This is a heavily abused Needle Wet Felted Eco Printed Embroidered Beaded Bracelet which was abused for “scientific” reasons.
This starts with a piece of string.
After tying a square knot in the string it is partially wrapped with core fiber to make lumpy bits.
Lumpy bits are needled to be more refined/dense lumpy bits. More core fiber may or may not have been added and needled.
String and lumpy bits are then carefully wrapped in Merino fiber and everything is needled to refine. Lumpy bits may be again augmented with addition fiber - Merino at this stage.
Needle until more refined.
Heat some water.
Prepare the eucalyptus leaves that were soaking to make them pliable by cutting off just the bits that were wanted for the eco-printing.
Soak bracelet in a solution of hot water, vinegar, and alum. Get the long strip of cotton (about 1.5" wide and a yard and a half (?) long ready for use.
Wring out the extra moisture from bracelet.
Start placing eucalyptus leaves and wrapping tightly with cotton strip to hold them in place.
When whole bracelet has been leafed and mummyed, haul out the slow cooker and set on high.
Check to see that the partially broken steamer basket is still funcional enough inside the slow cooker.
Add more water if needed to have it barely top the lowest portion of the steamer basket.
Cook it forever (about 12 hours).
Plunge it into cold water so you can hold it while unwrapping the cotton strip and removing the leaves.
Wonder why you didn’t get as nice a eco-print as desired and decide to make use of the bracelet for evil scientist experiments one of which was boiling the bracelet for over a half hour.
*Narrator: One of the odd things about felt making is that the more “abused” the fibers are the better the quality of felt. *
Wring out the excess water and set the bracelet aside to dry and be ignored.
Finish to better eco-printed bracelets and while waiting for a special yarn to arrive which is intended to decorate another bracelet (lumpy, but not eco-printed and in some very nice colors) decide to do something with the current subject.
Remember that I have two mini-skeins in my yarn for felting projects drawer that I have never used!
Wind the two mini-skeins into balls.
Start embroidering the bracelet with the yarns.
Loose a needle (which ticks me off still since I don’t loose needles). Start decorating what had been a leaf printed area with french knots. Enjoy the texture, but determine that spending 100 plus hours doing french knots is not the future I have planned for myself and switch design gears in mid-stream is such a “clever” way that had I not told you that I switched gears you might not have ever realized that. (We aren’t going to talk about the initial embroidering ideas that I tried on this same bracelet and removed because I didn’t like it at all).
Keep embroiderying (while searching for the missing needle every now and then). Finish bracelet.
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