Feltng class with Sharron Parker

Woo Hoo a new technique has been learned!!

I took an incredible felting class with fabulous Felt artist, Sharron Parker, who has been in Artspace for the last 25 years.

Sharron’s work studio is located on the Neuse River in Wakeforest. There was a small group of us, 4 from Raleigh (Moi, Donna, Lucy, and Elaine) and 3 from Virginia (Deb, Karen, and Rebecca)

To make our geodes, our first task was to choose 7 colors from a large pile of wool roving. (Holy cow that was harder than what it sounds)

We had to layer then perpendicular to each layer (|-|-) then we had to roll them up into a tight ball, then wrap 2 more colors around it as an outer layer.

It all got stuffed into a stock and we then plunged the sock into hot soapy water and “worked” the wool into a ball. This took about 7 minutes depending on the size of the geode we were making.

After we were done working the wool, we took them out of the sock and then cut them in half. All of us were amazed how the pile of roving we put together came out to look like they did.



We then took our geodes and then cut them into ½” slices and arranged them layered wool batts that were arranged in sheeting, again perpendicular

Once we arranged the geode slices we then arranged more wool roving around the geodes to fill in over the white. We also added curly wool locks and pieces of wool yarn.

Once we were done we covered the wool with more sheeting and used large safety pins to secure the geode slices and the other wool. After we completed the edges, we laid the pinned up sheeting in a tub and poured hot soapy water over it and “worked” it by pushing down on the sheeted wool. My thoughts is that a potato masher would work wonderful for this process…we had to do 10 minutes on each side and then check to make sure the wool was “felting”. Once it was firm enough we unpinned our creations.   

When I got home I had to try and make some..below are the results.