For soooo long I have thought about buying a tide clock but they are either naff looking or nice ones are mega expensive. So I ordered a tide clock mechanism and went about making my own.
Materials
- Tide clock mechanism (tides are not on 24 hour cycles but instead 24 hours and 50 minutes).
- Pre-felt
- Various fibres, I used merino, Corriedale, silk and flax
- Protractor and compass
- Wet felting gear…olive oil soap, bubble wrap, towel, hot and cold water and some elbow grease!
- Cardboard to use as a template and then actually ended up being used as the backing
- Pencil and ruler and a circle template for the dots
- Needlefelting needle and foam block.
- Pack of pins to mark the hours prior to felting them.
As material moves around so much during the wet felting process, it wasn’t practical to put any words or numbers or dots on during that stage. Instead, I opted for needlefelting dots. I had thought about using a stencil to felt the word High and Low and then 1-5, but I thought it would make it too busy, so dots seemed enough.
It was a bit fiddly doing the calculations etc. As I opted for a square-ish clock I decided to put the dots also in a square pattern.
Far less fiddly to make than a lampshade and of course now I need to make another lampshade for our hallway where this tide clock now hangs. On the photo the shadow is hiding some of the dots in the darker water, but in real life they are easy to read.
So for anyone not used to reading a tide clock, at the top (12 o’clock position) it indicates high tide, at the 1pm position this is actually indicating 5 hours to low tide, so if I were to number it there’d be a ‘5’ there. It then follows on where it is 4, 3, 2 until at the 5 o’clock position, it’s showing 1 hour to low tide. Then 6 o’clock is low tide. Then it switches to 5 hours to high tide and so on!!! I am hopeless at explaining things but hopefully that makes sense.
and for anyone who saw my post yesterday with my lampshade, here’s a picture of it lit. His morning I ordered enough lampshade kits to do all our pendant light fittings and bedside lamps lol!
HighlandHeffalump 
I had not heard of a tide clock. You felting is ideal for showing the high and low tide. A terrific idea.
My husband bought a ship’s clock when we were married. It rings at the end of each watch, nothing to do with tide but related to the sea. 😉
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Those are so cool! I have never heard of a tide clock – that is really interesting! And the image you felted really suits it so well 🙂 You are so creative! And this picture definitely shows off your lampshade really well too – so lovely!
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Fantastic!
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Beautiful things!
Do you find bubble wrap that helpful when wet felting? I hate using it.
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I have a bit of net curtain and do have proper felting tools and a sushi mat that work best…but where I find the bubble wrap good is when you’ve wet the fibres with the soapy water and it holds it protects the towel underneath, holds the water a little to stop it all dripping on the floor. I always use net between the bubble wrap and the item, as I find it avoids you getting the bubble shapes showing on the fabric. There are ladies in my felting group that only use bubble wrap and a towel and they end up having to rub and roll their items hundreds of times in each direction. Whereas my hands or the fulling tools do it much much quicker. I won’t but any more bubble wrap from an environment point of view, but have a lot collected in different sizes from packages we received and still some that works from when we moved house 13 years ago. I am always on the lookout for an old washer board on Facebook marketplace.
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Thanks for that explanation! I used to full with the mat, still do, but recently saw people using bubble wrap. I bought a kit which contained it and tried it, but really didn’t like it. Now I have a better understanding of how to use it. Thanks again!
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