I spent last week living at Ballarat Grammar School and
participating in a sculptural felt workshop with US artist
Kristy Kun as part
of
Fibre Arts Ballarat. This was a very different felting workshop for my
fibre-friend and I, as we have largely participated in wet-felting classes, and
this one involved a lot of construction with needling pre-felts
before the welt-felting process. This
was a great advantage in that we hardly needed to bring any supplies, and it
was a lot less physical!
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| Cute Kristy with our offerings for the 'Top Table' to be auctioned for charity |
For those of you unfamiliar with the felting world, a
pre-felt is a piece of felt which has been needle-felted or wet felted from combed
wool fibres to hold together as a fabric but is about half-way in the total
process of felting. Needle-felting is a technique using barbed needles to begin
meshing the wool fibres together – wet felting uses a process of water, soap,
and agitation by rolling or rubbing. For this class, Kristy supplied us with
the needle-felted pre-felts made on her Felt Loom, some with coloured silk
fabric embedded in them.
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| The pre-felt 'onion' and resist or 'bun'! |
She then took us through her process of making a flower with
the coloured pre-felts, a process un-like any other I had done before. Many
times the class thought they were near completion, but we just kept felting and
fulling until we had some very solid work, which was dipped in sizing and
hand-shaped before drying into the most solid felt I’ve ever ‘felt’!!
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| Cutting the petals |
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| Felted petals |
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| Trimmed and shaped petals |
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| Class flower production! |
Being immersed in flowers, it was wonderful to see the display of dahlias at the Botanic Gardens, as well as succulents, for inspiration.
We loved our flowers, but I think we were all even more
excited about the next project, the sculptural panel. Here we learned Kristy’s
technique of applying pre-felt strips to a background, how to join them, adding
colour - look at me embracing the brown wool! – as well as cutting strips to make tendrils.
Every section took an incredible amount of hand working to get it to the final
stage, before spinning, de-fluffing, and shaping. I learned so many things, and
found Kristy to be an awesome tutor - clear instructions and demonstrations, well organised, and heaps of fun!!
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| Pre-felt strips needled to base |
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| Half-wet |
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| Class samples before wet felting (above) and after (below) |
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| My piece finished at home |
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| The class - all fabulous gals! |
We had a great time doing this class, and enjoyed the whole Fibre Arts Australia experience. I'll be posting our pre-workshop adventures soon.
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