I passed! - Arts for Health & Wellbeing

 Readers of my other (more business-y) blog, Hue & Dye, may have seen that I recently passed my Arts for Health and Wellbeing course. Squee!

As part of the course which was run by Bolton University, we were asked to produce a series of pieces for a public exhibition at the end of the course. This was the brief for the exhibition.... (apologies for the blurry photo of the exhibition intro - no idea what happened there!)

I focussed my part of the exhibition on felting and made a series of felted pieces to express the personal creative journey I had taken during the course.

 For me, felt is such a tactile media - it has so many applications. How many products can there be that can be made soft enough to wear close to your skin, diaphanous, delicate and lacy like my merino/silk scarf, but can also be moulded into three dimensions to make the warmest, cosiest footwear like my little bootees, or my representation of a felted woolly shroud? (Yes, they really do exist).

 Not forgetting the more familiar uses of felt for decorative art - here is a felted landscaped made with soft felt embellished with needle-felting. It is destined to be a cover for one of my art journals in due course.

A personal favourite use of felt is for jewellery and accessories. Some of these pieces are made from simple wet-felting using merino roving in a range of colours. Other pieces incorporate stitching and embellishments with shisha mirrors and beads. I've also included additional fibres such as silk noil in the cuff, to give added texture.

Felt can, of course, also be stitched and sewn like a fabric. The purse on display is made from pieces of flat felt, cut to a pattern template and stitched. And no felt need be wasted! The small brooch is made from offcuts of an earlier project, this time torn to give more freeform edges then stitched and embellished with a brooch pin on the reverse.

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When I teach children felting we usually begin with felted balls for bracelets (or caterpillars!) and then make flat felt for purses. But, being a school project, I like to throw in some history and geography too. When I ask about where they can find felt today, Fuzzy Felt is usually the first answer! The students are always amazed to discover that felt is used to make homes, even to this day. They also love to hear anecdotes, such as the origins of "mad as a hatter" (from the extremely harmful mercury used historically in the hatmaking industry).

These are a couple of videos I like to use to illustrate some of the uses of felt....

Making a traditional yurt in Mongolia



The original stetson, made from, yes, you guessed it, felt...(Please note, this process uses rabbit fur)