Tuesday, April 14, 2015
Crafting Felt Creatures with Woolbuddy
Tested: At WonderCon, we meet up with Jackie Huang, an artist who sculpts with felt to create fantastic creatures. Jackie's "Woolbuddies" take the form of everything from adorable owls to giant dragons and even an R2-D2 droid. We learn about the felting process and get a quick demo!
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4 comments:
This is so cool! The only experience I have with felted wool is with the toys my dog uses- we got them at a craft fair from a woman who makes felted wool pieces and then stuffs them with regular quilting fluff. We use them as dog toys because they don’t have any stitching or seams, which my dog immediately targets for destruction. However, she always manages to find a place where she can chew through the wool and get into the stuffing within. This felting process is really interesting, especially because the fibers get tighter and tighter without any need for rolling, smashing, or stitching- they just make a solid ball. I would really like to know more about how this works, because it kind of blows my mind that he created that sushi in like 5 seconds without any stitching or glue. Maybe something made this way would work better as a toy that wouldn’t trail stuffing all through my dog’s digestive system.
Felting seems like a really cool process. I’ve always been interested in art forms that use fibrous materials. Sewing, knitting, croqueting, they’re all are really interesting and intriguing to me, but constantly needing to remember patterns, and sequences has always been somewhat daunting. Sure you can go into the pattern, invest yourself in the work and tackle the process, but the idea of messing up a piece because I missed a single step in a pattern and having to completely rework it has never sat well with me. This whole issue of patterns isn’t a done deal with me, and I plan trying my hand at sewing and knitting at some point in my life, but I’m excited to hear that there’s an alternative to sequencing that I can use to create fibrous objects in a way I feel much more comfortable. Felting is so interesting to me because it defies all the other similar fiber based crafts, instead of weaving simply pushing the fibers together bonds the pieces as one allowing you to create amazing plush objects with the same ease as sculpting. I just wonder if there’s a way to detach a piece of felt after its pushed together, in case you need to move a piece. Either way without the daunting patterns, perhaps felting is my in to fiber based crafts.
This an amazing style of crafting! It actually seems deceptively easy. I would love to track down this amazing felting needle and some of the raw felt because this is something that I would love to learn and master. It also forces you to look at things in a different way. Instead of having a patter, model or draft, it's just a mental image of several simple shapes combined to create many insane complicated shapes. That seems like so much fun but leaves so many possible areas where failure can happen. There are probably hundreds of messed up R2D2s lying around. But this is such a cute style of crafting and I would love to have little felt toys in my room or on my backpack. Where can I learn this?
I found this whole process crafting of these wool buddies absolutely fascinating. The making of anything with wool always looks so complex. I always knew that the fibers of wool where very strong because they are spun to make yarn but it never dawned on me that when the fibers are used raw it is very easy for them to attach and stay bonded to each other to form new creations similar to clay. His process speaking wonders to how many artists construction their ideas in three dimensions. So often people who are so used to working in two dimensional space don’t always know where to begin to bringing their creations to life. But learning to mentally be able to break down the final product figure into multiple small shapes can be very useful. This also just speaking wonders to how to accomplish tasks that at time can feel very large at the start. Provided that you can break things down into small enough pieces, little by little the final project can come together.
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