Tag Archives: exhibitions

Felt Connect 2025

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As I write, nearly a week has passed since the 18th Southern Hemisphere Felters’ Convergence drew to a close but that peculiar mix of exhaustion, elation and excitement I felt as I drove home still lingers. I’m buzzing with so many ideas and happy memories! 🙂

The Felters Convergence is usually (pandemics permitting) a biennial event organised by volunteers from Australia or New Zealand. It is an opportunity for antipodean felt-makers to gather and share their knowledge and ideas. This year it was held in the beautifully quaint and historic suburb of Parnell in Auckland, New Zealand.

Before we arrived we were invited to “bring your smile”, a common refrain for anyone attending a social event but this time there was a twist…. We were to arrive with a smile and leave with a smile…. a felted smile! 🙂

Christine Roxburgh and Jenny Forrester (our very talented and incredibly hard-working organisers) put together an amazing, fun-packed program over the 4 days we had together. At almost any given moment there were 3 to 4 different classes or talks taking place and if that wasn’t enough, there was a room full of traders selling all manner of fibres, fabrics and felting equipment and a fabulous felt exhibition to visit. They REALLY crammed a lot in to the 4 days!

A small selection of pieces in the exhibition:

As Christine explained at the opening dinner, the Felt Connect title was a nod to the underlying philosophy of Convergence where feltmakers from far and wide come together to not only share their knowledge and love of fibre arts but also where new connections and international friendships form.

We had just shy of 100 attendees, 30 of whom were visiting from Australia and one came all the way from the US! Our headline tutors were equally international with Nancy Ballesteros from Western Australia, Katia Mokeyeva from Vermont in the US and Jacqui Collins from New Zealand.

Nancy taught for 3 very full days, covering topics such as:

  • colour theory for fibre artists
  • making properly fulled but beautifully drape-able felt in the Art of Drape class
  • the saucily titled, “Hanky Panky” session where she suggested lots of different ways to incorporate silk hankies into your felt
  • the Natural Rhythms class where she shared how she uses Fibonacci’s design principles in conjunction with her colour theory lecture from day 1. This allowed us the perfect opportunity to put some of what we had learned from her colour theory talk into practice while exploring wet-wool layout techniques.

Our sessions with Katia were a technological leap forward for Convergence, having someone teach 100 felt-makers from a different continent was novel and gave us the chance to learn from an expert that most of us will never have the opportunity to meet in person.

An example of Katia’s “Sea Waves” technique from her website

Katia provided us with pre-recorded videos of her signature “Sea Waves” technique and answered our questions over a Zoom call. Jenny did an amazing job of bringing it all together and resolving the inevitable technical issues that required her to hold the speaker jack in the computer so the room full of keen students could hear Katia’s replies to their questions from half a world away.

After our online session with Katia we were set free to experiment with our new learnings in the main hall.

Jacqui provided 4 full days of teaching, her classes were so popular many of them were over-subscribed. She covered a wide range of topics including, how to:

  • felt a fedora style hat using alpaca fibre,
  • make a wet-felted necklace,
  • painting on silk
  • construct and hang 3D wall art

And of course then there was the army of more than 20 volunteer tutors who offered to share their knowledge, a technique or ideas on how to develop your own style in new directions. There really was something for everyone!

A raffle was held to raise seed money for Convergence 2027 and the prizes were drawn on the final day:

Photographer – Flo de Ruiter

The final gala dinner and fashion show was a hoot, with heartfelt closing speeches from Jenny and Christine followed by the very funny “Glitter Sisters” AKA Lynn Evans and Sharon Fergusson, who hosted the felt fashion show with more than 20 stunning creations paraded among the enthralled diners.

L to R: Lynn Evans, Jenny Forrester, Sharon Fergusson and Christine Roxburgh. Photographer – Flo de Ruiter
Just a few of the fabulous felted outfits on display in the fashion parade. Photographer – Margaret Joppa
Bernice Mitchell modelling one of the three outfits she presented during the parade. Photographer – Margaret Joppa

Attending a Felters Convergence has been on my bucket list since I first read about the 2015 event and 10 years later, I’m pleased to say, Felt Connect 2025 massively exceeded my very high expectations and was worth the 10 year wait! Now I am hooked and Adelaide 2027 can’t come around soon enough! 🙂

Thank you so much to everyone who attended, organised and / or volunteered at this event, you are all utterly marvellous!

Auckland Felters Inaugural Exhibition

I was surprised to discover this was the first group exhibition for Auckland Felters, this is such and active group full of very talented people it never occurred to me that I would be the first one crazy enough to suggest it.

For anyone thinking about getting a group of likeminded friends together and hiring a gallery space… Do it! This has been such a fun ride with the most wonderful group of people 🙂 It is quite a significant amount of work but with an enthusiastic group to spread the load it is perfectly achievable, even while working (more than) full time.

The first stage was to find out who might be interested and then get them together to decide on a title / theme for the exhibition. This we did over Zoom in July 2023. Armed with that information and some example photos of our work I set about applying to a gallery I know quite well from teaching in their workshop space. I am sure it also helped that the manager is a felt-maker too so was immediately supportive.

The title we settled on was – Resilience, the fibre that connects us. There was lots of brainstorming and different suggestions (I love working with creative people!) but in the end we agreed the title should be very flexible and open to interpretation in lots of different ways.

The next few months were pretty chilled as everyone worked on their pieces, just touching base at our Auckland Felters meetings on topics like different methods to hang or frame felt.

As the installation date approached, everyone became so quiet I started to worry only a couple of us would have something to hang and I would end up scratching around under the bed to find old pieces of work I could make fit the theme.

One month out from the installation and people started delivering their pieces and we began working on the advertising. Sarah Ritchie was incredible, preparing eye-catching posts for social media, a printed catalogue and posters for the gallery:

Advertising sorted, we turned our attention to making the opening event as enticing as we could, I’m sure we have all been to exhibition openings where there are drinks and nibbles, everyone wanders around chatting about the exhibits. All nice enough but I thought we could do better…

The gallery is conveniently located in a community centre, with the gallery, workshop area and a cafe on one side of a large atrium and the library on the other side. This is a great space for holding small indoor markets and attracts quite a lot of foot traffic, even before we turned up….

We had a selection of stalls selling felted goods, fibre and felting tools and equipment:

We offered four, have-a-go felting classes in the gallery’s workshop area, this is Lynn preparing for her felt beads class with me interrupting:

We had an amazing felting demo table, with members from Auckland Felters providing entertainment throughout our 4 hour event:

Daniel, Angela’s son, and honorary Auckland Felter, blessed us with live music accompanied by his friend and teacher, Trish.

And of course there was the exhibition. We created an online catalogue with a description of each piece and the inspirations behind them, you can read it here.

If you are quick, you can still see all the wonderful pieces in person until 4pm on Monday 8th July. For everyone from further afield I videoed a short tour of the exhibition so you would not miss out. Enjoy!

One last thing…

My online classes are now open and accepting students until July 16th (if you are thinking about joining the concertina hat class I recommend registering ASAP if you need to buy / make a hat block so you are ready for the first felting tutorial on the 18th). Please click on each class for more information:

Concertina Hat Class

Felted Bags and Cases