Harry’s Adventures: Felting
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Back in the ’70s, having cloth patches sewn onto your denim jacket was a thing, at least outside of the “Saturday Night Fever” crowd.
My mom wasn’t so keen on attaching, say, a skull-and-roses Grateful Dead logo to my outerwear. So if I was going to have such a display, I had to take a needle and thread to it, myself.
Attempts to do so without severely jabbing a finger represents my only foray into the world of anything remotely approaching working with textiles. Thus my recent experience with felting was a true adventure, something I’d never undertaken and never even thought about the possibility.
And besides the existence of felt boards, which I vaguely remember sticking stuff onto in kindergarten, I had no idea what felt is.
Judé Ernest was happy to enlighten me about how raw wool becomes felt, and how she makes all kinds of wonderful items from it, wearable and otherwise.
She teaches the art of felting, too: Her motto is “I felt it, and you can, too!” And so she invited my wife, Tammy, and me to her Mt. Lebanon studio to give it a go.
Rather than trying to make, say, a skull-and-roses logo, she suggested something like a piece of art depicting a landscape of some sort. That worked for Mrs. Funk and me, so we consulted a watercolor how-to guide by British artist David Bellamy and selected his image of a seaside scene as the basis for our creation.
First, I cut out a rectangular piece of fabric to serve as the canvas, managing to do so without severely jabbing a finger. On the fabric, I sketched a rough approximation of where elements such as the sky, clouds, sunlight, cliffs and ocean waves would go.
Then it was time to apply the wool, and Judé has quite the selection, an impressive array of colors and textures. The technique is to pull the wood apart so that you can see the individual strands clearly, and to lay them on the canvas in a way that more or less follow the sketched lines.
Next, everything went through Judé’s industrial-strength felt loom, which contains 900 needles to push the strands of wool into the canvas and effectively turn it into felt. What emerged sort of started to look like a seaside scene, but it was in need of more detail.
And so Judé handed me a felting needle with more than a word of caution: Don’t jab a finger! The needle is barbed, meaning that if it gets stuck in a digit or elsewhere, you can’t pull it out without causing substantial damage. That also means a trip to the emergency room probably would be necessary.
Thusly warned, Mrs. Funk and I proceeded to add smaller portions of wool strands to strategic locations on the canvas, such as wisps of white to complement the blue sky and purplish touches to make the clouds look kind of threatening.
I’m colorblind, so she pretty much took care of what color wool to put where. Then I took care of the needlework, poking the strands to push them into the canvas.
Believe it or not, I managed to avoid the emergency room.
At Judé’s recommendation, our final touch was to add the vague likenesses of a couple of birds in the sky, representing the two of us. Then it was back through the loom a couple of times, and to wrap things up, a flattening on a fabric steam press.
We’re no Judé Ernest or David Bellamy, but we did manage to come up with something that might not look too bad hanging on the wall.
At least we’ll have a good story to tell, even if it doesn’t involved a skull-and-roses logo.