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Photo shows a close up of a wet felted Wallhanging.
The Passage of Time

The Passage of Time

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I thought I’d show a few things I’ve been up to since my last post in December, starting with some pendants.
A while ago I did an online workshop with feltmaker Aniko Boros to make her beautiful wet felted Fuchsia pendant.  It wasn’t my intention to carry in making more fuchsias but rather to learn Anikos technique for making complex pendants so I could apply it to my own designs. And so the fuchsia led to this yellow/grey pendant which in turn has led to a recent request from Region 8 of the International Feltmakers Association to teach how to make it.

Yellow/grey necklace

I was concerned that some in the group I will be teaching may not be used to working with Superfine fibre on such a fiddly scale, so over the Christmas/New Year period I created three more sample pendants. Two of these involve some different techniques to Aniko’s, making them easier and quicker to create than my grey one, but they will produce a similar look. The third sample is made without resists and aimed more for absolute beginners, just in case we have any attend. The other obvious difference with these new samples is the addition of beading which can be optional. I’m looking forward to teaching this class on the 8th March.

Another project I’ve been working on recently is a planned IFA exhibition of Feltmaking titled Felt Connected: Bringing People and Fibre Together. It came about after we surveyed Region 8 members as to what they wanted from their Regional Coordinators and one of our members, Jo Cook, suggested we organise an exhibition of members work. Since then Jo and I have been working together to organise the event which will take place next month in Harding House Gallery in Lincoln. We have a total of 17 IFA members taking part with the aim of not only showcasing their talent but demonstrating the versatility of fibre and what can be done with it while at the same time promoting the IFA and hopefully attracting more members. If you are in the area we will be holding a Meet the Artists session from 1pm – 3pm on Saturday 14th March and it would be great to see you there.

Examples of our members work

Earlier this month I started work on The Passage of Time, my submission for the IFA 2026 online exhibition “Time” that launches during our AGM on March 28th. When I first read the theme title I have to admit that for a day or two I struggled to see anything other than clocks! Then I had a lightbulb moment, I’d make an Ouroboros, the mythical serpent that is often represented in Alchemy art depicted eating its own tail. It’s a symbol of the cyclical nature of time, the universe, and self-renewal and represents the concept of eternity and endless return. Image source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/culture/article/20171204-the-ancient-symbol-that-spanned-millennia

I created my 3D mobius wet felted version using Merino fibre but when it came to photographing it, no matter what angle I took it from, it looked really dull and boring. So I abandoned that idea and instead I’ve taken inspiration from the beautiful sandstone slabs on Seahouses beach in Northumberland. Coastal erosion and fossils are both dramatic indicators of the passage of time so seemed a fitting replacement for the failed Ouroboros!

My inspiration for The Passage of Time
Experimental piece depicting fossils
Another fossil experiment
Work in progress
Adding free motion stitch

The base is a mix of Carded Corriedale and Bergschaf fibre with silk fabrics, wallpaper, Tyvek, free motion stitch and hand embroidery. I’ve included a piece of felt I made a few years ago which mimics fossils, it’s one of two experimental samples I made and didn’t get around to using until now. After auditioning both of them in the pre-made hole I went with the darker option, which doesn’t look as dark in the flesh as it does in the photo. I’ve submitted this piece for the online exhibition but I’ve since felted another slab to add to the first one. It will be embellished in a similar way, to create a larger piece of work for another exhibition that Jo and I are hoping to launch in July.  

I’ll leave you with a piece of work that was created by a lovely lady called Avie, also known as The Curly Sheep. Avie came to spend a day with me last month to learn how to wet felt a picture and how to do free motion stitch. Turns out she’s a natural at both as I’m sure you will agree!

 

ReConnect – The Online Exhibition of the International Feltmakers Association March 2021

ReConnect – The Online Exhibition of the International Feltmakers Association March 2021

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This is a guest post from Ann B.  Thanks for the post, Ann!

 

After reading Karen’s post on how she found her inspiration for her entry for the International Feltmakers Association proposed online Exhibition, I was encouraged to have a crack at it.

I had found it extremely difficult to find inspiration from the theme of their previous exhibition, which was “Kaleidoscope”. I have a very literal mind and could not think of how to portray that idea – I don’t/can’t do non-representational, but I must try to think “outside the box”.

At first I found it impossible to think what to do. First I looked up “reconnect” in a good dictionary – the Cambridge dictionary said:

1. “to join or be joined with something else again after becoming separated”

2. “to improve a relationship that has become less good or less close”

3. “to make you feel or understand something that you had stopped feeling or understanding”

4. “to create a relationship with someone again after a period of time”

as well as the obvious of reconnecting a disconnected phone call or internet link.

