Felting techniques and process¶
About felt craftmanship¶
During the Textile and Scaffold Week, we had the opportunity with Le Textile Lab (and Lucia Javicoli, who attended Fabricademy program last year), to visit l'atelier Morse Felt Studio, located in La Mulatière, near Lyon. She showed us her work and the various pieces she makes with sheep wool.
Why felting?¶
The felting technique requires to work with raw fibers, but dog hairs are very soft. This idea of softiness was really important to me, since I want the participants of the workshop to feel at ease while practicing.
Also, this technique involves both the precision of the hand on the first steps of the process (placing the fibers onto the template), but it also require the full body energy during the felting time, when rolling the pebble to gather the fibers one with each other.
Felting process : wet felting¶
The process
Felting results par Guillerm
How does it work ?
Hairs are constituted of keratine. They are cylinders covered of scales or flakes. Their shape can vary according to the species of the animal from whom the hairs come from, but the general basis of its constitution is scale covered.
When you heat the hairs, and when you apply a harsh movement on it, the scales move and open. Then they can catch on others scales around them. This is what happen when you are wet felting.
Prototypes¶
Trying different templates :
I realized that human hair is harder to felt correctly. It is possible but both carding and felting are harder with these some fibers.
First Cairn
Tools¶
To know before choosing your tools
This site is very useful in term of understanding how TPI works.
Hand carders
Actually, hand carding is very time consuming.
Drum carder
Since the average price of a drum carder is around 500euros, I thought it was better to find another option.
My goal is not to build a machine, this is mostly a tool to help me card the fibers easily.