resist and transform
I like to make pretty, characterful personal spaces. Here is my favourite Ikea chest of drawers with a pretty ivy mirror made and decorated by a friend in decoupage and my own felted runner. The lizard has special significance. Above it sits a print of a favourite picture from an art gallery in Denmark.
Felt provides a simple way of decorating all sorts of surfaces. And it is a good protective fabric too.
A commonly used technique in felting, particularly in nuno, is to felt small amounts of natural fibre material into the felt. The hooks on a natural fibre will allow it to attach to the wool.
Synthetic materials often won’t attach because they don’t have natural hooks in the fibre which give that felting potential. But sometimes this resistant capacity can also be used.
This dressing-table runner was made both by adding in pieces of some materials that would felt and using some that would not as small resists and then removing them later. This gives a shiny moulded-out texture to parts of the piece.
Wool was added at different felting stages to achieve special effects. Some wool fibres rested on the resist pieces without being fully felted in. Instead they felted separately above the resists creating web-like effects on the surface when the pieces are removed.
It isn’t an effect you can control perfectly but then what can you with felt? The delight is in the transformation which occurs in the process.
Principally felt 