October 4 2025

Welp, I’m getting alerts that this newsletter is too long and image heavy. You might have to hit View entire message at the bottom to see the tail end. I’ve made myself late trying to edit it into a reasonable length and then fumbled and lost all my edits anyway and there’s just no way I’m doing all that again. Anyway,

I! Love! Making! Art! Wow this month has been fun.

When September started I was deep in the thick of dragon felting. I basically finished the shaping last month, so September has been all about color!

I mocked up these quick and easy color concepts, spent a few days agonizing over the decision, and then decided to ignore my plan entirely and just add wool on until I liked it.

Sometimes all I can do is pre-plan my projects and sometimes I feel allergic to it.

My color work is always heavily inspired by the paintings my mom made when I was a small child. They were these giant fields of color, soft and hazy and dreamlike, made of a million dilute layers of colored glaze. The color built up so gradually that you could hardly see the brush strokes, and made the softest warmest gradients.

I’m building up color here in much the same way. Thin layers of wool, blended on carding brushes and laid out in gossamer thin sheets that I tack down with a million tiny pin pricks. Each layer is so thin as to appear almost white in the light, but they build up and layer and form these rich colors that blend beautifully.

I love, deeply, the process of making these gradients.

I imagine they could be smoother if I began caring about fiber direction, laying things out in even parallel rows, but that’s a level of detail that I balk at even at my most obsessed.

The wings were a puzzle, and I’m unspeakably proud of how they came out. I laid down the thinnest layers of white wool that I could, barest hints of fiber in neat parallel rows. Then another layer over top, 90 degrees off from the first. Next the wire bones of the wing, which I’d formed from wire tightly wound around wool. You can get them wound nice and tight if you put a curved hook in a drill and loop that through the wire, run it until the whole length of the wire loop is wound tight with wool. This way they’ll be enmeshed within the wings, connected to the felt, and not just encased.

Over the wire, a couple more thin layers of wool, building up soft color now. I wanted the underside to be paler than the top, so only the one side gets any color.

Once the fibers were laid out I grabbed my hot water and soap and a fine mesh overlay and went about wet felting the wings into shape.

This is always a delicate process in my opinion, and much more so here because I couldn’t crumple or roll the whole sheet up. It needed to stay fairly flat in order for the wires to stay intact. The end result is not quite as tightly felted as it could’ve otherwise been, but I’m still immensely proud of the result. They fold beautifully, and I love how the light shines through them. That translucence is a dream.

Next steps here are to decide how I want to approach the eyes and possible horns, which is where the whole project stalled out, because suddenly I have to make big design decisions and so I’m immediately bored again. Oof!

But that’s fine because Halloween is just around the corner and that provides an excellent new project to work on: sewing costumes!

I’ll be going as a jester this year, and three of my closest friends are going as a princess, sorcerer, and knight. I haven’t done a group project in a hot minute and it’s really exciting to be designing one again.

I’ll be sewing my whole jester costume and a big dramatic cape for our sorcerer. It took a few days to nail down my jester design. I wanted to go a bit weirder with it, which would’ve made more sense in a group of all clowns. In this particular group I really need to embody a classic jester and match the additional details to the group vibe. I also struggled a bit with the overall shape language. I really wanted some silly poofy pants, and I really want a spiky jester hat and spiky collar, but those bring very different shapes to the overall design. Ultimately I think I’m resolving this by simply letting the poofy shorts and sleeves sag downwards a bit. They’ll be more bell shaped than spherical, which will hopefully make them triangular enough to blend aesthetically with all the spiky bell-laden hems.

I’m overthinking this, I know, but that’s half the fun.

Mocking up the shorts pattern was easy. I just traced some shorts I already owned which were the right length, then stretched that pattern piece out to about 3 times its original width. Then I sewed it down to some elastic to cinch it back in. On the final draft I’ll have the lower elastic free-floating in a little channel, rather than sewed directly to the fabric. I think that will allow me to distribute the gathering how I like it and avoid the awkward draping lines that flow from my outer hips to inner thighs. This is a good enough proof of concept that I don’t really feel the need to mock up that alternate approach.

The hat really needs to be the first thing I make though, because if I run out of time for anything else I’ll really need a good jester hat to sell the look.

I tried mocking up my own hat first, to mixed results. The first attempt was so skinny and misshapen that I didn’t even grab any pictures. The second attempt got a lot more concept sketches and math, and ended up ridiculously oversized. I spent a good afternoon tweaking and pulling and pinning and tucking and trying to make it into something more workable.

Ultimately I kinda hated it. You can’t win them all.

Thankfully you can just buy sewing patterns. You don’t have to do every step from scratch. I’m going with this one from Etsy, which I mocked up by just taping the pattern pieces together. It’s basically perfect.

I’m really looking forward to sewing it up - which will probably happen this week!

These are the fabrics I picked out, a bunch of red and black and gold. Plus a few black prints that have been sitting in my stash for ages

Here I’m starting to lay everything out on the main fabric I selected. The shorts pattern is a bit too wide so I’m seam ripping out the extra panels I put in, and I’ll make those in one of the other prints. I still have to mock up a sleeve puff pattern, and figure out how to do the patchwork tunic, and the neck ruff itself is completely untouched as of yet. But it’s working out, it feels like good progress.

For the sorcerer cloak I’ll be buying a few yards of red velvet and playing around with a bunch of hood mock ups. I expect things will get simpler from here on out. There’s just so much to do before Halloween.

It should make for a fun newsletter next month.

Ok that’s all for now byyyyeeeee!!!