How Felting Changed Our Lives with Heather Potten and Louise Curnin

So yes, and then you obviously, you've been interested in the sort of education side of the felt making for quite a while, partly because of your connection with Sheila, isn't it? With Sheila Smith.

Yeah, I suppose partly because of my previous life before I found felt making, which was in the steel industry.

And in the latter years of me working for British Steel and its derivatives, I was involved in training, in industrial training.

So that gave me an interest in the theory of learning and all those kind of things.

And then I fell into felt making and became involved with Sheila looking at ways to keep what the IFA had going and how to regenerate it and ended up involved in helping Sheila write the Discovering Felt Making courses of which we wrote the first three together.

And then after we'd written the first

three, Sheila basically said, on you go.

I come from a teaching background, and it's an interesting one because when I was doing my teacher training, just because you're teaching doesn't mean they're learning.

And I think that's quite interesting to think about.

So you have to help them to learn rather than just teach.

So that's one of the things that I've discovered with felt making is that I have been able to use skills that I've learned throughout my life and apply them in a different way.

And I was trying to think of the other ways that felt making has impacted on my life.

And I've actually become a bit more of an artist and I don't want to sound posy about that, but making felt made me start to think about, I don't know, color theory, composition.

And I've done courses now on color theory and composition in terms of how it impacts on your felt making, which obviously has far wider applications.

And I never imagined when I was in my thirties and forties that that's what I would be doing.

exactly

i mean i didn't either i i um at the age of 14 was thrown out of the art room at school and told not to bother down in their doorstep ever again because i was rubbish at it not in those words but i won't say the words that i was actually told um and so up to the age of 42 i thought i was rubbish at art and i've avoided anything artistic throughout that part of my uh my life and then um happened to be made redundant, so I had a little bit of time on my hands.

I didn't join a watercolour class, I was dragged kicking and screaming to a watercolour class, which I ultimately did enjoy, although I would be embarrassed to show anybody my work, but I enjoyed the process.

And

then shortly after that, I found out locally that there was a felt-making class and i had not a clue what felt making was so i turned up thinking it was just going to be a bit of a laugh and a way to spend an afternoon something a bit different and then i'd walk away and that'd be the end of that but i just had that moment of getting there and and getting my hands on the wool and i suppose it was you know working in the dark cold grey dirty steel industry and all of a sudden being surrounded by all this soft fluffy color then it just it just drew me in Well, you know,

it's funny you should say that because you've used that phrase.

I've heard you say that so often.

It's obviously something that was a complete transformation for you.

And even though you had no idea where it was going to lead you, you just knew, just as I did when I had my first ever class, that I wanted to pursue this.

Um, and I didn't know how or where it was going to take me, but just something, something clicked.