Last weekend was spent with the beautiful ladies of IFA region 2 in the New Forest and the delightful and generous Zsofia, Zsofia makes the most gorgeous and stylish hats, do check out her facebook page if you aren’t familiar with her work.
She shared some interesting techniques, some of which I confess I found alarming but everyone came away with a stunning hat, so clearly I need to be more open to the alternative ways of making felt. 🙂
If you get the opportunity, I highly recommend taking a workshop with her, she has a natural talent for shaping hats to suit different face shapes that is a true joy to watch.
Now I’m very curious: what sort of alarming techniques did she use?
Thank you for the question Robin, please see below 🙂
Wow, is this your hat Teri? It’s stunning! I am very intrigued by what you said regarding “alarming” techniques. I will definitely put Zsofia on my “to do” list.
Thank you Karen 🙂 Zsofia advocates laying out your wool, wetting out, then no rubbing, no protective plastic layer, the wool covered resist is rolled up in a bamboo mat and rolled until it is starting shrink. It still fills me with anxiety just thinking about it! But it clearly works for her and the fact that everyone left with a gorgeous hat no doubt means my nightmares of the bamboo ripping the wool fibres from the resist are entirely unfounded.
Beautiful hat Teri. Also an interesting technique. Wool is such an interesting medium to work with. It’s always fun to learn new techniques there always seem to be surprises.
Thank you Marilyn, yes, it never ceases to amaze me how many different ways felters find to reach a fulled item 🙂
Beautiful hat! It’s always interesting to see what different techniques people use and how versatile felt is that there can be so many techniques that all work!
Thank you Ruth. I couldn’t agree more, I consider myself to be a reasonably competent felt milliner but there is always room to learn something new 🙂
We’ve come across the same alarming method but it’s always been during just small demonstrations of felt making at shows.
Absolutely love your hat!
Hi, I’m doing Zsofia’s workshop soon and wondering which wools to take as the requirement list just says ‘merino wool’ and fibres of ‘different thickness/coarseness’ Any advice would be very much appreciated x
Hi Deborah, I am sure you will love Zofia’s hat workshop, it was great fun and she has some different ways of working to most other tutors I have studied with. For wool I used merino and Norwegian but others were using Merino and Bergshaff with great results too. I expect any slightly coarse wool that you know produces a firm felt will work. One other tip, if she asks you to bring a 3ft (or was it 4ft?) wide bamboo blind, make sure it is at least that wide or you will be very limited in the style of hat you can make, you can buy blinds of different widths quite cheaply at B&Q.