Our anniversary exhibit, Threads of Change: Celebrating 50 years of the Northern Fibres Guild, was hosted in the  community gallery at the Yukon Art Centre for December through January. There was an art opening on Thursday, 28 Nov. 2024. 
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The centrepiece of the exhibit was our Yukon Climate Stripes tapestry, which was collectively woven by ~30 NFG members during July at the Jenni House arts residency in Whitehorse. It is an amazing piece of collaborative creation, and was displayed with many additional inspiring pieces made by our members.

And Knitted mittens using Briggs & Little "Tuffy" yarn.

The book I am referencing is Filz Geschichten by Annette Quentin-Stoll und Robert Quentin. MaroVerlag is possibly the publisher and everything in it is in german. Yay, Google Translate!

This project creates 9 samples; all done very simply with little tweaks that advance from one sample to the next.  I read them all, put the book down and then used my own methods, my knowledge of resists and prefelts and made my own samples. I added buttons, free motion quilting and other decorative stitching.

Cool, huh?!

Well, that was last year. This year, I returned to the original book, re-translated it and was again in awe with how 9 little projects were made and advanced. I had been inspired, but I also missed the point. This little project had a lot to teach and was enough completely as is. I'm struggling to find the right words, so here it is, everything I love about felting in one little package. Will make a great gift too.

By Sarah Overington


Here’s the end result of the silk spinning Saturday. On the bobbin, then in the skein. I Navajo plied it to retain the colour sequences.

We laid out Design threads on these backgrounds to see what would stand out. One really wants a design that pops. It helped to take photos and make grey tones of the colours to check their values.

And without further ado, here are some of my mug rugs.

By Carolyn Steele Lane
Needle felting
I had created my first dinosaur way back in February 2017. I used wire in the arms/fingers only, keeping the arm wires joined and built the wool body in the middle (as opposed to making two separate arms and sticking them into the body).

Last fall, Elisabeth Weigand kindly commissioned one like it for her sister in Germany, so I got to make another! 
I stayed away from wire this time, though last fall seems so long ago, I can't quite remember. I did use a string jointed technique to attach the arms and legs. Simply sewed from inner leg to outer, back through, through body and into second leg and back and forth a few times. If done right, the leg will move on a joint.  Any dimples created can be covered up with more wool.

One of the biggest decisions of a project is size or proportion. All this has been done freehand. I much prefer sizing as I go rather than creating a complete wire frame of the whole project at the start. That's just me. Learning to draw has helped and I've always been spatially aware, except now I'm probably less exacting. I've often start with a head  or a body part that is important to that character such as the claws on this one. The rest is built to fit or adjustments are made as I go and exaggeration is allowed. And like any story book, the character starts making demands such as a flower rather than a heart or sometimes coffee.

I love how this new dinosaur looks so completely different than the first one and shows my work improving.

By Carolyn Steele Lane
Needle felting and wet felting

My daughter asked me to make a couple gifts for her cousins, which led to us watching many episodes of Futurama over Christmas. The Piranha plant from Super Mario, I know well from playing quite a few frustrating video games when the kids were younger. Back when you couldn't save your level or yourself for that matter. I love how I am influenced by my kids. When I can catch their excitement and create something I wouldn't have otherwise.

Introducing Nibbler from Futurama and The Piranha plant from Super Mario fame!

Nibbler's cape is from store bought felt. His diaper was made from quilt batting. I had tried to give him a big, cute butt 'cause its funny, but it didn't fit his character and body type and plus, the diaper. So I do go back and forth with my ideas and rework areas to make it better- even his teeth were cut down and reshaped. It's a good thing wool is forgiving.

The Piranha plant is mostly needle felted, but I wet felted the leaves, machine stitched the veins and stitched onto the stem. The stem is made of pipe cleaners, wrapped in wool and carefully needle felted. I sometimes wet felt the stem as well to make it smoother and tighter, but didn't this time.

Enjoy!