Lincoln Wool Doesn't Felt Very Well . . .

I finally figured out what I wanted to try with some of my first homespun: A felted bowl!

This was an interesting experiment. Lincoln wool only gets about 3 diamonds on the felting scale (I think 5 is the highest). I pretty much knew this . . . but I wanted to try it anyway. The goal was a low, wide console bowl, similar to the Japanese Celadon bowl that lives on the sideboard in my dining room.

The ingredients were:

• The 3-ply Lincoln from my first spinning efforts
• A skein of recycled sari silk
• Two pair of size 15 Addi Turbos
• A variation (my own) of the Deb Gray Felted Bowl Pattern (scroll way down - it's there)
• A zippered pillow cover

OK - just so you know, the sari silk yarn is just as dirty as I'd heard it could be. I did not use a "bathed" skein. The washing machine water was dark grey on the first round. It's still really pretty yarn, though.

It took FOUR washes in HOT water to get it felted enough that I thought it might work . . . And it did. Sorta. (Although it left me with a pink pillow cover . . .) I dried it over the aforementioned bowl.

It is pretty and colorful - the sari silk and the dark brown made it really pretty, actually. But it's floppy. That's it there, flopped over the side of the Celadon bowl. It does hold its shape if it's sitting on a flat surface, thought (you can see that in the first photo, above).

I did get what I was going for, shape-wise, so it was a good experiment - and I discovered that either a different wool or a different size bowl would likely have been better choices.

My friend, Tori discovered that it exactly fits the bar stools in my kitchen :-D Oh well, if you don't experiment, you never learn anything, right? I will likely keep it around - at least for a while, anyway - It's the first thing I have made with yarn that I spun myself :-)