As of the 9th of July, the workshop is FULLY BOOKED. If you want to be put on the waiting list, please email Sam – see below for her details.
Workshop Description from Pam:
“In the workshop, we will learn several skills useful for fibre jewellery making. We will make one or more pieces of felted jewellery depending on the complexity of the individual design. We will look at how to design the piece for wearing, and how to construct various closures and attachments. You can also learn how to incorporate foreign objects if necessary.”
WHEN: Friday, the 18th through Sunday, the 20th of July 2025, 10 AM to 5 PM
To apply for PAM de GROOT’s workshop, please email committee member Sam Fagan at samantha.d.fagan@gmail.com
Please include Pam de Groot’s name in the ‘Subject Line’ of your email.
All participants will be notified via email and provided with a payment link for secure payment using a credit or debit card. The cost is 250 euros for members / 265 euros for non-members.
Additional Information
Supplies are not included in the workshop price. Once registered, we will email students the supply list provided by Pam.
Cancellation & Refund Policy for Workshops
If you need to cancel your place in a Feltmakers Ireland workshop, please notify the Guild by email at least 7 days before the start of the class. A €10 handling fee will be deducted from your refund.
Cancellations made less than 7 days before the workshop are not eligible for a refund. However, if you can find a replacement student to take your place AND inform the Guild within this period, you will receive a refund (minus the €10 handling fee).
Please note: In exceptional or unforeseen circumstances, the committee may consider refund requests at its discretion.
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 the content, please follow the link to the organisation hosting the event.
On Friday, the 16th of May, twelve members of Feltmakers Ireland enthusiastically came together for our first in-person workshop with an international tutor since the COVID pandemic. Our teacher was the esteemed Canadian artist and teacher, Marjolein Dallinga, who has a wonderful hands-on teaching style, where students experienced the sculptural possibilities of wool.
We learned how to create three unique felted sculptures, each incorporating many stages of the complex techniques Marjolein uses in her artwork. As specific processes needed to be followed when the projects were dry, it was a choreographed dance!
Here is a lovely photo of some students gazing with adoration on their damp, in-progress work.
Students Watching
Throughout the three days, there were step-by-step demonstrations of techniques.
Everyone is hard at work.
Students Felting
Exhibition
At the end of the course, we had a mini-exhibition in the sunshine. It was wonderful to see how each student’s work came out!
Thanks to the Many
Many thanks to Suzanne Phelan for taking care of so many details and keeping everyone caffeinated. A tip of the hat to Elaine Peden for recommending Kilteel Hall – isn’t it beautiful? Also, thanks to Elizabeth Redding and Breda Fay, guild members who came by to lend a hand. ENORMOUS thanks to Elizabeth for bringing the tubes that we used to raise the tables—it was such a treat to have those! Of course, thanks to all the students who helped create such a focused learning community and knew how to laugh!
The warmest thanks go to Marjoelein for sharing her warmth, wisdom, and talents. We look forward to her return to Ireland!
Marjoelin Dallinga in Kilteel, Co Kildare.
Disclaimer for Feltmakers Ireland Blog
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.
NOTE: MARJOLEIN’S CLASS IS NOW FULL – as of 28th of April.
Feltmakers Ireland is thrilled to announce that we will be hosting TWO exclusive, wet felting workshops this year with renowned international tutors! We haven’t hosted an international workshop in a long time and are super excited!
Each workshop runs for three days and is limited to twelve students.
Registration is now open to non-members of Feltmakers Ireland. (Guild members have already received emailsannouncing the workshops.)
The workshop with Marjolein Dallinga is appropriate for intermediate to advanced feltmakers.
The workshop with Pam de Groot is appropriate for most feltmakers.
It is from the dance of often conflicting emotions that creativity and art are born. Though sculpture is usually perceived as static I see it more as movement, and in this workshop the movement of wool fibers into felt.
And as long as there is movement there is life and possibilities.
This 3-day workshop will deepen the consciousness about experiences learned from sculpting with wool and other fibres. We will explore different techniques for sculptural form ideas, with themes like: folding and unfolding, building relief clamping, binding, etc. All to become more aware of how and why we want to use this medium. This workshop is inspired by different ideas to make three-dimensional sculptures with conceptional, intuitive and sensual sources to create from. We will play with the processes of shortening, thickening, tightening, shrinking, and other transformations of the felted surfaces.
All out of the experience of discovery and surprise when working with this surprising wool medium.
WHEN: Friday, the16th through Sunday, the 18th of May, 2025, 9 AM to 5 PM
“In the workshop, we will learn several skills useful for fibre jewellery making. We will make one or more pieces of felted jewellery depending on the complexity of the individual design. We will look at how to design the piece for wearing, and how to construct various closures and attachments. You can also learn how to incorporate foreign objects if necessary.”
WHEN: Friday, the 18th through Sunday, the 20th of July 2025, 10 AM to 5 PM
NOTE: As of 28th of April, Marjolein’s workshop is NOW FULL.
To apply for PAM de GROOT’s workshop, please email committee member Annika Berglund at annika@annikaberglund.com
Please include the tutor’s name in the ‘Subject Line’ of your email.
All participants will be notified via email and provided with a payment link for secure payment using a credit or debit card.
Additional Information
Supplies are not included in the workshop price. Once registered, we will email students the supply list provided by each tutor.
Cancellation & Refund Policy for Workshops
If you need to cancel your place in a workshop, please notify the Guild by email at least 7 days before the start of the class. A €10 handling fee will be deducted from your refund.
Cancellations made less than 7 days before the workshop are not eligible for a refund. However, if you are able to find a replacement student to take your place and inform the Guild within this period, you will receive a refund (minus the €10 handling fee).
Please note: In exceptional or unforeseen circumstances, the committee may consider refund requests at its discretion.
Feltmakers Ireland is very grateful to have received grant money from the Design and Crafts Council of Ireland to partially cover the costs of these two workshops.
Disclaimer for Feltmakers Ireland Blog
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 the content, please follow the link to the organisation hosting the event.
Teacher and artist Dagmar Binder offers several online feltmaking classes via Zoom.
Dagmar’s workshops take place over two days during one weekend, with three hours of live Zoom sessions each day. The classes are supported by video and PDF instructions for students to work independently at home. Videos are accessible for two additional months after each class.
There are three sections available for different time zones.
Artist and instructor Fiona Duthie will teach her Surface Design in Feltmaking workshop this January. This is an excellent workshop for beginners or those interested in expanding their library of felt textures!
The classroom opens on December 15th, so there is plenty of time to discuss the materials.
{In our October Sunday Session, guild member Annika Berglund shared her samples from this (and other) courses}.
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.
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.
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
If you can travel to New York State, USA, this four-day class on felting traditional Turkish felt rugs may interest you.
In this workshop, students will make their own thick, fully functional felt area rug. The rug will be intricately patterned with geometric designs in various colours of wool. Students will make their own prefelt and learn to ‘kick’ the felt, with a dance-like rhythm that can be sustained for days on end.
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 with hosting the event.
Felting tutor Dagmar Binder will teach two classes at Feutre Formation France, south of Toulouse. She will teach a Book Resist class from October 26th to the 28th and a 3D Waistcoat class from October 20 to November 1st.
Feltmakers Ireland aims to share information about awards, education, events, exhibitions, and opportunities that you may 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 with the event.
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.
Feltmakers Ireland 