Artist and educator Gladys Paulus has an upcoming class this January – INSPIRED BY NATURE: HORNS.
It’s an online workshop of drip-fed content release, including pre-recorded video tutorials, illustrated step-by-step instructions, PDF handouts, opportunities to submit questions/receive feedback, and a virtual classroom community.
COMMITMENT: 3 days between Friday, 19 January – Tuesday, 06 February 2024.
TYPE: Online, scheduled (Please note: All contents are pre-recorded. There are no “live” sessions).
CONTENTS RELEASED ON: Friday, 19 January 2024, Friday 26 January 2024, and Friday 02 February 2024.
REGISTRATION OPENS ON: Friday, 08 December 2023, 1pm (GMT)
Feltmakers Ireland aims to share information about awards, education, events, exhibitions, and opportunities that you will find interesting. Our sharing is neither paid for by nor an endorsement of these individuals or organisations.
Contact Us: If you have any concerns about content, please email us at feltmakersie@gmail.com.
Questions: For questions about content, please follow the link to the organisation involved in hosting the event.
The teaching of Anikó Boros inspired Feltmakers Ireland member Annika Berglund to enrol in the Hungarian Felting Camp this past September. (You can read about Annika’s fantastic experience on our blog or watch her presentation on our YouTube channel.)
Anikó will be teaching an online Ginkgo Earrings and Necklace Workshop in November.
Date: Saturday, November 11th, 2023 (6PM CET, which equals 5 PM Irish Time).
What you will learn:
Creating a jewellery set with ginkgo leaves in the spotlight.
The characteristic ginkgo leaves are created using fine-micron wool.
Making earrings by felting in the smallest possible scale.
Making a thin cord with a slip knot, with the help of which the length of the necklace can be adjusted.
“Planting” a ginkgo leaf onto the cord, using the encased pebble technique.
Creating a gradient/ombre effect ginkgo leaf.
Special, unique design solutions, ideas and inspiration for your very own ginkgo necklace design.
Feltmakers Ireland aims to share information about awards, education, events, exhibitions, and opportunities that you will find interesting. Our sharing is neither paid for by nor an endorsement of these individuals or organisations.
Contact Us: If you have any concerns about content, please email us at feltmakersie@gmail.com.
Questions: For questions about content, please follow the link to the organisation involved in hosting the event.
Member Annika Berglund shared her felting journey at Feltmakers Ireland’s most recent Sunday Session on the 8th of October.
Online Education
As mentioned previously, Annika started her felting journey with an in-person class at the 2019 Knitting and Stitching show. However, most of her textile learning experiences have been via online study. To read about her recent experience with the Hungarian Felting Retreat, visit this previous blogpost. This is a recap of her online education. Jump to the list ofonline classes.
How Information is Accessed
Annika explained how online classes are ‘delivered’, with many of the best ones being held on the Ruzuku platform, where new topics or projects are introduced weekly or bi-weekly. Depending upon the instructor, these classes can contain short videos, photographs, and step-by-step written instructions. This method helps to break down information into bite-sized pieces. Other tutors share their teaching via recordings of longer Zoom sessions. Typically, these classes are private links on YouTube. The drawback of this method is that students may need to fast-forward through a video to search for needed steps within the instructions.
Depending upon the teacher, classes can be for a few hours or for several weeks.
In some of the courses, students can upload photographs of their felted assignments. Seeing the work, the teacher and the other students in the class can offer feedback. Other students’ comments were an aspect that Annika appreciated through the isolation of 2020. Annika says, “When you did a course, {it} saved my sanity”.
Additionally, being a part of the worldwide felting community was a benefit of some of the courses. Lastly, courses offer one the opportunity to play!
Pam de Groot
The first online class that Annika took was taught by Pam de Groot, an Australian feltmaker.
Pam offers two online courses. Annika greatly enjoyed ‘Surface, Form and Space’. It focuses on different types of differential shrinkage with each assignment. Pam’s other class, ‘Textures and Dimensions’, is more project-based, with multiple techniques in each project. Students create three three-dimensional sculptures: The Splash, The Spiral, and the Twistie. Annika’s Spiral project is the large white ‘seashell’ in the photograph below. While the teal-coloured, star-fish shape is from Pam’s other class.
A medley of felted objects from Annika’s two Pam de Groot classes.
In May, at the AGM, guild member Ramona Farrelly won a bursary to attend a workshop of her choice. She chose Pam’s first class. You can read about Ramona’s experience on our blog.
Fiona Duthie
The next bunch of classes that Annika took were taught by the Canadian feltmaker Fiona Duthie. Fiona’s classes are so popular that they fill up. Hence, Annika could only get a spot in the ‘Over the Edge’ class. However, this eight-week class proved to be quite useful. As Annika says, it “was actually a really good one to do, because {there are} a lot of techniques in the one course and because of all these different ways to edge work, will teach you a lot of different felting techniques that you can use in the middle as well.”
