I had a couple of really long and skinny pieces of silk so I decided to make some table runners. My mom’s favorite color is red and mine is teal so made one for each of us.

Each piece of margilan silk that I had was about 15x120in and I didn’t have a table long enough to work on them so luckily I had a 12 foot bar countertop in my basement that did the trick.

For the black and red runner, I laid out wool to make red poppies with gold accents and black centers and added in swirls of gold, black and red wool yarn.

I made sure to leave exposed silk throughout the runner. Once the wool is felted, it will shrink and the silk will not so you get the gathered, crepe paper look that I think is really interesting.

For my teal one, I went with a more abstract design with some copper sparkle woven in (doesn’t get picked up on camera). The copper is like very fine tinsel and is incredibly light and staticky (is this a word?) which makes it difficult to work with. It NEVER stays where you put it but always manages to stick to my shirt without any issues.

I ended up using a bamboo roller shade to felt these so I could do the whole runner at once. Once completely felted, the runners ended up about 10x96in

These were fun projects that I was able to complete over a weekend. It would have been a lot harder if I didn’t have the bar top to lay out the entire runner – sometimes it is good to leverage a pop up studio in the basement!