FELTING IN WISCONSIN

 A PANDEMIC SATURDAY IN WINTER

The snow broke on Friday. The roads in Wisconsin rarely have the opportunity to get slippery. Road crews are out plowing during and after a snowfall. There’s always a concern for icy patches on a less traveled road but on Saturday clearing the path from our house in Madison to Stoughton was a high priority with only the interstates having a greater urgency.

We’d made countless trips before to Stoughton, a little Norwegian bedroom community of Madison. Maybe twenty minutes away. 

Its Main Street is picturesque with shops like the Nordic Nook and Viking Leather and known for hosting the annual Syttende Mai Norwegian Heritage festival and parade.

Housed in a century old storefront on Main Street, Spry Whimsy is a shop that is neither particularly Norwegian nor geriatrically agile, but it is creative, inspiring and puts a smile on your face. 

There’s an air of a turn-of-the-century Wisconsin general store where the town elders would sit around the eisenglass potbelly stove tell stories while staying out of the cold. The oak plank floors have the wear of decades. The old tin ceilings have a new coat of white paint. There’s an antique chair where Ingrid sits with her spinning wheel and a basket of raw wool.

She’s the knitter and the reason that half the shelves are filled with skeins of yarn in deep ocean blue, heathered earth tones and a spectrum of candy counter colors. In the fashion of the bygone mercantile elders classes of beginners and seasoned knitters sit in a closed circle the click of needles chattering while balls of yarn roll on the floor.

Ingrid’s husband, Peter, sets up his studio at the back of the store. He’s a felter. His artistry provides much of the whimsy that fulfills the pledge encompassed in the shop’s name.

The shop is dressed in his creativity. Complex felted vases peeled open to reveal multiple internal layers sit on shelves

next to vessels with pressed scraps of silk scarves embedded into their shells.

Hats and neck wraps worthy of a Vogue editorial are positioned as pieces of sculpture turning parts of the space into a museum of outrageous fashion design.

Between the ice cream collection of colorful yarns and the felted circus sculptural performers the shop’s smile is contagious to anyone who enters its front door.

Here is where we come in. We gave my sister a gift certificate for a felting class as a Christmas gift with the intention that we would join her in trying our hands at making felt vases. There would be four of us, the maximum number for a felting class during the pandemic. We picked a Saturday in early January. Peter had two long metal tables with four workstations safely separating each of us.

We were told to be prepared to spend most of the day constructing, molding and drying our attempts at felted creativity.  The act of creating is such a powerful boost to one’s psyche following a year of isolation.  There’s a similarity between making a vase out of clay and felting one out of wool. You have to be willing to get your hands dirty without having Patrick Swayze wrapping his arms around you while you spin the wheel and mold the clay. There’s a lot of kneading and muscle work involved. 

The majority of the work takes place on a flat surface where you work out patterns in a circular geometry.

Pulling off wisps of wool and laying them out in layers of radiating and then spiraling designs you slowly begin to construct a flat pancake of wet wool. Each layer needs to be sprayed with a solution of water and a hint of soap that is then pushed and beaten and squeezed until your biceps ache and the heels of your hands feel as if they have gone through a karate brick braking exhibition. The process is lengthy. Ours required a lunch break to allow for a bit of drying time for our pancake deflated vases before we moved on to the molding phase.

Here is where you begin to understand the strength of bonded wool.

The difficulty of moving on to the next step depends on the size of the hole you’ve left for your hand to get inside the layers of what looks like a very psychedelic discus. It can be very painful trying to compress you hand into the shape of a cat’s paw to fit inside this flattened cocoon and begin turning it from a creepy larva into a gorgeous butterfly.

I was initially unhappy with the colors I had chosen. When the wool is wet the colors I thought I had chosen looked very muddy and uninspiring. As the wool began to dry and shrink the colors I thought I was dealing with started to reemerge and regain some of their vibrancy. 

We four novices went into this felting class only expecting a Saturday diversion. We all came out feeling as if we had done something so satisfying we began making plans for our return and debating what we were going to make next.

Never underestimate the joy of making something with your own hands and sweat. Our results may only seem beautiful to us much in the same way that a parent thinks their children are the most beautiful whether they are or not.

Joy is always beautiful.

THE GALLERY

Sheep Feeding

From our private collection