Making Felt is Super Fun

 Last Sunday I taught another felting class at Tacoma Art Place.  This time it was a smaller group (6 students) and a much longer class (5 hours) and I taught the process of wet felting.  At the end of the day everyone had made a sample and a small scarf.   As you can see above, it was pretty messy and took up a lot of space.  Unfortunately the space was not the best for teaching wet felting.  It was a little too crowded with other art stuff crammed into the room and other members of the center kept coming in and out of the facility.  Crying babies in the back room is not the best thing for teaching.  More importantly, the sink is way too small and takes forever to get hot water.  So this is inspiring me to get my studio at home up and running the sooner the better!  I have a giant utility sink and lots of space to make a mess.  Yay!  Classes at my studio!

Here is an action shot of making the felt samples.  Towards the end of the process when the fibers have felted together but you are working them, "fulling" them to cause them to shrink, throwing them down on the table helps a lot, believe it or not.  Water was flying everywhere.

This is the sample I made to show how to make fringe, a scalloped edge, and Nuno felting: the use of silk in between the layers of wool.  

Here are the finished samples and I think they just look amazing!  I absolutely love how everyone's turned out so different.  

And here's my lovely students with their samples.  An awesome day!