post a wiki through the "wiki" tab when you compose or edit your post. The "wiki" tab is next to the attachments tab where you add pictures.

Refrain from posting about your product/event/service on other people's threads unless it makes sense. If you make a lot of posts about your service on other people's threads, especially in a row, we will assume you are a spammer and your posts will be deleted. Add your link to your signature, and post only about your service/product/event when it is very relevant and helpful to the conversation.

and:

In order to be useful, your content should be:
Relevant to permaculture or homesteading;
Accurate and complete; and
In English (just like Permies posts).

Notice the "Make one thread about your service/product/event." You're more likely to get clicks on one longer thread with multiple posts, than multiple different threads that have no replies. Every time you reply to your thread, it bumps it up in the "Recent Topics" so more people see it. And, the more people see one thread, the more likely it is that they'll get curious and click on it. If they go to "Recent Topics" and see a ton of threads that are all pretty similar, all made by one person, people will view it and spam. They might also just leave permies because it looks spammy--that hurts permies, so we have to take action.

r ransom wrote:There seem to be two origins of goose feathers for sale on Etsy.  One is from harvesting the goose (aka, leftover from killing for food) and the other is from moulting.  Mine would be from gathering up the feathers as they naturally fall off the goose in the summer.

I feel there's an advantage to this from the customer point of view.  I'm trying to think of words that a customer would search for.
Ethical, moulting, natural, ...?

There's definitely an advantage to them being "cruelty free." When I was teaching my lesson about making feather dusters and mentioned that the feathers came from my ducks and chickens and geese, I watched one of the moms  of my students make the saddest face. Then I continued saying that they were ones that I'd picked up in the yard as my birds shed them. Her face perked up with the biggest smile, and she said something like, "Oh, I love that!"

For selling feathers verbiage, maybe something like "cruelty-free feathers naturally shed by my flock of geese."

I ended up washing a BUNCH of feathers a few weeks ago. I was teaching my history class about cleaning during the Renaissance and thought it'd be fun for them to make their own feather dusters (some used the spare branches to make brooms, too!).

To wash the feathers, decided to go with a diluted solution of apple cider vinegar. I didn't want anything too alkaline, and I didn't want to strip the preening oil off the feathers. I figured if my ducks took baths in apple cider water when sick, then it should be good for their feathers. Here's my process:

Fill a bowl with warm water and a glug of apple cider vinegar. I did this in the sink!

Add a few handfuls of feathers at a time to soak in the solution.

Pick up a feather and gently swipe my fingers down each feather in the vinegar water to get off any grime or poop. always swiping from the base to the tips, and out from the spine of the feathers to the edge. I tried to pretend I was a duck preening.

Rinse the feather in warm water

Lay the feather on a towel. (Once a towel was covered with feathers, I put a new dish towel on top to add another row of feathers. This was only because I ran out of space, though. Thankfully, none of the feathers ended up deformed by the weight of dishtowels.)

This did a great job of removing what little bits of poop were on some of the feathers, and none of the feathers ended up looking dry or clumpy!


(Making feather dusters is quite easy that even 7 year olds were making them on their own! Here's info on how to make your own feather duster. The brooms use the same process, just with sticks or straw instead of feathers--my 10-12 year old students were making those independently. Here's a tutorial on making brooms)

Thank you! I'm usually too terrified to paint things I've drawn, for fear of ruining them. But, I tried to keep a feeling of "This is for fun, it doesn't matter how it looks." I think, when A.I. can be so good at certain styles, it sort of frees us to just create because at least we're human. If it looks too good, it looks like A.I.!

Tereza Okava wrote:

Nicole Alderman wrote:Do you have a rotary cutter, a fabric mat, and clear rulers?

I have a cutter, but none of the rest of the goodies (like the sharpener???

They make a sharpener for those?! I think I need to put that on my Christmas list. Mine has one spot that is dull, so I usually have to manually snip the uncut bit with scissors.