Exploring Ideas and Fibres with Jeanette Appleton

‘My focus is to help the individual find their unique way of making and designing. An art/ design approach discovering the various marks and mixes with the fibre and additional materials. The potential of discovering ideas at each stage of the felt process is enormous.

Briefly experimenting with art materials heightens ones awareness of the texture and surfaces possible with textiles. There are various ways to layer or mix the fibre, which are made into pre-felts. As these are partly felted they hold as a cloth but still pliable to attach more fibre or other materials. They are excellent to fold and manipulate to suggest three dimensional forms, also using a tailors dummy for garments. Pre felt can be pulled and cut to discover many more shapes and compositions. These change again when fully felted but this magical transformation of materials reveal new surprising marks and textures.

The aim is not to know what you will make but explore the possibilities of a prototype or finished item, depending on what emerges through the process. I encourage developing an A3 folder to display these ideas with the samples as prototypes for future one-off textiles, interior or fashion items.’

www.jeanetteappleton.com

Beginning Again

I have built up a range of skills by felting but  this was my first experience on a course with an artist totally immersed in using fibres to explore meaning, place and context. It felt very much like beginning all over again and sometimes that can but just what is required in order to move forwards.

laying out single threads on paper to understand

their unique properties.

Exploring fibres, 

textures and colours

Using a mask to think about garments

First pre-felt with black chiffon

Pre-felted colour blocks

Two different colour ways

textures

and shapes

added to existing pre-felts

the bottom of the sea

exploring folds

At the end of the two days I had four or five pre-felts whilst others had larger, more finished felt pieces. I thoroughly enjoyed the two days and Jeanette's approaches to using felt as a material for art making or a as component part of an installation. I love using the wool / alpaca, I thought I was going to make a coat, now I am on a journey with these unfinished things wondering where they will take me.