sunday on etsy

Good morning! It's a beautiful day here in the South!

Since I have been on Etsy I have noticed several hand crafts that I would like to try. One of them is felting. As you know from my felted purse write up from last week, I just love felted wool. I do not knit and I can sort of crochet.. well, enough to make a blanket but not well enough to follow a pattern! (Have you seen them? It's like Greek!)

So, clever and crafty people (not me) knit or crochet things from wool and make felted bags, socks, gloves, hats, scarves, etc. Then there are some clever people thinking outside the box, like Valerie at Valerie's Gallery. She turns her felted wool into things like this "pottery" called Simply Nature:

I cannot stand how beautiful this is and similarly how lovely everything else in her shop is as well. She even has felted bracelets! Oh my god! They're fabulous and I want at least 10 of them!!!

I talked to my mother-in-law who knits (and is in the Clever Crafty People, Unlike Me group.) and we discussed attempting to felt beads. A likely choice for me since I like to make jewelry!

Well, we got together some wool that she had left over from a felted purse she made and we downloaded some instructions from the internet and then went to our separate corners and tried to make some beads! Easy yea? The instructions were simple, well laid out, and it look super easy. Right on!

Two hours later I had myself 12 lumpy dice-sized balls of wool, that upon closer inspection were just clumps and not truly felted at all. The m-in-law had similar results. We are chalking that failure up to us pulling fibers from already spun yard instead of using roving. If you looked at the wiki that I linked there, you'll see that it is a lot easier to imagine felted anything coming from roving than it is to imagine it from a skein of yarn. So we have not yet given up, but I'm much more appreciative (bordering on awe quite frankly) of anyone who can felt.

So Valerie, who you can also visit on her blog Felted Treasures, gets my Sunday spot for her jaw-dropping felted vases, pottery, and remember I said she makes bracelets?
Look at this Purple Passion bangle set!

*swoon*

Also, to further impress, Valerie doesn't use patterns. She creates every single item by hand. That makes every single thing she makes truly unique and one of a kind.
I wonder if she could be persuaded to adopt me? Hmm. Quite unlikely as she has a family of her own.

Ah well. Still, you should visit her shop even if it's just to see what lovely work she does. But I'm sure she's appreciate you buying something too. ;)