Family Holiday Felt Session

On Sunday, we had our family needle felt session, with Cecilia Ho from FelTastic Fashion as our instructor. My husband comes from a large extended family – his mother is one of six children, and he has quite a few cousins. They are a family with a fairly strong creative streak, including professional writers, amateur painters, knitters, musically inclined, and more. A few years ago we did a family painting session together the day after Christmas. This year most of us can’t come together over the holidays, and a remote painting session might be a bit unwieldy – with the need for easels, paints, brushes, aprons and the rest.

So after my sister-in-law and I took the fun and successful virtual needle felt course at FiberWorld2020, I proposed this as a virtual family session for this year. Ultimately, we had nine people: myself, my husband, my brother and sister-in-laws, my mother-in-law, both my husband’s aunts, and two of his cousins. We selected several images of the family farm, where both my MIL and her sister live, and Cecilia provided guidance on what was reasonable to tackle in a three hour session. Cecilia then put together the kits with the right fiber colors, and I used my Zoom account* to set up the virtual session.

Now, I spend A LOT of my work life on Zoom or other virtual conference platforms. I won’t say I’m a Zoom guru, but I’m pretty darned good at using it on my computer. So, I did take the time to send out some tips to family members, and a couple of us did a practice session Saturday just to get them familiar with Zoom and how it works. I’ll admit this revealed my weak spot: I know Zoom on a computer, but I don’t know as well where the various functions and options reside on the Zoom apps for tablets, such as iPads, or mobile devices.

I also spend a bit of time on Sunday fussing around with my office set-up to make it easier for my husband and I to participate:

Key changes:

• I pulled my laptop out from under the stand so I could have a dual-monitor set up, one for the Zoom session to view the instruction, and one to show the farm image.
• I also moved the desk lamp from it’s usual spot on a bookshelf off to the left to sit on top of my mini-drawers. It’s angled upwards because this provides a more diffuse light across the work space which I find nicer for seeing colors than a direct light with strong shadows on my work. It’s usual spot works well for me, but would have put one of us in the shadow of the other with two people at the desk.
• Oh yeah, and I messed around a whole bunch with the laptop display to get its color settings closer to my monitor. The laptop is about 7 years old, and somewhere in the various updates and operating system changes, the color balance had become faded and weird.

It took us a few minutes to get everybody connected in correctly on the Zoom, but given the large group and limited experience many have with virtual environments, I feel like we did pretty well. We only had to sort out one echo and there were no tears, or even mild swearing aimed at devices.

Our class back in August was only two hours with a simple sunset image as the “prompt”. Our farm image was more complex with branching farm lanes, trees, and various grasses. It’s not just background and foreground, but background, a couple different middle grounds, and foreground. I resisted the temptation to run ahead of the instruction, as I wanted to see how she would build it up layer by layer. Let me be clear – Cecilia was not going too slowly. Rather, she was pacing the class so that everybody could keep up. This means pacing it for people doing it for the first time, and using a single needle. I wasn’t doing it for the first time, and even my first time I came to it with familiarity for how fiber behaves. For example: how to keep a light touch on the fiber as you pull it apart to mix colors. So I could mix colors more quickly, and with my multi-needle punches, fix them to the pre-felt more quickly.

I used the “extra” time I had on this class to watch more closely how she was working, and think about the methods she used to add color to the background. One thing I’ve been working on a bit on my own is not trying to have a “perfect” section the first time around. But it is still fighting a bit my own impulses. Working on this piece and watching her process helped me see how quickly you can go from the basic layer and background, which looks unsophisticated, and simplistic, to adding just a little more on top which transforms it. She also does a lot more with folding the fibers back on themselves, or even ripping them into shorter pieces, than I’d realized. An instructor is also almost always doing more than they are explaining. This is because our motions can be incredible complex and subtle, and explanations take time. An instructor has to select what is most important to explain to the whole group. Some things are also easier to show than describe. This is why you can often get additional layers of knowledge and instruction when rewatching or retaking a course a second or third time.

Here’s my final result, along with the original photo. To make it something people could get near completion in three hours, Cecilia recommended removing the trees on the right (which people can go back and add later if they like). I used my photo-editing software to do this.

As I look at it, I can see places where I could add and further refine. But for now, I’m going to leave it as it is. It looks really quite nice from a few feet away, and in the dim winter light of my office. The flaws and imperfections feel like they are highlighted and revealed far more in my photographs of it, than when are visible in person.

Cecilia also shared a few “behind the scenes” images of her set up during the session as well as her sample piece that she worked on alongside us:

I think we all had a good time. It was fun to do something together with family, and it’s always fun to see how differently peoples’ works come out when we all started from the same image. We had different points of focus, and different areas where we took more “artistic license” with the image to capture what we see when we look at it. My husband is planning to work on his some more over Christmas. Maybe we’ll do more needle felting together in the future.

*Zoom offers free accounts, but these are limited to 40min sessions for more than two participants. I have a paid account for our various family get-togethers.