Category: Felt

Advantages of using viscose in felting

With many visual characteristics of silk tops, the lack of static makes felting with viscose easy. As a substitute and more economical than silk, viscose tops also add lustre and strength to felting projects. Making felt more elastic, its use enhances the drape of thin layouts. As well as additional comfort and softness,  using viscose tops / roving  reduces pilling.  Derived from regenerated wood-pulp,  it is  vegan & eco-friendly due to the closed cycle production process. 

Versatile viscose

Use clouds, strands or shingles for decorating and reinforcing when using viscose for felting. Use a little or a lot (up to 70%!) for different effects, especially on pre-felts.

Mix different colours together in your hands or with hand carders to achieve a wide range of colour variations. For greater effect, use viscose colours that contrast with the wool.

Make viscose fibre sheets using soap, starch solution or wall paper paste when making faux ‘silk‘ paper for felting. Torn or cut pieces or whole sheets can be added to wool or pre-felt layouts. Using the textile medium or PVA glue method will give a firmer result more suited to embellishing other textiles and making bags or vessels. Anything you can do with silk roving, you can do with viscose roving with no static and at a fraction of the cost!

Being cellulose, use fibre reactive dye to dye white viscose tops or overdye light colours.

Viscose fibre is a wonderful fibre to incorporate into:

• Felting – wet felting, nuno felting, needle felting
• Spinning – incorporate with other fibres, create art batts
• Hand weaving – use alone, in combination with wool roving, or as an accent in macramé wall hangings.
• Paper making – added to other fibres or used alone to make fibre sheets
• Doll making – for wigging and making curls
• Mixed media and textile art surface design; layering, couching

Viscose Roving – Creative felting techniques

Stunning effects can be achieved with  viscose roving:

• Marbled & Impressionist effects
• Openwork and Windows
• Viscose paper applique
• Graphic images
• Faux fur
• Blending viscose

With explanatory subtitles, these techniques are beautifully illustrated below in videos by Katerina Korshun, a textile artist from Prague.

FeltWEST February 2019 meeting

Mini-workshop – Fibre Finesse for Felt

Today Sara Quail kindly demonstrated the use of plant fibres for embellishing felt to create texture, subtle bling, sheen and colour variation. Adding non-wool fibre also reduces pilling and increases the structural integrity, allowing for extremely thin layouts.

Silk waste, silk spaghetti, soy silk, mulberry silk, tussah silk, viscose and ramie are some examples. Viscose is much finer and ramie (made from plants of the nettle family) is coarse. Fibres that are coarser than your wool will sit on the surface, whereas fibres of the same or finer thickness will combine with the wool.

Today we concentrated on viscose as it is one of the cheaper fibres but the same process works with other plant fibres. To make fibre paper, lay out fibres in both directions over a piece of plastic. Place netting over the fibre, wet down and rub soap bar (don’t use liquid soap) all over to create a good amount of foam. Gently peel off the netting and put the fibre on the plastic in the sun to dry. You may need to use small weights to prevent it blowing around. Once dry, the fibre paper is rigid enough to cut into pieces for decoration or can be folded and shaped.

Colour variations can be achieved by chopping up the length of fibre into chunks and dropping onto the plastic. The fibre tops can also be pulled into fluffy clouds or different coloured fibres can be blended.

Fibre paper pieces or fibre (as lengths or clouds) can be placed onto laid out wool tops or wool prefelt and they will attach during the normal felting process. Fibre/wool prefelt can be cut into shapes and placed onto wool tops, Margilan silk or cotton gauze before continuing felting.

Another method is to lay out a tangle of wool pre-yarn, then place plant fibre on top, ensuring that all the plant fibre is in contact with wool. Pre-yarn can be added to the other side if desired. Very light, soft fabric with a cob-web effect can be achieved by laying out a very thin layer of wool, then covering with plant fibre.