How on earth was I going to depict any of that? Initial thoughts ran along the lines of the connecting stitches in garment construction, and the more obvious stitches connecting inserted lace and tapes and how to use this in a felted piece. All this was going round in my head, when I happened to notice one of my husband’s photographs of the Scissor Arch holding up the tower in Wells Cathedral pop up on my laptop screen saver and this brought my attention to connections with the past and the future.

I started to mull over the idea of a piece of felt with the scissor arch as cut open channels on a piece of felt, which were then sewn together again, i.e. reconnected.

I cropped the image and printed a grey scale picture so that I could more easily gauge the colour values, and I subsequently decided to stick with the grey scale as it seemed to add to the drama of the image.

I then made a tracing of the main features, leaving out a lot of the detailed glimpses of the crucifix, the Jesse Window, the organ and the vaulted ceilings behind the arches. I used this to plan the piece: what prefelts I would need; what resists I would use; the order of placing resists and layers of prefelts. I wanted to start dark and come forward into the light, so that the arch itself would be white. I decided originally that there would be a minor variation from the greyscale palette – I would use the fact that the vaulting of the ceilings was picked out in gold paint and I added pale yellow to the list of prefelts.

This picture shows the prefelts I made, but in the end I did not use the mid grey, nor the yellow.

I made a couple of photocopies of the tracing so that I could cut out templates for the resists and the prefelts, and then I cut them out. I made a “crib sheet” setting out the order in which I needed to work – I have been known to forget what I was supposed to be doing halfway through a project, and I didn’t want to do that this time. I have not attached a copy of this as you probably wouldn’t be able to read my scrawl.

This picture shows the resists and templates after use. In fact there should be a resist in the shape of the little curly topped bit shown centre bottom. Unfortunately it’s still in the piece somewhere I couldn’t find it so left well alone. It was supposed to reveal the white base of the picture being lit from the Jesse Window shining through above the organ.

Once I had finished the initial fulling, I cut out the resists, (those that I could find) the resist for the scissors was cut at the cross so that I could pull it all the way out, as I did not want to cut the channel just above the cross. The top of the arch and the lower “legs” section I did cut all the way so that the darkest grey would show behind the white. I then inserted a piece of metallic grey fibre inside the top channel so that when the stitching reconnected the cut edges it would resemble the slashed and pinked work in Tudor costumes. I then finished the fulling, sealing the cut edges. I then set it to dry, but unfortunately I did not pay sufficient attention to where I laid it to dry as it has a distinct lean to one side at the top, and I didn’t notice this until I came to photograph the finished piece.

Although I had abandoned the idea of adding the pale yellow prefelt inside the top of the scissors arch to try to echo the gold paint on the arches there, I decided to pick out the nearer arches in gold thread and used a back stitch. I decided to stick with gold as the only colour in the picture and reconnected the cut channels with two goldwork yarns using sorbello stitch, which is an embroidery stitch used for insertion work. Using some silk yarn which I had hand dyed variegated grey many moons ago, I emphasized the edges of the scissor legs and the circles connecting them to the walls of the cathedral.

Having abandoned the yellow prefelt, I wondered what I should do with the blank space that left me with. I’m not sure why I decided to add the masked face instead. It just seemed the thing to do as we have to wear the things so often at the moment.

By this time, I was heartily sick of the piece anyway, so I took the required photographs, filled in the application form and sent it all off; and lo and behold I eventually received an email confirming that it had been accepted for the Exhibition.

This is the finished piece and the close-up of the Sorbello stitched lower arch.

This is the link to the Exhibition on the IFA’s website . If you click on an image it takes you first to the part of the submission form with a description of inspiration etc, and then to more photos of the work. If you click on those images you can see the complete photograph – in some cases they had to be cropped to thumbnails for the general exhibition page.

https://www.feltmakers.com/online-exhibitions/

IFA Conference

IFA Conference

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This is a guest post by Anne H. (penguin), one of our forum members who recently attended the IFA Conference that was held near her home. Thanks for the post Anne!

I’ve only been felting a couple of years, and I’m certainly no expert, but when I saw that the International Feltmakers’ Association was holding their annual conference (with workshops of course!) only an hour away from me I couldn’t resist. I was a little nervous going on my own as I’ve done a few residential courses before (for embroidery) but I’ve always known some of the people there – however, the group of approximately 65 ladies (and one man) couldn’t have been friendlier, and I had a wonderful time. If you ever get the chance to go, I highly recommend it!

The whole event was also extremely well organised and there was something to do all the time – although of course you didn’t have to join in with everything. Shortly after we arrived an aluminium jewellery workshop started, and later that evening there was a mini-marketplace with a few members’ stalls and a bring and buy charity sale, and Annemie Koenen, one of the tutors and a remarkable felter, had brought an entire shop with her from Holland – lovely dyed wools, tools, soaps, silks … most of us wanted to go home with the lot!