The next class that Annika took with Fiona Duthie was her ‘Raised Surfaces’ class. She found this class highly rewarding. She explained, “Once you start to attach things to the surface, you get much more lively stuff. And once you can do this, … then you can make a hat, or you can make a wall piece. So consider the techniques on their own, and then figure out how they fit with what you want to make…”
Another class that Annika took with Fiona was the ‘Fibre + Paper’ course. This class required gentle feltmaking, with students trying to coax wool through various types of fine papers, including mulberry. However, one of the benefits of working with paper is that it allows crisp mark-making. It also makes the felt stiffer so you can do more sculptural shaping. {In the past, Fiona has offered a related course where students learned how to create paper lampshades.}
Annika also took Fiona’s ‘Surface Design Online Class’, which focussed on texture on flat surfaces. Note how Annika’s careful recordkeeping on her samples.
A Free Fiona Class
If students want to experience a Fiona Duthie class before first purchasing one, there is always her free online tutorial for a ‘Vessel with a Vessel’. This tutorial inspired the guild’s ‘Basic & Beyond’ class, which Annika taught at the beginning of 2023.
Mandy Nash
In this class with Mandy Nash, students learned how to make two felted fish during a live seven-hour Zoom workshop, which is now available as a recorded class. Mandy is UK-based and currently the president of the International Feltmakers Association. In 2022, she taught an in-person felted bag workshop to the Guild.
Eva Camacho
Annika particularly enjoyed learning from tutor Eva Camacho, a US-based feltmaker who is originally from Spain. Annika shared pieces from two of Eva’s classes. In one class, students used the Korean technique of ‘Joomchi’ to make projects out of mulberry bark. Annika explained, “Basically, Korean peasants couldn’t afford fabric, so they took mulberry paper and layered it.” The results were used for clothing and purses. The process is similar to feltmaking! She also took another class with Eva where students focussed on embroidering Joomchi.
Kristy Kun
Kristy Kun is a US-based feltmaker who includes the supplies in the cost of her courses. As Kristy mails the supplies, Annika advises to keep this in mind when enrolling as there can be delays due to international mail. In these classes, Annika learned how to combine thick prefelt with thin cheesecloth fabric. She further explained the types of cheesecloth: it comes in a range of 90 to 10, with 90 being the densest. The loosest weave that she can find in Ireland is grade 50. She added that you can use cheesecloth for Nuno felting; it doesn’t need to be expensive silk fabric.
HERE is an article about the different grades of cheesecloth.
Molly Williams
Annika learned about sculpting a woollen figure around a metal armature in UK-based Molly Williams‘ class. Annika shared how the metal goes through the base, which she made from ceramics.
The Felting and Fiber Studio
The Felting and FIber Studio is an international collective of felt and fibre artists with an active blog (which frequently includes needle felting). They also have a selection of online classes.
In ‘Nuno Felting with Paper Fabric Lamination’, Annika learned how to use an acrylic medium to ‘print’ onto fabric. She was especially interested in the textures the acrylic medium created.
Gladys Paulus
Dutch-Indonesian and based in the UK, Gladys Paulus only teaches in person a few times a year, and these classes fill up quickly. Annika is on the waiting list for a class that is next year. In the meantime, she took two classes with Gladys. Her first class was ‘The Lotus’, and the second was ‘Horns’ – where students made a straight and a curved one.
Annika highly recommends Gladys, “Well, she teaches you good felting. Where you can see the difference when you haven’t quite felted it enough, and when you felted it enough, that it takes shapes.”
Some of the above teachers sell their finished products, supplies, and online workshops via their websites. Other tutors may need to be contacted directly for further information. Some of the teachers who teach online have recorded classes that are available year-round, while others have ones with specific availability. Several of the tutors teach additional classes which are not included below. Visit the links to be inspired and learn!
Links are grouped and in the approximate order of when mentioned during Annika’s presentation.
Classes that Annika took in person as part of Felting Camp
If you have experienced other online felting-related courses that you have enjoyed, let us know. We will collect this information for a future post. – feltmakersIE@gmail.com
Several exciting felting classes are coming up at Vrouw Wolle in Belgium. Teachers, including Lisa Klakulak and Charlotte Sehmisch, will teach this autumn. In January, Yaroslava Troynich will be teaching two classes. Anita Johnson is coming in September 2024.
Vrouw Wolle is located in Essen, a little village situated in the north of Antwerp, next to the Dutch border.
Enrollment is open for Pam de Groot’s online class, ‘Surface, Form, and Space‘. This class covers three-dimensional felting techniques. Pam says it is an intermediate to advanced course. Editors’ note: I would take this class before her other class, the project-based, ‘Textures and Dimensions’,which begins in mid-October.
Via the online learning platform Ruzuku, you will learn many skills and techniques in the eight weeks of the course. The first six weeks are based on making samples with these techniques, and the last two weeks are spent on an individual project named the “Samplodicus”. This final project will be a combination of the techniques learned previously in the course and include undulations, large foreign objects, buttons, warts, pimples, claws, lumps, bumps, brains and connections.
Raised Surfaces create great textural dimension through the construction of felt forms that rise up and over the surface of our felt. By repeating these forms, we establish a strong sense of movement, creating felt canopies of leaves or waves, a floating garden of felt or silk blossoms, or dancing, twisting bone-like structures.
