Last month when I was in NYC, I was fortunate enough to visit the Cooper-Hewitt exhibit entitled Fashioning Felt. It runs through September 7th and I highly recommend it!

I couldn’t resist picking up this book about the exhibit in the gift shop as well as this amazing felt sea anemone brooch by Vacide Erda Zimic from Peru.

The description from the Cooper-Hewitt website:

This exhibition will explore the varied new uses of felt—an ancient material, believed to be one of the earliest techniques for making textiles. Made by matting together wool fibers with humidity and friction, felting requires little technological expertise and is an extremely versatile material. The exhibition will begin with historic examples of felts, showcase innovations in handmade felts, and feature contemporary uses of industrial felt in a range of fields, including product design, fashion, architecture, and home furnishings. The exhibition is being organized by Susan Brown, assistant curator, Textiles.

Do yourself a favor, if you have any interest in felt or felting, you’ve got to at least take a moment to visit the museum’s website to view the photography of the artwork.

The only part of the show I was allowed to photograph was the felt yurt in the conservatory. Yurt. Isn’t that a great word?

This is called the Palace Yurt by fiber artist Janice Arnold. She used the technique of felting wool fibers through sheer drapey silk fabrics for a translucent ethereal result. This technique is sometimes referred to as nuno felting.

The exhibit blog has a video of The Making of the Palace Yurt which is truly amazing. You can also watch Martha Stewart take you behind the scenes of the exhibit as she had Curator Susan Brown and designer Janice Arnold on the Martha Stewart Show last month.

This kind of felting is a lot of work but I’m itching to try it sometime! Today I saw a book at Borders called Uniquely Felt by Christine White (no relation!) that has some very detailed how-to’s.

Have you been to this exhibit? Have you tried nuno felting?

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