Bender Trial

I finally have enough straight Hazel and Rowan rods gathered to try out the bender build.

I marked the size of the structure back in Feb by the simple expedient of drawing a circle in the snow with a walking stick held at arm's length. This gave me a circle approximately 3 metres across which feels big enough to be spacious but small enough to be cosy. Human scaled.

Today was idyllic weather for a change, and I loved working in my outside studio with a big pot of wild-gathered nettle soup cooking on the open fire ready for lunch.

It's interesting how as soon as the skeleton of the structure was up there was a clear feeling of inside as opposed to outside.

It's also interesting to find that rods I thought were really straight in the woods turn out to be very wonky when I try to bend them.

Sampling Fleece

top to bottom: 1, 2, 3.

 Felting trials to see which fleece felts best and the different qualities: texture, colour, density, and ease of felting.

Fleece 1 felt wonderful when it was un-felted but was very hard to felt well.

Fleece 2 was quite wiry and was nearly as hard to felt as #1.

Fleece 3 felted like a dream with the same amount of rubbing and rolling as the other two.

L to R 1, 2, 3.