Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Making Wood



For several years I have made a small faux birch woodpile in my store when the firewood season arrives.

Birch is my favorite tree, which I like to imitate in rag weave, this time with a rosepath threading. The pillow weft is mainly wool blanket wool, with supplemental rag bits cut from a black and white linen checked weave. The log ends are soft cocoa-colored blanket wool, machine embroidered.

This time I sewed the pillow together, lacing the selvedge edges around the pillow form, then sprinkled the whole pillow with warm water, and tumble dried it in the hot dryer, so it shrank perfectly to fit the pillow form. Yes, perfectly. Which gives weight to the idea that sometimes things work out as planned.

4 comments:

Brittany | the Home Ground said...

I'm so glad the felting worked for you! Birch bark is my favorite too. We have a few birch trees in my parents' woods and I love to go out and look at them.

Peg in South Carolina said...

Exquisite design and execution. Perfect.

Unknown said...

bravo! a perfect birch log pillow. hope you made plenty.

Anonymous said...

Hey, thanks for the compliments! I was pleasantly surprised myself to see how it finished