John Wise

From Caroline: Here I am, felting away on the last project, a bag. The rocking action can take quite a while until the fibers are fused together properly.

My mother shows off her finished objects (she might have taken the flower to our room not anticipating there would be a photo). The book cover on the left is for a folder with felting instructions. The blue/black object is her bag and the round thing in front is a wall ornament.

The workshop was a lot of fun and so was the conference. I was glad to have my mom with me because mingling with other attendees wasn’t easy for me. She also was incredibly lucky and won two (!) baskets in the raffle. I was lucky too, because of course she didn’t have much use for all the fibery things in those baskets, one was a spinner’s basket with a Ken Ledbetter drop spindle (that I still treasure) along with lots of spinning fiber, the other was a handwoven wine bottle basket (which I still own and cherish) with some items that we regifted, although I still have some of the wine glass markers that I use as stitch markers. Before we left the conference I filled out a feedback questionnaire and foolishly suggested I could help with the website of the AZ Federation of Weavers and Spinners Guilds – which I ended up doing for about 10 years.

For my 45th birthday today, I’m being given the gift of quiet at home while the ladies are spending a couple of nights in Tucson, Arizona. They are attending a conference called Fibers Through Time and are signed up for the felting workshop. From this point, Caroline will have to take over blogging duties as she better understands what’s going on in the next photos.

From Caroline: Our workshop was all about wet felting, something that neither of us was familiar with and didn’t require any prior knowledge. Our instructors were Sallie Hall and Susan Thompson of Spirited Hands Studio in Tucson. This was going to be a 2.5-day workshop and my Mother is holding up the materials for some of the projects we were going to make. 

Wet felting is fairly easy but involves a lot of manipulating of wet wool fibers. In retrospect, I’m surprised we got away with holding this workshop indoors in a carpeted room, but we also managed to not leave the room in a wet mess.

This is the beginning of our “flower” project. The goal was to make a multicolored felted disk that would be twisted into a blossom. For this and other flat felting projects, layers of fiber are stacked on top of a sheet of bubble wrap and then soaked in soapy water. 

To get the fibers to felt, the fiber layers are covered with another plastic sheet and the whole thing gets wrapped up in a towel. The resulting sausage gets moved back and forth by leaning on it with your elbows and rocking back and forth – a lot.