On Sunday, the 11th of February, 22 students gathered around artist and Feltmakers Ireland guild member Annika Berglund to learn about Fine Feltmaking.
What is Fine Felt?
With this type of wet felting, the aim is to create dense, smooth felt. It is not a fast process; we didn’t toss or throw but took it slow. Annika said we might never seek this patience-requiring method again, but we would know and have the option to use it in our future felting.
Throughout the workshop, the students used only two colours: black and white. This simple limitation allowed us to experience how colours combine through the feltmaking process.
Morning
In the morning, we worked two-dimensionally. We learned how to carefully lay out Merino wool roving to a specific size and then gently transform the fluff into felt. Annika explained the hows and whys of why we might want to shrink our samples more or less.
Afternoon
In the afternoon session, the students concentrated on creating a three-dimensional vessel – a sphere. We used a flat resist to create this hollow form. Similar to our morning education, this felting process needed a delicate touch.
Students concentrate on their work.
Feedback
Many of the students were fairly new to wet felting and appreciated learning the mysteries of the process. Several enthusiastically reported they would continue felting at home with Annika’s suggestions on how to create new samples with different shrinkage rates.
Students’ Work
Top row: Margaret Ryan, Loli Cox.
Second row: Valerie O’Ceallaigh, Sandra Reynolds.
Third row: Caitriona Nolan, Suzette French.
Fourth row: Samantha Fagan.
Fifth row: Ruth Dawson, Claire Wallace.
Sixth row: Ramona Farrelly.
Appreciation Time
Many thanks to the volunteers who assisted the students. Lorna Cady, Deirdre Crofts, Marian Fagan, Juliane Gorman, Fiona Leech, and Clodagh McDonagh.
Special thanks to Clodagh McDonagh and Adrienne Dempsey, who refreshed everyone’s water containers with the needed water temperatures – at times lukewarm and other times hot!
Additional appreciation to Elizabeth Redding and Valerie Nowak Oceallaigh, who helped with the morning registration process and the selling of our book, ‘Exploring Irish Wool for Feltmaking’.
As always, special thanks to Fiona Leech for taking care of the tea, coffee, and sweet treats!
Lastly, a huge thanks to Annika Berglund for taking on this workshop for the Guild. She has a marvellous way of getting the students’ attention and also making us laugh!
Editor’s note: as more students email photos, we will add them to this blog post.
Feltmakers Ireland 