This week's featured do-it-yourselfer is a fan of nature and obsessed with felt. As a teacher, she gets to adopt 125 children as her own every school year. How cool is that?
Name: Marysusan Noll, 34
Hometown: West Sayville, NY
Occupation: High School biology and forensic science teacher
Craft: Felted accessories
Where do you find inspiration?
I take inspiration from nature for my flowers, but I am not trying to slavishly re-create nature. If I am looking at a picture of a flower, like I did for my peony hairpins, I only look at it once or twice. I only want to evoke the feeling of a peony. I try to boil it down to what is the most recognizable feature of that flower and bring that out in the felted accessory.
For everything else, my inspiration is pretty diverse. My husband once called me “perversely old-fashioned” and I think that describes me pretty well. I love things that are old but I like them in odd contexts or I like to use them in unexpected ways. I have huge collections of vintage fabrics, photos, clothing, beads, ephemera, pottery, furniture, and books that I go to all the time for a scrap of this and a bit of that for either assemblages or just ideas. Sometimes inspiration comes in a snip of a song on National Public Radio in the morning.
However, sometimes it is more insidious than that. My red felted necklace is my “Birds, Bees and Berries” necklace since the beaded designs on them evoke a sperm and eggs….and elderberries. I was teaching reproduction the week I made that, so I guess that it was a true case of worlds colliding!
How did you get into making felted goods?
I have always worked in a variety of media. I had been working in encaustics for the last year or so pretty exclusively, but I suppose that you could describe me as a bit easy when it comes to the arts. I have always been willing to try anything once. I had been weaving for a while and working in fibers when I saw a program on DIY network, Uncommon Threads, with Carole Huber Cypher making some felted beads. After watching it, I figured that it was something that I could try. I picked up some roving and was felting the very next day! Then I wanted to start doing some more complex projects and that is when I got into the felted flowers. They have been so much fun to figure out. I used Carole’s book “Hand Felted Jewelry and Beads” as a jumping off point since it has great basic felting recipes for the beginner. I just ran with it from there.
Where do you get your supplies?
I get most of my wool roving for my felting at Rumpelstiltskin Yarns in Sayville, they are so nice there and very supportive of the crafting community. I think that is really important when you are deciding where to shop. It is quite easy to just find an online supplier, but it is vital to support small and local when you can. Most of my beads are vintage stock that I have picked up over the years but I purchased some at Garden of Beadin in Sayville which has unfortunately closed down. I also source some supplies at www.firemountaingems.com and www.dickblick.com. You can find me at Jo-Ann Fabrics at least every couple of weeks shopping for something.
For my mixed media art my best supplier of odd and strange things is the Materials Resource Center in Ronkonkoma. They stock tons of stuff that would be considered waste from industry. It keeps useable resources out of landfills and makes them available to educators and artists for a very low handling fee. They are one of our great unsung heroes of the arts here on Long Island. I only wish that more artists would check them out!
What's your best craft tip?
Don’t be afraid to take a piece in a totally different direction from what you initially intended. I will often start a felted flower thinking “I’m going to make a daisy” and I end up with a hibiscus. The fun thing about the felting process is that a huge chunk of it is totally random. Once you lay down your mat of roving, wet it and then roll it up to start felting it, you relinquish a lot of the control over the design. You have to sort of hand it over to the chaos of creativity and trust that what you get at the end will still rock.
My felting table is an antique marble ice cream parlor table out on my deck and it just lets me slop water all over the place. The whole process has been like a gift to me because I am such a control freak. It has really forced me to give up a lot of that intense attention to detail in the middle of the process and just enjoy the feeling of creating. I can re-insert all that obsessiveness at the end of building the flower when I am doing the hand beading and internal sculpting. Now that is when I don’t leave anything to chance.
What's your biggest challenge?
My biggest challenge is finding the time to get into the studio. During the school year there is always something going on that seems to prevent me from getting through that door. Besides my classroom teaching I also do the costume design and construction for the theatrical productions at our school. I have to schedule time for myself. Unfortunately, the time that I schedule and the time that my brain is in a highly creative place are not always one and the same. However, during the summer sometimes I go in there and my husband has to drag me out and remind me to eat.
What craft would you like to try next?
I would like to learn how to knit. I mean really knit, not just “hey, look at this 6 foot long scarf I just made” knit. However, I am afraid that one more art/craft in my head and my brain might explode.
Any advice for beginners?
If you are making something felted, here is my advice: when you think you have felted and fulled your roving enough, felt or full it some more. For everything else, whatever you are making, don’t be afraid. You aren’t going to ruin it. It will just become something different. On the other hand, sometimes you have to have the courage to know when to stop.
Why do you love making felted creations?
I love how felt is both soft and strong. It is the antithesis of everything woven. It relies on the nature of being annoying to be created. You are literally “rubbing something the wrong way” so that it will come into being. How cool is that? I love how I can give the felt very defined, almost slick, edges, or I can allow it to fade off like smoke. It is such a versatile medium. I can’t wait to see what it will do next. Every time I go to my felting table with a ball of roving it is an experiment and I get to be the mad scientist. I can’t think of anything more appealing.
Visit Marysusan's Web site (http://marysusan.etsy.com) to learn more about her felted accessories and artist cards. For musings about her crafty life, check out her blog All Good Girls Are Marys -
http://allgoodgirlsaremarys.blogspot.com/
Want to show off your creative side? Send me an e-mail with pictures showing off your favorite craft and you might be chosen as our next DIYer of the Week!
