Well i suppose most of you very talented artist out there will know all about this but i didnt and its been bugging me. I couldnt for the life of me work out what you would do with Silk Rods , i asked on the forum and they told me but in my own head it just didnt make sense, have you seen those ugly little things ( well you probably have ) lol to me they just made no sense at all. I know that a lot of people use them in there felt works and they do look gorgeous. Well all thats changed now lol i'm happy to say. My friend Zed sent me some to try and i've been looking at them for ages not knowing what to do so yesterday i dyed them the same way i dye everything else and they came out nice but NOW what hehehe. I thought you pulled them apart to make like a roving but that didnt really work so it was suggested that i might have to soak them again to seperate. I'm thinking seperate what ! there so flat but then i put some stronger glasses on lol and i could actually see a semblence of layers, aha i thought so i very slowly tried to peel the layers apart, alot harder than you think, the first effort resulted in a tangled mess and i realised then that this is how they get the throwsters waste, we'll leave that to one side and i just waited for some to dry before another play and wow i started to pull off this fluff, i soon realised that if i wanted more fluff than stringy bits i have to wait till its crispy dry and then just with gentle fingers started to pull at the ends, I love how it comes out so here's some pics to show off.
I should have taken a pic before dying, sorry i didnt think of that !!
Dying the rods
Peeling the layers off, this is still wet
The final yummy fluffy Cloud but it has to be crispy dry to pull it out. otherwise it goes to a waste , i left a layer of the rod there in each color to show you and everyone likes it different so know we can do both.
When your in a hurry to seperate and dont have patients, this is what happen's
Anyway as i said im sure most of you will have know this but not me, so this is my lesson for the day
Happy Felting
Well, I didn't know all of that. I have actually "degumed" them (that's how apparently, according to the seller, it's called to take the gummy part) with hot water and vinegar. Let it float there for a while and then carefully do basically what you did. Now, with a bit of that backing gum, I have stretched and added to a felting project and they worked just fine.
ReplyDeleteMy problem now is that I have a bunch of cocoons... some with the (dead) worm inside... how do I work with those???
Hi Mariana,
ReplyDeletethis is the first time i played with silk rods and it was fun but i'm still learning lol
I did have a couple of those in with this and i just soaked them to and started to just pull off the fibres, they come off easy but really really fine and of course i made a tangled mess of them. You could use them in your felting projects to just like you are. I'm not really sure on that one yet so i'll keep practising
I'm sorry i know that probably didnt help much, i'll see what else i can find out
cheers karen
Thankyou so much,
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry i dont know your name, it usually all comes up as little squares that i cant read xoxo