Tag Archives: wet felting

The 30 Day Folding Challenge – Part 1

2 Replies

I have long admired the work of Andrea Noeske-Porada, she is a felt artist best known for her origami pieces. As far as I can tell she does not have a website but if you type her name into google you will find yourself buried under an avalanche of inspiring images of her work and what her students have made.

For years I was fascinated by her kaleidocycle design and hoped to take a workshop with her to learn her felt origami techniques but after our move to NZ I realised this dream is probably never going to happen, so set myself the challenge of trying to figure out how to make one. It took a few attempts but I was eventually successful.

Please don’t ask me to explain how it was made, this is Andrea’s design and if you can’t figure it out, please sign up for a class with her 😉

I acknowledge I am a bit of a creative magpie, I always have at least 3 projects on the go and my UFO (unfinished objects) box is overflowing. Maybe this is you too? I suspect it is part of the creative mindset that we struggle to focus on just one thing at a time, our brains are wired to be constantly on the lookout for the next exciting development….

In some ways I think this is a good thing, it means I am frequently presented with opportunities to incorporate 2 or more techniques or materials in the same project to create novel combinations. However, I also feel like I am frequently just skimming the surface of what is possible with each technique or idea. With that in mind I decided to kick off 2024 with a 30 day challenge (feel free to play along if you wish!):

To explore a different folded / pleated shape every day

This theme was partly inspired by origami felt, and origami has already worked its way into what I have been doing this month but I have deliberately avoided using origami in the mission statement to leave the door open for exploring related techniques such as pleating and smocking. I’m also bound to go off on some random tangent before the end of the month too!

The first week:

In order to really learn, we first need to make mistakes or encounter some minor disaster….

My first “disaster” was instigated by this book:

It is chock-full of inspiring and gorgeous (mostly paper) sculptures but contains no instructions at all… “how hard can it be?” I cockily thought to myself as I reached for some wool and a pair of scissors….

Thankfully I had enough sense to start small:

No matter how I stretched and rubbed the felt it refused to make lovely concentric pleats and folds 🙁

I convinced myself it was because I used an oval template instead of circle, so on day 2 I made this:

While I like the shape of this one a little more, it still wasn’t folding how I expected it to.

Frustrated, I decided to play with paper folding instead (looking back this would have been a much more sensible place to start!).

Day 3:

I found some amazing origami websites (with some much needed instructions!) and sat down to play (I apologise for the scruffy appearance of some of my origami but these pieces have been folded and unfolded multiple times):

The box was fun to make but there are much easier ways to make cubes from felt (take a look at my free book resist tutorial if you’d like to give that a go).

I love this next pattern, this is one that I have attempted to make in felt before but playing with it in paper, I’m enjoying the stretchy qualities it has and wondering if it would work as a cowl? I found this print out on an engineering website, apparently this is a popular pattern for folding mirrors and solar panels used on satellites.

Day 4

The photo of this piece doesn’t do it justice, it is much more interesting to look at from different angles, you can probably tell from the state of it that it has been unfolded and refolded multiple times when I translated the pattern into felt.

Day 5

I decided to revisit the concertina style folds of my first 2 attempts in felt but this time in paper.

The circles were still frustrating me, the curved pleats just refused to fold, I now think I understand why they don’t work but I will save those explorations for my next post.

Concertina folds along straight lines were far more successful:

This one started out as a flat square

Day 6

This one was an equilateral triangle

Day 7

Excited by how well the paper origami samples turned out I started translating some of the shapes into prefelt and felting them. The felt versions are much more flexible than their paper cousins, offering a myriad of different forms just by twisting or folding different sections, my favourite is the flower shape at the end of this video:

Aoifa couldn’t resist getting into shot but lost interest as soon as she discovered there was no food involved

Day 8

I turned my favourite of the origami shapes into felt and was very pleased with the outcome:

The Wool Revolution

6 Replies

As avid wool enthusiasts (including a few shepherds) most of us are all too well aware that the cost of shearing a flock of sheep is rarely ever covered by the sale of the fleece. In fact the financial return on many fleeces is so poor, I know many farmers end up composting what should be a valuable and eco-friendly product.

Woven and felted wall hangings

Part of the problem is that many of these under-valued fleeces are typically at the coarser end of the spectrum, shorn from sheep bred for the meat industry. In some cases the situation is further compounded by farmers deliberately selecting sheep with coarser wools for their breeding program because their logic dictates, coarser wool = a heavier fleece per sheep and since wool is sold by weight, a heavier fleece = more $$$.

If, like me you make mostly wearables from wool, you probably see the fault in that logic, I know I value the lower micron wools far more, cheerfully paying a premium for them because they are less “scratchy”. However, this doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for the coarser wools too and as felt-makers and spinners perhaps we should not be so quick to dismiss them….

These coarser wools, also known as “strong wool”, have traditionally been used for various industrial applications that require padding that is fire resistant, for home insulation products, even the pads that piano hammers rest on.

In previous decades, one of the largest buyers of strong wools used to be the carpet industry, unfortunately the move towards synthetic carpets has seen the use of strong wools for carpets go into a steep decline. Currently there is a drive in New Zealand to support rural schools to replace their flooring with wool carpets, rather than the imported nylon carpet tiles the government wants them to use.

Large felted wall hanging

I fist met Liz Mitchell MNZM when she joined the Auckland Fun Felters (AFF), just a month or two after I did. Already a wool enthusiast, she was on a mission to discover new ways to use this fabulous, natural material and her enthusiastic interest quickly evolved into a dedicated promotion of strong wool.

Felt illuminated

Liz has had a very interesting textile career, as a fashion designer, with her own label, she was primarily focussed on hand-made couture and in 2005 was awarded the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to the fashion industry and to this day she is one of the best known names in New Zealand fashion.

A series of large wet-felted vessels

In recent years Liz has expanded her repertoire to include working with architects and interior designers to use strong wools, still in their natural colours, for a mixture of wall hangings, rugs and soft furnishings. Her diversification from haute couture to interior design is beautifully documented in her current exhibition, “This Raw Material” on show at the Corban Estate Arts Centre in West Auckland.

This exhibition is open until 9 December 2023 and is well worth a visit, I particularly enjoyed the interactive room where you are encouraged to touch, feel, sit on and even smell the pieces. When was the last time you went an art exhibition where they encouraged you to sniff the exhibits?!! 🙂

Biker jacket and hot pants – Agate wool Jacquard

We were all very proud to hear Liz has secured a grant to set up a “Wool and Natural Fibres Textile Hub” in Auckland, which will serve as a hub for wool research, education and creative exploration. An endeavour I am very keen to support. She has also set up a Wool Revolution PledgeMe to raise funds to support the new Hub.

Winter White Wedding Dress – NZ wool felt
Detail on Wedding Dress