Felt Until You Can't Stand

This last weekend I attended the most wonderful class. It was held at New England Felting Supply in Easthampton, Mass. Chris White, the author of Uniquely Felt, was our hostess at her shop..... http://www.feltingsupply.com/ Our teacher, I claim as a friend, Linda Veilleux....an outstanding teacher and seamstress extraordinaire! She can make a felt garment....and it is gorgeous....and it will fit...to a T!

These were my two samples. I do a very thin cross pattern as taught by Inga Bauer.....another felter of superlative qualities. My squares were 3 strips of green home dyed silks layered with commercial blue and green merino. The orange square was similiar with 3 strips again and 3 colors of commercial dyed merino.
After we were measured (no, no picture) we calculated our total pattern size. Everyone in the class groaned as we were called to do math.....but Linda not only had a formula printed on paper that we could fill in the blanks....but.....drum roll here....she has made a CD for your computer that calculates it all out and gives you the dimensions of your pattern to use over and over!!!! YEAH!!! LINDA....I will be ordering one of these to make other patterns for myself...and possibly for others....I'm thinking I still owe my sister a Birthday Present.

Then we laid out our silks....Oh! The colors people picked .... some were brought from home...but some came from Chris' store....take a gander of what we had to choose from:




Yummy Felters' Heaven!! I'd brought silk and wool from home.....but that didn't keep me from shopping!! But the class was time pressured and I was on a limited budget .... sigh..... so off to work on my T Shirt
I bought some lushious silk yardage from Chris (hummmm the computer seems to have changed to italics and I can't shift back....) the green and blue. The orange and blue was my own. This is the front laid out. I am really not that huge!!! I have lost a few pounds since my vacation...but my calculations said it would shrink almost 63%....Yipes! My silk hung over the edges of my two tables from top to bottom....and my sleeves .... which were only 3/4 length....stretched end to end.

This about it for me that first day. I met with two classmates and off we went for dinner and well deserved glasses of wine before falling exhausted (from all that math!) and aching legs and knees.... into bed....by 9:30pm! I slept like a log with visions of orange and blue dancing in my head....too much orange????? Would it all work out? Oh, I agonized over my color choices after seeing what my classmates had done.