Creative Friday- buzzy buzzy bees and wooly wooly wool

 Buzzing bees, buzzing bees,
 Buzzing and bumbling from flower to flower
 Sucking sweet nectar out of the bloom
 To fill with gold your honey comb bower

 I've been crafting some things for the day care sleep room lately. The addition of new beds motivated me to to put some extra effort into this little room that has remained fairly plain since we moved in.
 . Bees are a special favourite here, we enjoy watching them in the garden and pretending our fingers are buzzing bees

 This morning while the children were busy playing I began needle felting some soft yellow bees. Although I've done quite a lot of  wet felting I've hardly ever needle felted. I enjoyed making these bees

 It wasn't long before we ended up outside so I took my work out to continue as they snacked. I worked on them while the children napped and then when the older two were up we headed back outside.

 Once the bees were finished the boys helped me weave together a wreath of  peppercorn tree branches, lavender and yellow flowers. The peppercorn branches came from over out back fence and worked fantasticly, I will use them for wreaths again if they still look nice dried out. I like them because they have a lovely smell and are very Port Wakefield. There are so many big old peppercorn trees growing in this town!
We added the lavender and yellow flowers as these are two main bushes that attract bees. How can you think of lavender and not think of buzzy bees?
I hung the wreath on our clothes line to add the bees and it occurred to me to add ropes to the corners for the boys to pull as I often do. They absolutely love pulling the clothes line around, we discovered this one day when a dressing gown cord was hanging down at their level:) It was extra fun for them to chase the bees and see them fly.

This fun lasted a good half hour or so and then Mitch was still asleep so we hung our bees above our meal table while we had afternoon tea. When Mitch woke up he was so excited to see the mobile all finished!

 In other woolly news, after years of buying pre washed and carded wool for crafts (always white to dye myself) I bought a few fleeces to wash and spin. This one is from a corriedale named Ursula. I got it from Moseley Park farm

 I picked through the fleece to remove any organic matter which there was barely any. I put it in a old lace curtain, soaked it in hot water with shampoo, soaked it in clean hot water I think twice or so until the water stayed clear. I then stuck it in my spinner and dried it on a towel draped over my drying rack.

 The whole time I was worried about it felting too much to spin. Even though I swirled it in the water a bit and seemed to handle it quite a bit when squashing dirty water out it didn't seem to felt at all.

I started spinning it. As you can see I only had a few spare minutes but already I think its safe to say i will never buy pre prepared wool roving again! The only carding I did was very quickly combing the ends if they looked a bit clumped and it spun like a dream. It still has some lanolin which feels lovely and the slight slipperiness made the wool  glide straight out of my hands  beautifully.
Now that I have discovered how easy washing fleeces is I'm fairly certain I will use them for all my felting too.   I used some of my fleece for the bees stripes you may have noticed.
I will deffinately never buy pre prepared wool for toy stuffing, thats for sure!! To think I've been buying beautifully prepared wool just for stuffing all these years!

feel free to join in the fun of Creative Friday and Fibre Arts Friday