Oh, I am woefully behind on posting and keeping up with you, my  inspirational students! I just found the Patterning Worksheet for  Level 1class, which I will send you sometime this weekend – it was hiding on that defunct machine, so has been rescued and resurrected.  When that is ready, I will also take the time to post pictures. I hope to use a new format for those with our new capabilities that will make for easier viewing here… It’s exciting to hear from all of you that you are working on homework and enjoying exploring all things felt-worthy.

Visit this link http://diterlizzi.com/blog/category/news/ to an author’s blog – he is one of my library kids’ favorites, co-author/illustrator of the Spiderwick Chronicles, a series of fantasy books for elementary students.  One of the women on my email list of feltmakers, Andrea Graham, made a felt version of one of the characters from the books and sent him photos, which are on his blog. Lovely work. I am still not a huge fan of doll work for my own personal taste, but hers is stellar, and she commands my respect as a committed and principled artist and teacher. Check her out.

She can be found at:

Andrea Graham-Feltmaker
Felted Art-  www.andrea-graham.com
Waldorf Education Resources- www.acornsjourney.com

Just back last week from a teaching trip which took our family to Hawaii, and then 5 days in Oak Harbor, Washington to teach there.

Feltmaking in Hawaii? Amazing – the passion is alive and well there, and I see that my focus may change over the next few years as far as how I approach the way I promote this artform.

Photos will be posted soon, from both Hawaii and the class in Oak Harbor – which was really wonderful, and almost as hot!

Time to get busy with felt! August is the month to go for it: in Honolulu, August 1,2, and 3, at The Creative Festival, three wild days of make and take felt at the Calico Cat booth, with proprietor Carol Kuniyoshi. I look forward to a great time.  I believe there will also be a seminar at her shop on the 9th of August (after we return form playing on Kauai). Since we’ve never been to Hawaii, I am excited that our family’s opportunity for adventure is expanding – all because of my pincushions…

Then, August 15-18, some serious feltmaking takes place in my Experimental Feltmaking: Level One Certificate class at Gail Harker’s Creative Studies Center in Oak Harbor WA, on beautiful Whidbey Island. Students will learn an array of colorblending techniques with fleece and work with a variety of fibers in a controlled and reproducible way. A wonderful resource book and collection of samples will be the result, along with a new-found confidence in exploring this amazing medium.

For some reason I have been unable to post the brochure for this class on my blog: therefore, look in my blogroll and follow the link to Gail’s studio.  In the banner, click the course schedule link and find August. There you will find the brochure and the registration form to examine.

Happy felting! Hope to see you this summer!

All I can say about these is, WOW!  I can’t believe how busy we are with these.  It doesn’t seem possible that this many people in the world don’t have pincushions yet, especially since there are those people I encounter who don’t know what a pincushion is, or what it is for, since they’ve never seen a straight pin…

I can’t get over how meeting a sheep whose fleece I use makes me feel! It adds a depth to the feltmaking experience I can’t quite describe. This is my friend from Spring Hill Farm, on the Kitsap Peninsula of Washington State.

Fabulous Fiber

What is it about felt that is so great?  I was a weaver for 20 years before I fell in love with felt, and all the properties of wool yarn which I have loved on the loom I get under my hands when I work the fleece, and then some.  In addition to the feel, the give, the amazing properties of the fiber in a chemical/physical sense, felt is a medium which lends itself amazingly well to painterly techniques. I have always wished I could paint.  In felt, I can.

It has been 6 years since we bought the felted pincushion business from friends Helen and Tom.  It has been an interesting road, and I truly thought we would be growing the business by adding contacts. The truth is that we could hardly keep up this past year, and our number of clients remains relatively stable,and very few.  This never ceases to amaze me. When we started out, we were making about 500 pincushions a year to wholesale around the country.  That seemed a huge number, and we were starry-eyed with the big feeling of marketing our own product.  We are  just barely into 2007 and already at 350 – last year’s total was 1800 pincushions!  Where do they all go? I expected that the market would dry up, but I guess everyone has a friend who sews.  I will post photos when I figure out the best way to show the story.