The International Feltmakers Association (IFA) online courses for wet feltmaking are currently open for enrollment. There are five different courses, and each covers a specific area of interest to felters:
The January-February Coursework access begins on the 2nd of January, 20206 and ends on the 28th of February, 2026. The courses run three times a year with a period of access to the online material. The other two slots are scheduled in May/June and October/November.
The workshops are delivered step-by-step, on-screen, and as downloadable or printable PDFs through the Ruzuku platform. Students work at their own pace and can use the online group forum to ask the course mentor any questions. Students can also share their work through peer feedback and discussions.
Fibre packs can be ordered if needed.
Feltmakers Ireland guild member Hélène Dooley is one of the mentors with the IFA Discovering Feltmaking Courses. She masterfully guided us through the ‘Cracked Earth’ and ‘Geode’ techniques during our April 2023 Sunday Session!
These online courses are open to both IFA members and non-members, and would make a perfect gift for oneself!
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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.
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Questions: For questions about content, please follow the link to the organisation involved in hosting the event.
The International Feltmakers Association (IFA) online courses for wet feltmaking are currently open for enrollment. There are five different courses, and each covers a specific area of interest to felters:
The October-November Coursework access begins on the 1st of October and ends on the 30th of November, 2025. The courses run three times a year with a period of access to the online material. The other two slots are scheduled in January/February and May/June.
The workshops are delivered step-by-step, on screen and as a downloadable or printable PDF through the Ruzuku platform. Students work at their own pace and can use the online group forum to ask the course mentor any questions they may have. Students can also share their work through peer feedback and discussions.
Fibre packs can be ordered if needed.
Feltmakers Ireland guild member Hélène Dooley is one of the mentors with the IFA Discovering Feltmaking Courses. She masterfully guided us through the ‘Cracked Earth’ and ‘Geode’ techniques during our April 2023 Sunday Session!
The online courses are open to IFA members and non-members.
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.
The International Feltmakers Association’s online Colour Course is now open for enrollment. Coursework access begins on January 2nd and ends on February 28th, 2025. In addition, four other classes are available that run during the same time: Basics, Surface & Edge, 3D Forms, and Nuno Felting.
“DF2 | Colour gives you the skills to blend your own hues, tints and shades of wool. Learn essential colour theory through hand carding and make felt shade swatches for future reference. Explore soft and firm prefelt effects by creating inlay and mosaic design samples. A truly practical course on understanding colour, DF2 is highly recommended for beginners and professionals.”
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.
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Questions: For questions about content, please follow the link to the organisation involved in hosting the event.
In her online course, ‘Dyeverse Synthetic’, feltmaker and teacher Pam de Groot will cover the basics and also venture into colouring and patterning fabric for use in felting projects. Using ‘Acid Dyes’, students will learn how to print and paint. Additionally, students will learn how to use fabrics in Nunofelting applications. The course will demonstrate how to ensure samples are fixed and ready for projects. It is designed to cover as many techniques as possible while keeping costs minimal and showing how to be innovative with equipment.
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.
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Pam de Groot has two wet felting classes, which start in May.
Surface Form and Space is an eight-week class that focuses on making samples using different techniques, including undulations, large foreign objects, buttons, warts, pimples, claws, lumps, bumps, brains, and connections.
Her other class, ‘Textures and Dimensions,’ runs over three weeks. It is a sculptural project-based class where students create the “Splash,” “the Spiral,” and “the Twistie.”
Irit Dulman has a new online class on eco-printing on silk and wool. The class has 33 lessons and is self-paced. She also has two other online eco-printing classes.
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.
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Questions: For questions about content, please follow the link to the organisation involved in hosting the event.
Artist and tutor Moy Mackay will teach ‘Trees in Felt & Stitch’.
Learn the processes and techniques for creating your own felted artwork through a four-week online course.
The lessons are pre-recorded and will guide you through additional techniques to increase your technical ability while developing your own artistic style. In addition to the learning resources and videos, there are in-person, weekly webinars with Moy.
When: 6th February – 4th March 2024
She also runs other online classes throughout the year and has published several books on needle-felted art.
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.
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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.
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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
To my great surprise and joy, I received a call a while back, to be told I had won a bursary voucher from Feltmakers Ireland to put towards any course I’d like to do in felting. (Editor’s note: Ramona won the Membership Renewal Draw, which took place at our AGM in May).
I chose Pam de Groot’s surface treatment course, ‘Surface, Form and Space’. This online course is great for learning various techniques for adding parts and creating form and texture in felt.
The course consists of 7 modules/weeks with activities from undulations, lumps and bumps, buttons and claws, as well as pimples, warts, connections and brains, all of which can be used to create new and interesting forms in your felt. I very much enjoyed the first two modules, particularly as I created four little characters that my daughter and her partner fell in love with and claimed as their own. (See image below).
One of the pieces created by Ramona Farrelly in Pam de Groot’s ‘Surface, Form and Space’ online course.
Pam is ever present with helpful and encouraging comments. Her instructions are clear and concise. The beauty of the online course is that the parts can always be revisited if you’re unsure.
Students ask questions and receive feedback from the tutor for the duration of the course. During the last two weeks, the students create a felted project combining the learned techniques.
The Ruzuku platform also allows student interaction via posting images and commenting. This is very useful to everyone on the course. Reading each other’s comments and gaining more knowledge this way adds to the tutor’s teaching. (More information about Pam’s classes can be found on her website).
A piece Ramona created around a hard object – a ceramic vessel that she made.
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