Felting fabric for a chair

I love Festive fibers chairs and other pieces that she makes and thought I would try to make fabric for this little victorian style chair that I bought for a few dollars at a garage sale. It still had the horsehair stuffing in it but the fabric had been clawed by the owner's cat and was awful. So, I took it all off down to the springs which I restrung, gave it a nice paint treatment, and then created this fabric for the back and the seat. The hard part was getting it on the chair since I haven't done a lot of upholstery before but I bought a book and just followed the directions. Fortunately for me the book had lots of illustrations of how to make nice corners, etc. Such a cheerful chair!

New Yarn

My friend really loves turquoise and red together. So I created this yarn ... hand dyed merino roving. Then I spun one single from the multi colored roving and one single from the turquoise and plied them together to create the yarn. This was done on a drop spindle. I think it looks a little like "baker's twine" but it is so soft. When I get it all done my plan is to make a beautiful pair of fingerless gloves. I hope I have enough leftover to make a cowl to go with the gloves.

Washing the fleece and felting "in the grease"

 This is the fleece I purchased a while ago and have been too timid to process.

I finally took it outside on a big table and spread it out. Its just beautiful with all different colors, brown, rust, gray and white.

 I separated it into small mesh bags and filled a couple of 5 gallon buckets with hot/warm water and dishwashing liquid and, after taking a big breath, immersed it into the water.

After soaking it I pulled the bags out and spun them dry in the washing machine and just repeated the process.

Wow, was there a lot of dirt!

Then I begain rinsing the bags and spinning them in the washing machine. The wool here is clean and drying on a unused window screen. The wool is soft and I got most of the grease out.