Felt Seamless Bag Workshop

A couple of weeks ago I attended an Embroiderers Guild Felt making day class. It was a very busy day and taking pictures was not always possible but I hope that you will get a good idea of what I did.

The aim was to make a seamless felt bag.

I had some wool roving and managed to buy a bit at Creative Stitches in Exeter, plus what I had from needle felting with Sophie in the summer.

We needed 80grams to make the main body of the bag. We then divided the 80grams into two equal halves for the next stage.

Having a piece of very thick plastic, we actually cut up one of the thick blue bags for life from Tesco because we did not have enough to go round. On top of this wee drew the roving into lengths and laid it one the plastic horizontally, over-lapping the ends slightly. Then layer it vertically, over lapping the ends and again horizontally etc. I ended up with four layers in the end.

The next stage was to repeat again for the back. Using some more roving we were then shown how to create a design to go on the front. I decided to decorate the back as well.

Back view

Front View

We then added some soapy solution and then agitated the roving to get it to felt. Now this process took AGES! My arms had a real workout!. We then worked on attaching the designs to the front and the back of the bag. We then took the half that had the plastic on the back, dampened the felt edges and wrapped them around the edge of the plastic. This was then placed design face down and the other side was placed onto the plastic and the roving edges wrapped around again. this is how you get your seamless edges. Is this making much sense? It was surprisingly easy to do. We then needed to work the sides to make them felt and improve their strength. after a while we could take out the plastic. To take it home I put my towel inside the bag because was worried that my bag would be "Stuck! together. It then sat on my cooling wire on top of the storage heater over night.

It know looks like this! Front view, not too bad I think. What I have started to do now is embellish it with stitching, beads and sequins etc. I also need to make some handles and as yet I do not know how long to make them.

Back view, I will also need to add a lining as whilst felting the bag did get a little thin in some areas. I thought that I might be able to strengthen it to by adding some additional felting shapes such as more 3D petals etc. I shall see how it goes. What do you think. We all worked really hard that day but it was very satisfying. I shall certainly try this again but maybe on a smaller scale. Could try it will the GCSE group too, maybe a coin purse.

Lots of fun.

xx