Experimenting with Functional Art

 I have been having an enormous amount of fun experimenting with different felting techniques. I prefer to make an object rather than just a sampler and pillows and tea-cozies work really well for this purpose. These pillows were created by laying down a dark background, laying bands of lighter coloured wool over top, cutting trees into the middle layer to expose the dark layer, and adding silk, bamboo and wool surface embellishments. The wool is laid onto turban cotton to provide additional strength without having to resort to very thick felt. The pillows are created as a one piece envelope that have button closures on the back.

In this tea-cozie, vertical light bands were "woven" with yellow and green horizontal bands. A resist was used under the vertical bands at the points were they overlapped the horizontal bands, emphasizing the weave.

 Felting seems to be becoming very popular and a surprising number of new techniques and ideas are out there. In the early 1990s, nuno felting was developed and fibre artists are taking it in many directions. In this technique, wool is felted onto a fabric with a fibre or weave than enables the wool to attach itself to the fabric. I took a nuno scarf workshop from Sue Scott, an amazing local felter. For this scarf, I laid black wool onto a very summery looking shear silk fabric (the silk fabric is exposed on the right had edge in the picture on the left which creates a ruffle once the wool starts to shrink). Picking up the colours from the fabric, I created geometric designs on the surface using wool, silk, ribbon, and bamboo embellishments as well as laying on small scrap pieces of the silk (encased in the blue diamonds and burgundy squares). Before and after pictures are on the left and right respectively with a detail shot below. It was a fun and valuable workshop experience. Just to give you an idea of the amount of work that goes into felting, this piece took about 6 to 8 hours to complete.