For the last few months, I've been working on a wool sculpture to exhibit alongside my crafting friends from my local Maker Space. The art pieces we created are currently on display at Melton Mowbray Museum as part of The Great Big Green Week and will remain there until June 16, 2025.
Everything we created was made with a focus on zero-waste, environmentally friendly practices, and swapping and sharing skills to promote community and keep crafts alive for future generations.
For my main exhibition piece, I decided to create a variation of my Joyful Wreath, incorporating some slightly different elements that I couldn’t fit in when I made it back in 2022.
I wanted this wreath to be a little moodier than the Joyful Wreath I made previously. I intended for the colours to be a little more sophisticated, so each one was blended with the addition of 10% black wool to add a little shade and complexity.
I wanted to celebrate the potential and beauty of wool - a fibre that is undervalued, renewable, and compostable, but is often discarded in favour of synthetic plastic alternatives.
For the base, I spun some worsted-weight Blue Faced Leicester, which I divided into four balls so that I could knit the base quickly by holding four yarns together.
The base was knitted as a flat piece…
… which I then sewed around a 30cm metal ring base (affiliate link), stuffing it with wool combing waste as I worked my way round.
As I had only 4 months to create my wool wreath and wanted it to be as maximalist as possible, I covered just over half of my ring in wool and knitted fabric, securing it at the ends with Gorilla Tape (affiliate link). I also liked the idea of making an asymmetric wool sculpture this time, as I wanted it to be very different to my original Joyful Wreath.
I’d spun two different yarns that I planned to make all of my elements with…
A variegated yarn…
… and a second yarn with much longer colour sections that I intended to separate out into all the component colours :-
To begin assembling my wreath, I used the variegated yarn to crochet around some USB powered fairy lights (affiliate link). You can read how I did this previously here.
Using the combing waste that is inevitably produced when I blend colours together, I created some layered, needle-felted flowers in a rainbow of colours.
Stitching the fairy lights on and then the flowers really helped to dictate where all of the other colours were placed later on. I wanted a complex meandering of colour changes along the base, rather than a strict adherence to their colour order.
I went on to knit curlicues from the 18 different colours of handspun yarn. You can find the instructions on how to knit these here.
Some of the stars were knitted in variegated yarn and left plain, while others were knitted in the solid-coloured yarn and had a row of beads knitted in around the edge. The variations in scale and colour all added to the complexity I was aiming for.
As I could see my solid-coloured yarns beginning to run out, I joined them all together again using a Russian join so that I could ensure that none of the yarn was wasted.
Here’s how my wreath looked at the halfway point. I find the best way to approach decorating a wreath that I want to be totally covered is to add all of the bigger pieces first, as it’s so much easier to then fill the gaps with the smaller embellishments.
I turned some of the knitted beads from my earlier blog post into colourful acorns by drilling a couple of holes to add a yarn string. I then glued the balls into the acorn caps with epoxy glue (affiliate link).
Finally, with my variegated yarn, I made some 2.5cm pom poms. These were made 5-at-a-time using my Multipom - wrapping it around 50 times for extra fluffy, but tiny, wool pom poms.
To make them fuller and fluffier, I finished them with my handheld steamer (affiliate link), which made the seam virtually disappear.
Once I’d attached everything, the shiny, wreath base was looking very hard and metallic next to an abundance of wool and soft colour so I used the last remaining length of variegated yarn to wrap around and cover the metal base.
It really brought the whole thing together, and I was happy that my “For the Love of Wool” Wreath was finally finished!
Now, I just need to decide where to put it once the exhibition is over…
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Related Blog Posts -
Some of my other related blog posts -
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| Knitted and Felted Beads |
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| How to Knit Curlicues or Spirals |
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| Easy Layered Needle Felted Flowers |
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| Needle Felted Balls or Beads |
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| Making Silk Top Pom Poms on the Multipom |
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