We make a series of samples in this class. These techniques can be applied to a vast range of felting projects, including wall hangings, vessels, sculptures, bags, and even garments, for the bold!
This online class runs from the 1st of September to the 30th.
If you are in a position to get to Castleknock once a week for 10 weeks, this might be for you:
Feltmaking with Clodagh Mac Donagh
Course Content: Welcome to the wonderful world of wool. Using beautiful Merino wool and other fibres to produce woolly works of Art. You will learn all of the terms and many techniques to create your own fabric and solid forms, from fluffy fibre, done using the wet felting technique. (Students will be required to pay a €25 materials charge)
Sorry forgot to add email to respond to. Apologies. Reply re this offer to clarepbrophy@gmail.com.
Hi EVERYBODY
There Is a partime job available to any feltmaker interested and competent
to design and take a course in Castleknock Community College D15. Adult Education Dept..It is a night school. The person could set a duration of eight or 10 weeks with classes being two hours or 90 minutes long, which ever they felt was best. The tutor rate is €41.38 per hour
So an 8 week 2 hour course pays €620.70 & a 10 week 2 hour course pays €827.60 for example we run Mondays & Tuesdays so they could have their choice of night.
Please contact me immediately if you are interested…
There Is a partime job available to any feltmaker interested and competent
to design and take a course in Castleknock Community College D15. Adult Education Dept..It is a night school. The person could set a duration of eight or 10 weeks with classes being two hours or 90 minutes long, which ever they felt was best. The tutor rate is €41.38 per hour
So an 8 week 2 hour course pays €620.70 & a 10 week 2 hour course pays €827.60 for example we run Mondays & Tuesdays so they could have their choice of night.
Please contact me immediately if you are interested…
We hope you are all doing well, staying safe and finding some time for crafting. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, there is one actual benefit from the pandemic, and that is that more felting workshops than ever are offered online. This means that you can learn from artists across the world and establish contact with other makers from many different countries. The best courses are quite pricey and fill up quite fast, but if you compare with the time and cost involved in doing in-person workshops they start to seem a bit more accessible. Also, remember, all renewing members will be placed into a draw for a bursary award to the value of €200 for an online international tutor workshop this year.
In this blog I want to present a list of artists whose courses I have done, or would like to do, in case any of you are looking for workshops to do in the coming year. Learning about new techniques and being encouraged to keep making has helped me retain a modicum of sanity in the last year and I am planning to keep it up in the new year as well. If any of you know of other courses and artists not mentioned here that you would like to recommend, please send us a line.
Fiona Duthie: Fiona Is well known for excellent online workshops. They one I took last year definitely improved the quality of my finished felt. She is also very generous with help and advice and added a number of extra tutorials to the course in response to what students were interested in. Fiona is opening registration for her spring courses on January 4th.
Pam de Groot: Pam’s workshops focus on 3D felting, and allows you to explore how felt can go from 2D to 3D and the effects and structure you get by varying the thickness of wool in a felted piece. Pam has not posted dates for courses in 2021 but sign up to her newsletter if you are interested and be first in line when registration opens.
Eva Camacho-Sanchez: Eva is a Spanish artist living in the US. Her online classes are mostly 2D, incorporating, mark making, stitching and Joomchi. Joomchi is an old Korean technique where water and agitation fuse mulberry papers together to create a strong and interesting surface that can be used on its own or with felting and stitching. Eva has not yet put up dates for 2021, but join her newsletter if you are interested in her courses.
The Online Felting Studio with Ruth Lane and Teri Berry have courses that are quite a bit cheaper, but much shorter that the ones I mentioned below. Ruth Lane teaches 2D embellishments and mixed media approaches to felting and Teri Berry ‘s courses include an interesting looking concertina hat. These would be good if you wish to dip a toe into online learning.
Mandy Nash: Based in Wales, Mandy did a few live zoom classes last year. I attended two of them (remotely) and learnt how to make two types of fabulously colourful felted fish. These are now available as a video down loads. They are quite long as they include the recording of whole day workshops. They are very reasonably priced, but require a specific wool (bergschaus) for best results. This is a very interesting wool as different colours of separate layers of wool migrate through the layers and give both vivid and subtle colour gradations when felted.
Patti Barker: Patti has a number of shorter tutorials and workshops. They are very reasonable and for the “Demystifying felt resist “ course she did Last year she even sent you all the materials needed. She does not have any dates up yet, but her courses can be found here:
Molly Williams: Molly’s workshops teach how to felt human figures in 3D around a metal armature. I am signed up to begin one of her courses in January, so will keep you posted. She has opened registration for courses beginning in March.
International Feltmakers CiFT: The International Feltmakers offers a course that gives a certificate in Feltmaking, CiFT. You receive course information online and send samples for feedback to a course coordinator. There is also a facebook group were students can interact and support each other. I have not done this one, but would be curious to sign up some time in the new year. If you have experience of this course, please send some feedback or information to Committee
International feltmakers also list a number of upcoming workshops on their Events page, including feltmakers Ireland’s upcoming workshop with Gabi MacGrath.
