I have been spending the last week making new pieces for my craft guild application. This is what I should have been doing over Christmas, and not just because I procrastinated (It’s due January 19th). I love making felt, making clothes, working with fibers. It makes me feel whole, something I missed over the holidays. 

So, I will share with you a little of my passion for my craft, a little instruction, a little context, and a view of the final piece, before it goes to be scrutinized by my peers. 

What I do is felting, and I make jackets, vests and some smaller items like hats and scarves. They are made of sheep’s wool, and direct from the farm. Sheep’s wool wants to lock together, into a solid mass, and all I do is layout the fibers in a shape and create the environment for the locking together to happen. 

Most wool clothing is woven into fabric first, from yarns (twisted lengths of fiber) stretched on a frame with more yarn woven over and under those stretched yarns. The fabric is then sewn into garments. Wool clothing is also knitted from yarns, which creates a knotted, stretchy web of fabric. Sometimes woven or knitted items are forced into a felted state, and they call it felt, but it isn’t the real thing. 

Felting skips the yarn twisting process (spinning) as well as the weaving/knitting/sewing part. Felting takes less time, uses far less wool so it’s very light and warm. It’s also more intuitive and creative - you can make it up as you go along -  and it’s  a sculptural process - I actually form the fabric with my hands in three dimensions. And it is fantastically fun to do.

day one

 beginning to layout the first layer, onto the jacket pattern, from the "bump" or ball of wool.

The first thing I do is set up my kitchen, which has a 4’ x 6’ plywood sheet on sawhorses at waist height. The table gets covered with plastic and two layers of towels which are clamped to the edges. I cut out a pattern from sheet plastic that is a little bigger than the piece I want to end up with, since the piece will shrink about 20% from my original layout. I put down a sheet of bubblewrap, smooth side up and put the pattern down. Then I start laying down tufts of wool, thin clouds of fiber, all going in one direction, til I’ve covered the entire pattern. I’ll repeat that process to make a total of 4 layers of wool, each one turned perpendicular to each other, to make a stronger fabric (similar to the structure of plywood.) 

 the first layer done

This is the longest part; laying out the wool for a jacket, front and back,  takes about 8 hours. It’s meditative and calming and I like working in the kitchen because it’s south-facing and sunny during the day. I either listen to music or watch tv and this last week I was lucky because Stargate Atlantis was having a marathon. As a sci-fi fan, I have seen all of the episodes so many times I don’t have to watch to enjoy it. (a foreign movie with subtitles is the wrong choice for this.)  

While I’m laying out the wool, I also go over things in my mind like pricing and other designs I can make in this collection. I make a lot of colorful pieces but right now I’m concentrating on using natural colors only (colors that were grown on the animal, not dyed) and fibers that only come from local family farms. (Most wool in items that you buy in the store comes from New Zealand or Australia.) Buying from US family farms makes the energy footprint of my pieces tiny. The farm breeds the animal and shears the wool, which is sent to me as a whole fleece or they comb it into long ropes of fiber wound into “bumps.” Buying something from me supports two or three American families, neighbors, good hard-working people. 

The jacket I’m working on now is made from a breed that is cross-bred from Finn and Merino. That means that it will wear well (the Finn characteristic) and will be soft and springy (the Merino characteristic). The farm is in Virginia, and I bought it at a wool festival here in Asheville last October from the farmers themselves. I’ll also embed some lovely gold Mohair curly locks (which comes from a goat) from a farm in Dawsonville, Georgia,  as a contrast to the natural dark brown wool.

Many people think they are allergic to wool, but most are reacting to the scratchiness of wool fibers that have been processed commercially to remove the natural lanolin and grass and twigs that gets stuck in the fibers on the animal. They use harsh alkaline soaps that scour the fibers and ruin the natural softness of wool. I wash my own wool in pH balanced soaps and pick out the twigs myself - though some show up occasionally as a reminder that this was an animal that roamed in a pasture. You don’t get that from so-called polar fleece!

Okay, so now I’ve got the back done, so I'm halfway through the layout. I’ll come back tomorrow and lay out the front, and finish the felting process.