One of the first things you do when you get a needle punching machine is to play with wool roving. Roving is used by fiber artists to spin thread or yarn. It is also used to make felt. The fibers lock together during these processes to create a tightly matted surface. Silk roving can also be used for a very slightly shinier result.
This is NOT what we want when creating a Christopher Nejman (CN) design. He made a design choice early on to explicitly exclude roving as a material for inclusion in his signature works. NO roving is allowed in a CN Pillow.
I have used a tiny bit of roving in some of my own, personal projects for very special reasons.
- Roving is good for testing if your punching machine's needles have grown dull. If you can not punch wool roving to another punchable surface it is time to change those needles.
- Roving, especially silk roving, can be used in very tiny amounts to act as "glue" to bind normally non-punchable fibers and fabric together. Because wool roving is so dull when punched even a tiny bit can take the shine off a project and mask the material so use this approach only when nothing else works.
- Tiny amounts of high contrast color roving can be finger spun and pulled to create a matt thread that can look like ink from a calligrapher's brush stroke. Again a tiny amount can create a negative space to set off your fabric punching. As an example you might see my football on this blog.
There are some great sites out there that have projects that use roving to give a great rustic look to craft projects but this blog will remain, for the most part, a Roving-Free Zone.
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