Category Archives: felt

You can never have too much felt art

Leave a reply

Since we moved to our new home in May we have been steadily adorning the walls with the pieces of art that moved with us, as we were deciding what to hang where, Mr TB pointed out that more than half of the art work on our walls is made from wool. I couldn’t disagree but still felt compelled to make a new piece to hang in the hallway, opposite the front door. Something colourful and cheery to greet any visitors. Much to my surprise, instead of complaining that we have too much wool on the walls, Mr TB helped me hang it.

I really wanted to play with a piece of silk purchased at Fibretron (a fibre festival in Hamilton, NZ), it has this wonderful wavy texture and can be peeled into fine sheets a little like silk hankies. I used some to decorate a large sheet of felt, layering and blending different colours as I went.

Once felted, I cut up the sheet into large petal shapes and continued felting them while shaping and blocking them, before laying them out to find an appealing arrangement.

At this stage I felt like the centre really needed something, a complimentary colour perhaps? So I had a play with some different colours…

But they didn’t quite feel right.

I have recently been playing with making different sculptural flower shapes and had one sitting on my bench. This looked much better, this is the piece after I had started gluing and sewing the petals together:

I tried making another central flower in the same blues as the large petals but it didn’t look half as good, it’s funny how some, unplanned, random elements just work together isn’t it? More on the blue flower at the end of this post…

Here is the final piece assembled and hanging on the wall:

It had been hanging on the wall less than a week before one the fluffy terrorists discovered that, if he jumped really high (4 feet off the ground), he could rip the petals off and add to his collection of toys. So far the hanging has lost 2 petals….

Floki with his “prizes” – if you look closely you can also see muddy paw prints on the wall

There were quite a few pieces of felt left over after making this hanging so I re-purposed them to enlarge the small blue flower:

Now I feel inspired to make a whole bunch of these to create an artificial flower bouquet….

Summer has finally arrived here in Auckland, I hope the weather is being kind wherever you are.

International Feltmakers Association Conference 2015

12 Replies

The week before last saw 5 days of joyful feltmaking, surrounded by beautiful, generous, like-minded people and being taught by internationally acclaimed tutors. For me, it was heaven and I really did not want it to end.

The line up of tutors was pretty impressive but for me, the biggest draw was the chance to make hats with Judit Pocs. She is an incredibly talented and imaginative felt artist, I am particularly fond of her “phantasy” hats and creatures but she also makes incredible jewellery and bags.

We only had 2 days but Judit packed a lot in, within the first hour she had shown us 5 completely different hat templates and examples of finished hats that each template could make by employing different fabrics, prefelt vs tops, different surface designs and decorative elements.The options were seemingly endless. Almost everyone in the class had picked a different style which can’t have made Judit’s job easy!

Judit went on to explain how to resize each template to our own head sizes an off we went, me with my head spinning and feeling slightly overwhelmed by all the options to choose from.

I finally settled on using a flower for my inspiration and this is the result. I am really pleased with it, not least because I look silly in most hats, and while this hat is a bit OTT it actually suits my face, so much so that I think I will keep it, now I just need to find some exuberant venues to wear it at! 🙂

This hat took the best part of 2 days to make but in the last couple of hours I managed to make a small pouch too:

The third day was spent making collars with Joke van Zinderen (Joke is pronounced Yo-Ka). She is so funny and cheerful I can’t imagine Joke ever having a bad day, she really is the eternal optimist and her enthusiasm and joy is utterly infectious. Spending the day in her class, learning new ways of using Kap merino and attaching felt ropes was an absolute pleasure.

It’s not quite finished, some of the felt around the neckline still needs fulling and shaping but this is what my collar currently looks like:

My last workshop was with Evelyn Refsahl, making more hats but this time with Norwegian wool. I confess Norwegian would not be my first choice for hats, I find it a little bit scratchy and it has a tendency to shrug off the water when trying to wet out the wool but laying out with batts was relatively quick and easy.

On the last evening, there was a gala dinner followed by a fashion show where all the students paraded up and down in our wonderful new creations, it was fantastic to see what everyone else had been making and have them all proudly show them off. Lots of photos were taken of the parade but I’m afraid I don’t have any to share.

To my utter shock, I won a prize at the parade. I can’t decide if I was most shocked because I wasn’t even aware there was a competition or because the prize was for “best dressed”. For those of you that know me in the real world, this will probably be a surprise for you too. I’m not very girly, I don’t wear make-up and I feel most at home in a pair of jeans and trainers, so being awarded this accolade nearly knocked me off my, slightly inebriated, perch. Here is my prize, a lovely bundle of hand-dyed woolyness just waiting to be felted.

I’m thinking another hat might be in order….

To all the lovely ladies who attended and organised the IFA conference, thank you, each and everyone of you made it a truly wonderful experience and I can’t wait to see you all again at other felting events in the near future. Your kind hearts and generous spirits make the felting a world a beautiful place to be 🙂