Embellisher Felting Workshop with Her Majesty Margo!!!

I have been gone for so long!! I have neglected you all and my poor blog!! I have been busy, busy, busy and I hope that the next several posts will help to explain what I have been up to!!


One of the major highlights of the past several weeks was a Class with this wonderful and talented lady, Her Majesty Margo, Ms. Margo Duke!!

(above photo taken by Susan Elliott)

Here she is as she appeared in class with her adorably stylish felted Fascinator chapeau and her gorgeous wool and silk shrug that she calls her Butterfly Wrap!
I was quadrupley excited to take this class as I found out that my dear blogging friend, the  amazing thread and bead artist , the delightful Susan Elliott would be traveling down to meet Margo and take the class as well!!   Oh my! almost more than I could stand!!!
 We had lots to cover in our Gown Fragments class and Margo got right to it demonstrating how to achieve some of her beautiful looks with our embellishing machines.

Margo is always so very generous with the materials that she provides for her classes and we each chose some silks and ribbons and fleece and silk fibers to create with.  Our class was held at the wonderful Artistic Artifacts in Alexandria, so anything else that we might need was readily available, including the felting machines.  (Judy Gula is now a distributor for the Simplicity Felting Machine which works like a dream and does not cost an arm and a leg.  If you are considering buying one of these wonderful machines, look at this machine first- Judy can tell you all about it and sell you one too!!

                                                   This is the palette that I chose to work with.  No surprises here!!!

This is the progress that I made on my piece during the class.  All of the work that you see here was done using the felting machine.  you can also see that I used my regular sewing machine to add some free motion embroidery work .  once the wet felting portion of the project is done you will see just how much texture this extra stitch work adds.

The small pink circles that you can see are little circular rosettes of wool yarn that i felted down into the wool and silk fabric.  All sorts of fibers and yarns and trims can be added to this process and my piece became a sampler of sorts for many of the techniques that Margo was demonstrating for us.

Our time together literally flew by and none of us wanted to pack up and leave.  We all would have gladly stayed for a three day marathon class if we could have!!!
Margo has plans to give a class on creating her wonderful little Fascinator Hats and you can bet that we will all be stalking her blog waiting for the next class announcements!! If you ever have the opportunity to work with this delightful lady, DO NOT HESITATE!!!  You will be so glad that you jumped at any opportunity that arises!!

                                  Here we are as a class showing off our work on our gown fragments.
                             (Susan Elliott is standing on the far left in the pink shirt with the great smile!!!)

Once I got back home I set to wet felting my sampler piece.  If you look back at the area around the large purple flower you can see a border of green wool that had been embellished to the edges of the purple silk.  once the wet felting was done the green wool had shrunk up so much that it was no longer visible and it had pulled the purple silk along with it to form the much more ruffled and blousey flower!!!!

In fact, all of the luscious silk fabrics had been gathered and ruched in along with the shrinking wool!!  What fabulous fun and a delightful set of techniques to apply to all sorts of different projects!!!
                                Thank you so very much for yet another delightful and delicious class Margo!!!