The meetings are held alternately somewhere in the UK and somewhere … not in the UK. Next year it’s Sweden. I wish I could go! We had someone from Canada and someone from Iceland, and two or three from Holland, although most people were UK based.

The two workshops I did were with Zsofia Marx – hat making, and Chris Lines – Felt Faces. The one with Chris was on the first day and I learnt an incredible amount. I was going to use a pic of my hubby, but he’s got a fair bit of hair and a beard, which would have made him a very tricky first subject. So instead I ended up doing a brooding looking popstar – Chris couldn’t remember who hewas but I liked his face!

 

One of the ladies from another workshop came round and said, ‘Coo, who’s HE?’ I managed to keep a dead straight face as I said, ‘Oh him? That’s my husband!’ The look she gave me was priceless. ‘I’ll be round yours tomorrow!’ she said … but then I couldn’t hold the straight face and had to confess that I had no idea who it was really.

Chris, the tutor, was horrified that I was using Carex hand soap and gave me a lecture on why olive oil soap was the ONLY thing to use. So why had I taken Carex? Because Zsofia, the tutor for the sculpted hat workshop, had said to bring liquid soap.

Well that evening myself and another lady who was going to be doing the Zsofia workshop next day decided we had better create some liquid olive oil soap – so I made a kind of gel in a tub with a lid, and Pat made a big (lidless) tub of soapy water, which she spent the whole of the next day trying to get people to use so she could get rid of it! Zsofia was most amused at what we’d done and said the soap I had bought would have been fine! A classic example of how every felt maker seems to work differently and swear by different things.

I’m still using my olive oil gel now and it’s great! I have to say that I did actually find things felted much better and much more quickly with the olive oil soap so I’m now a convert!

I didn’t get ‘my face’ finished during the workshop hours so I skipped the talk that was laid on that evening and went back to the workshop to finish off. Just as I’d finished my effort, another lady came in to finish hers, so I stayed and kept her company until bedtime. Unfortunately she’d used Superwash for her background without realising and of course it WOULD not felt! In the end she needle-felted the rest to her background and it looked fantastic so all was not lost.

The hat making workshop was terrific – Zsofia, a Hungarian-born lady now living in Holland and speaking superb English, was delightful. She started us off by showing us a variety of hats she’d made and then had us all trying them and telling each other, frankly, if they suited or not, while we looked in the mirror in the ladies’ toilets – as there were no mirrors in the classroom! This meant that most of us ended up not making the hat we liked the look of sitting on the table in the workshop, but the hat that actually looked good on us! I wanted to make the hat with the crazy rose sticking out of the side but it looked terrible on me! (two back on the right of the photo):

So I made a much more simple, pleated hat instead.

’Thanks to some excellent advice from the Felting and Fibre Studio forum I’d taken a selection of colours too. My intention was to make the hat purple with some peach decoration, but that was shouted down by Zsofia and the other ladies, so I stuck my hank of turquoise/green stripy merino roving on my head and said ‘What about this then?’ and they all said that suited me perfectly, so my purple hat ended up green! So much for trying to move away from my comfort zone – but at least it goes with a lot of clothes I’ve got, and my glasses; I always gravitate towards turquoise!

The hat was laid out on a 2D resist with coarser wool inside and the finer, coloured wool on the outside – except that the layout was inside out so the merino was against the resist and the other wool, in my case Corriedale, was on the outside.

 

Corriedale wasn’t the best choice as something a bit courser would have been good, but I had a lot left over from the Chris Lines workshop so that’s what I used!

Zsofia took us through the whole process from laying out, to wetting out and rolling, rolling, rolling … and then eventually cutting out the template (see photo below).

Then came fulling the hat into a 3D shape, first getting rid of the ‘seam’ from the template, and then gradually shaping the hat through rubbing until we had a fairly shapeless and ugly cone!

Then the magic happened as Zsofia showed us how to pleat the hats and set the pleats using steam.

I must say I’m really thrilled with the result, and was amazed that we all got a finished out of the process and that they were all so different!

After the second workshop we had the ‘Gala dinner’ where we were all asked to wear something we’d felted. I took a couple of scarves and also a completely mad, over the top jacket which I’d made for an exhibition a couple of years ago but never worn. I mentioned this to a few people on previous days and the answer was basically, ‘Look luv, if you can’t wear it here, where can you?’ so I braved it and it elicited much interest and some complements, so I was glad I did!

The following day we had a big show and tell in the main hall where we got to see everyone else’s work. I didn’t photograph everything but I was especially taken with the tops and dresses from the Vivienne Morpath two-day workshop:

And of course the variety of Felt Faces we managed to produce between us:

as the AGM, (which was relatively painless as these things go), and then lunch and homeward bound.

All in all a terrific weekend and I’m so glad I went. I hope I’ll be able to go to many of these meetings in the coming years.