by Carolyn Steele Lane
Weaving Mug Rugs

Jill Johnstone mentioned to me one day that she wanted to try overshot and then I just happened to receive an email about a free Weave-along course that would introduce us to colour and overshot. I think I sent the email to Jill the day it started. She jumped in and I followed.

Wow, I never knew how much fun it can be to experiment with such small projects. I don't have too many colours to play with yet, but then I found an old box of cross stitch threads and a world of opportunity opened up. I only explored one warp of tiny rugs. We were going to host a session on colour before Christmas, but then we hoped to give away most of our samples.

Normally, Overshot uses a Design thread that is usually twice as thick as the warp and the tabby yarn.  The warp thread and the tabby yarn make a plain weave. So, if the design thread ever wore off, you would have a plain weave cloth underneath. That also means that for every Design thread you throw for Weft, you would follow it up with a plain weave tabby thread.

We started class by using one colour in the warp and testing various tabby threads in the Weft. My warp was burgundy. Notice how the red and green make a muddy green. Because plain weave has the thread going over and under every thread the colours blend more and having them closer on the colour wheel and in value made nicer backgrounds.

We laid out Design threads on these backgrounds to see what would stand out. One really wants a design that pops. It helped to take photos and make grey tones of the colours to check their values.

And without further ado, here are some of my mug rugs.

By Carolyn Steele Lane
Needle felting
I had created my first dinosaur way back in February 2017. I used wire in the arms/fingers only, keeping the arm wires joined and built the wool body in the middle (as opposed to making two separate arms and sticking them into the body).

Last fall, Elisabeth Weigand kindly commissioned one like it for her sister in Germany, so I got to make another! 
I stayed away from wire this time, though last fall seems so long ago, I can't quite remember. I did use a string jointed technique to attach the arms and legs. Simply sewed from inner leg to outer, back through, through body and into second leg and back and forth a few times. If done right, the leg will move on a joint.  Any dimples created can be covered up with more wool.

One of the biggest decisions of a project is size or proportion. All this has been done freehand. I much prefer sizing as I go rather than creating a complete wire frame of the whole project at the start. That's just me. Learning to draw has helped and I've always been spatially aware, except now I'm probably less exacting. I've often start with a head  or a body part that is important to that character such as the claws on this one. The rest is built to fit or adjustments are made as I go and exaggeration is allowed. And like any story book, the character starts making demands such as a flower rather than a heart or sometimes coffee.

I love how this new dinosaur looks so completely different than the first one and shows my work improving.

By Carolyn Steele Lane
Needle felting and wet felting

My daughter asked me to make a couple gifts for her cousins, which led to us watching many episodes of Futurama over Christmas. The Piranha plant from Super Mario, I know well from playing quite a few frustrating video games when the kids were younger. Back when you couldn't save your level or yourself for that matter. I love how I am influenced by my kids. When I can catch their excitement and create something I wouldn't have otherwise.

Introducing Nibbler from Futurama and The Piranha plant from Super Mario fame!

Nibbler's cape is from store bought felt. His diaper was made from quilt batting. I had tried to give him a big, cute butt 'cause its funny, but it didn't fit his character and body type and plus, the diaper. So I do go back and forth with my ideas and rework areas to make it better- even his teeth were cut down and reshaped. It's a good thing wool is forgiving.

The Piranha plant is mostly needle felted, but I wet felted the leaves, machine stitched the veins and stitched onto the stem. The stem is made of pipe cleaners, wrapped in wool and carefully needle felted. I sometimes wet felt the stem as well to make it smoother and tighter, but didn't this time.

Enjoy!