Fibers

 

I wove a handbag in grade school. I did macrame in high school. I don't have any pictures of my work from those days handy but it was always very involved and my school projects were usually late. I have some sketches somewhere I will scan and put up here eventually. In college I learned weaving, spinning, feltmaking, knitting and crocheting.

Only the feltmaking made it beyond the sampler stage. I did a moonscape piece for my sister's living room. It was a series of 8 white/black moons in all the moony phases, new to full, hung in an oval against a varigated black/white oval sky. The felt itself was not very compact and subsequently it was taken down for repairs not long after it was installed. That my sister had made a game of flinging sticky velcro balls at the moons for fun made it fall apart in places faster than it might have otherwise. But it was fun while they lasted. I am describing the project because I don't have images of it yet, either.

I took a paper workshop at the Toledo Museum of Art, conducted by Ted Ramsay, who had been a teacher of mine in college. "Sail Away" was the result. It was originally a drawing done by my 5-year old daughter, which I turned into a relief piece through an complicated process involving pulp, a table which was a sieve and a vaccuum underneath, sucking moisture out of the pulp which comformed to the sculptural shapes I had placed beneath it.

In recent years, my middle school art teacher friend, Pam MacGregor, re-introduced me to felt. Shown here are various results of this re–intoduction.