Needle Felting with Various Sheep Breeds and Fiber

At the end of October I was privileged to visit Janice Arnold in her studio in Centralia, and to tour her exhibit at South Puget Sound Community College. I found Janice through a Youtube video while looking at felting machines and techniques. Janice graciously gave me a tour of her studio, showed me some of her many felt samples, and allowed me to tag along with her and she gave a tour to several of us at her exhibition at SPSCC (which unfortunately is now closed). I had no idea that Janice was a world renown artist and a recognized expert in felt when I first contacted her. She has had her work exhibited or purchased for use at Cooper-Hewitt in NYC, the Grendel Opera in LA, Cirque de Soleil, The Gates Foundation, and the list goes on. Below is a photo of one of her local installations held in private collection in Olympia.

Janice Arnold Wool and Felt exhibit at South Puget Sound Community College

Most of Janice’s work is geared toward welt felting. However, she has done several projects using needle felting on a large scale. The needle felting machine is what led me to Janice. She showed me how the FeltLoom worked, and we ran a layup of wool through the machine making a fairly thick piece of felt in a matter of minutes. The process if fairly quick, but I learned that I have a lot to learn about the types of roving that will work best for what I want to do.

Janice Arnold’s Wave Ceiling Art installation

I am still very interested in the process of dry needle felting. I think the process has a lot of potential, but there are lots of questions to be answered. What sheep breeds would work best for the applications that I am interested in? Is a blend a better option, and what breeds do I blend? How many times should I run the wool roving through the machines? Do I need to wet finish? Do I need to apply soap? Do I need to run it through a dryer? How much shrinkage occurs when the roving is run through the needle felted? And these are just the start of the many questions that must be answered in the development of a felted wool cloth.

To get me started on this path of experimentation, I ordered a long list of wool rovings to experiment with….

Cheviot
Corriedale
Dorset Horn
Finnish
Gotland
Icelandic
Jacob
Lincoln
Shetland
Teeswater
Welsh
Tunis
Alpaca, to name just a few….

I am looking forward to setting up time on a local machine to felt these rovings into squares that I can then test. I will keep you all updated on the next phase of my journey into developing wool fabric from our local Fibershed.