Wool woos woman

I have a confession to make. I have a guilty, seductive pleasure that gets me into trouble.

This sensual indulgence eats up hours of productive time and leads me into unknown places and introduces me to strangers.

I love wool.

Yes, the baa-baa-black-sheep kind. My addiction is knitting. I love spending hours solving intricate puzzles that I hope I can wear or give away.

I have wandered down dark alleys in strange towns — just like Alice did down her rabbit hole — searching for knowledge or that prismatic skein of wool. 

Last Wednesday, my obsession took me to the Rotary Centre for the Arts (RCA) to meet members of the Ponderosa Fibre Arts Guild, which was formed in the 1970s and has been growing ever since. 

Its mandate is to share knowledge and educate members and the public to appreciate fibre arts. 

I met Denise Oyelese, a wet felter, Deb McConkey, a spinner, and Linda Thomlinson, a weaver. No knitters on Wednesday, although the guild has some incredible ones.

Denise was my guide into the broader world of fibre arts.

Felt is considered the oldest known textile. It originated in Siberia and Mongolia during the First Century and was used for floor coverings, inside walls of tents, bedding, and illustrative art. 

Denise wet felts instead of dry felts.  

Dry felting uses a barbed needle to grab fibres and compact them. This is the felting method for making toys and animals. 

Wet felting uses water, soap and some form of agitation — not mental — to cause the fibres to open up and bind together.

“We are a clean group,” says Denise, who moved here from Regina 11 years ago.

She wears her art in the form of bracelets, scarves, clothing, and makes karma bowls, something she couldn’t have done when she was a rug hooker. She made the switch after a friend introduced her to felting.  

.“I love to repurpose used fabric,” she said, as she experimented with a new type of wool to see its bonding qualities.

She also works with used saris from India. She said it is not unusual for an Indian woman to have 40 saris and to keep them for many years. Denise collects ones that are old or damaged and uses them in her creations, creating a synergy between the old and new owner.

Fibre arts may be ancient, but they are constantly evolving. In 1992, Nuno felting appeared in New South Wales, Australia. 

Polly Stirling coined Nuno Felting from a Japanese word meaning cloth. This technique, which Denise loves, bonds loose fibres, usually wool, onto a sheer fabric like silk gauze, creating a lightweight felt fabric.  

On the other side, before you get yarn, you need to spin the wool fibres. Deb McConkey spent 18 years in England and learned to spin there. She said she really didn’t understand just how much cleaning and preparation wool needed before spinning. 

When she first started, she proudly made a sweater for her husband from wool she had spun. He went to the pub, which was very warm, and as he got hotter, the sweater took on the fragrance of a wet sheep. 

Opps! She has learned a lot about how to treat wool since.

The spinning wheel first appeared in India in 750 CE. If you would like to try spinning, the guild rents wheels and looms to new students to try before investing the money for one.

Guild members meet by Zoom these days, but the positive spin is they can afford to learn from the best in the world. It is much cheaper to hire experts to give a workshop online than it is to bring them to Canada.

Weaving has been around since the Neolithic times. Weaver Linda Thomlinson is getting her master weaver certificate from Alberta’s Olds College, which also offers a master spinning certificate.

Why weaving and not spinning or felting? Thomlinson felt weaving was more analytical than the crazy, creative type of art. Weavers weave brilliant eye-catching stacks of tea towels, which sell as fast as they can make them. 

These fibre artists keep as close contact with the producers, their local shepherdesses of alpaca and sheep, as possible. Linda gets raw wool from Carstairs, Alta., while Denise deals directly with a breeder in Ontario. Her favourite sheep is named Ebony and buys all the wool she produces each year.    

Once you get your wool, it is difficult to get it processed because there is only one local mill, in Salmon Arm, and it has a backlog of several months.

The longer I stayed, the more I wanted to see and buy some of the guild’s projects. Normally, the annual Christmas sale is the perfect place to buy these adjudicated items, but it was cancelled due to COVID. 

COVID has, however, not hurt their membership because registrations are up.   

For a girl with a serious addiction to wool, finding this group was like finding Mecca. I will definitely be joining in January.  

Felted karma bowls here I come.

To learn more about this guild or to join, go to www.ponderosaguild.org

Meeting and featuring artists in my column is what I love to do. If you know of an artist — any genre — please contact me with your suggestions. [email protected]

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.