Felt Gnome home and bag

(Goblin is 28 months)

I have been doing some more wet felting experiments. I've gone a bit wool crazy recently and bought a load of mixed random bags of merino wool from World of Wool.

I felt I needed to justify my expenditure by actually making something.  I wanted to try something more 3D so I started with a bag. I laid some white wool as a base and then laid coloured wool in a picture on top (I tried to lay the white horizontal and the coloured vertically so that it felted better).

 Then I grated soap onto it and poured some warm water over it and stuck a rectangle of bubble wrap over the top. I wobbled the bubble wrap about a bit to flatten out the wool and start the felting process. Then I wrapped the edges of the felt round the sides of the rectangle before laying more wool on this side of the bubble wrap.

On this side I laid the picture first and the back colour after (so all the pictures would be facing in on the final thing - the idea being to then turn it inside out).

So here it is drying off. I didn't bother putting a white backing on the other side, I just used coloured wool. 

 When I turned it inside out I realised that I'd folded the white backing straight onto the bubble wrap and laid the back picture over it - so the seam of the white backing is showing - lesson to learn for next time.

But the front looked good. The little bits of coloured wool really do look like little flowers.

To strengthen this creation as a bag I lined it. I added a handle made on a knitting nancy.

And this is what the final bag looked like. I was really pleased with this but thought I could probably improve on it. So I set out to make a gnome home using the same technique.

This is the wet felted result. But then I needle felted some detail onto it. I used a triangular piece of bubble wrap to make the roof. While the roof was still wet and soapy I moulded it into a soda bottle. It gave it a great shape - i need to remember this for next time so I can make the house bit more circular (maybe using a tin can). The handle is just plaited wool.

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