Autumn butterfly

Autumn is upon us! With very few bushes still in bloom we see less and less of beautiful butterflies. They will be all gone pretty soon. I took a picture of this beautiful butterfly in our front yard. It will help me remember warm days and beautiful colors of autumn!

Bright tangerine summer swing earrings

I believe that summer is all about bright and vivid colors. I created my new hand felted earrings of wool in tangerine, carrot and ginger colors. Deep blue beads serve as additional decoration and metal chain let my beads swing freely around the owner's neck. The earrings are of that happy orange color that lifts one's attitudes and helps a person live happily through a day!

How to color wool with KoolAid

A few of my friends recently told me that they are experimenting with different artificial colorings easily available in grocery stores. What we all are looking for is a coloring that would be inexpensive, reliable and not too harmful. The new favorite in the felting community is KoolAid that could be found in any grocery store in US. I bought a few small packs of different colors to try it out.

To experiment with KoolAid coloring we will need to create wool felted beads first. To read about how to create ones you can go to my previous post on how to create wool acorns.

To make colored water I added powder from KoolAid packs to water in a few small plastic containers. As a result I got five containers with brightly colored water. I added approximately a tea spoon of powder to every container. Then I put each of my five beads into a separate container and let the beads suck in the colored water.

It makes sense to heat containers with water and beads in a microwave for color to fully penetrate the beads. I microwaved my containers for approximately 3 minutes. I didn't want to boil my beads but might experiment with boiling next time.

The result is pretty impressive. All of my five beads turned out to be colored differently. The most intensive, bright and beautiful color turned out to be orange. Yellow bead was not that intensely colored but I really like the light lemon color of the bead. The cherry color turned out to be very intense and vivid as well. In general all the beads have vivid and bright colors as a result of coloring. They smell of oranges, lemons and cherries!
It's definitely worth experimenting with this powder as theoretically one could mix different colors and get some interesting results. My only advice is to wear rubber gloves as it will be very hard to get the color off your hands once it gets there!

This post describes my personal experience with a particular product.
Please be careful trying to replicate the experiment!!!

Hand felted wool flower brooches

I discovered a few really cute buttons in a store and bought them without any particular purpose. They were so lovely that I just desperately wanted to attach them somewhere. Finally I found a place that fits them perfectly. Hand felted flower brooches with multiple layers of felt in different colors look nice with a large vivid spot in the middle. That's where my buttons belong from now on.
The key is to match the color of a button with a color of the felt flower. It's hard to find nice looking buttons but relativery easy to buy wool of diffferent colors and types. So here is the rule: Start with the button!

My First Fall GIVEAWAY results

Thank you for participating in my Red Berry handmade earrings Giveaway. Believe it or not but the number generated by Random Generator was 66!

Let us congratulate Lee who won Red Berry handmade earrings today!!! Congratulations Lee!!!