Felt Matters | The Podcast, Season 1 Episode one (part 1)
Like many of you, Heather and I can quite happily talk about felting all day. As cohosts for the brand-new IFA Felt Matters podcast, we are loving this chance to chat and share our passion about all things felt with our listeners.
Our conversations have enabled us to discuss the nuances within felting, often in great detail. We enjoy the spontaneity of discussing aspects of felting with wool that articles or photographs alone might not capture fully.
Here in the blog, we’d like to share some of the background to our chat with you, adding to the narrative with the written word and pictures.
Heather’s stunning felted rainbow front door hanging
In our conversation, Heather describes her top stash-busting tip of using old felts and prefelts saved from different projects, to felt a large hanging rainbow (in this case, to celebrate the NHS during Covid times). It’s amazing to think that all these leftovers, this myriad of felted off-cuts, could be arranged onto a one-and-a-half-meter long template. Cutting the disused fabrics into small squares and rectangles, Heather organised these by colour, distributing them between bowls on the table for easy storage and access rather like a chef might pre-prepare the weighed-out ingredients of a cake into small separate dishes before mixing.
Heather’s photos show this perfectly, but the photo I really love is when she has laid out and wet down the whole rainbow ready for felting with all seven colours in an arc. Many different colour values are chromatically arranged, amassed from a broad spectrum of tiny individual coloured felt shapes, not just seven. A joyous and merging saturation of tones, shades and hues which, in the photos, even look to contain blacks and browns.
This luminous spread from the stash, carefully graded into seven tiers of tones, combine to show us a typical rainbow. And we are convinced.
Felt Matters | The Podcast is available on our YouTube Channel, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Vivienne Morpeth with Heather Potten
Region 10 and 13