Felt Wicked Art

It's getting cold outside and my weather app says there might even be snow in a few days. Worst of all, because of Daylight Savings Time it feels like the sun is going down pretty much right after lunch. Around this time every year I start to feel a familiar combination of sadness, lethargy, and frustration. I suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) and it actually runs in my family.

But this post isn't just about my mental health. I think that stuff is important (and my husband is a counselor so we talk about it all the time), what I want to talk about though is how something like SAD impacts my creative output, and what I have done to cope. Lots of creative people out there suffer from SAD, and if you are one of them I'm hoping that by sharing a tiny bit of my personal experience I can help you figure out your own.

The first thing that I have figured out that has helps me cope during the winter is trust. It used to be that I would force myself into my workroom for long hours during the winter. I wouldn't make much but I had this nagging belief that if I went too long without making anything that I would somehow "lose the magic touch," that I would no longer be able to make the things I loved to make. Eventually though I realized that for all those hours I was only making a few hats, and they weren't up to my standards of quality. I had to let go of this fear. What I found out was that even if I took a day off (or even several) that when I returned my fingers would know what to do. That creative part of myself was still there. I learned to trust it and to trust myself. That creativity was a part of me and wouldn't just vanish. Sometimes I still have days where I push a little too hard and hold on a little too tightly. But when I realize I'm doing that I just disconnect and come back later when the time feels right. And it usually works out better than I thought it would.

The second thing I have figured out that helps is that I really need to be careful to engage in good self-care. For me in the winter that means going out to do fun things as often as possible, even if I don't feel like it. Making plans with friends, going to greenhouses and florist shops, and even spending a little extra time in the produce section at the grocery store are all examples of what I've done. There is a real temptation to isolate myself or to stay buried under blankets. So instead of pushing myself to sit in my workroom, isolated and miserable, I push myself to do whatever might help me get out and get moving. This doesn't cure my SAD, but I do find I tend to have a few more hours a week in my workroom than I used to where I actually making things that live up to my standards, even though I actually spend less hours in my workroom overall.

The last thing I've figured out that helps is to just accept that SAD is a reality for me. That doesn't mean that I resign myself to it or just give up. It means that when I am depressed in the middle of winter that I just let myself be depressed. I accept it and know it will pass. And (more importantly) it means that when I'm not depressed that I make plans to cope ahead, figuring out what I can do now while I feel okay that will help me when I don't feel okay. That means that I save big but unnecessary projects (like redesigning my website) for the Summer months when I'll have more energy. I also pre-make some hats during the warmer months so I have more room for downtime come January. Rather than judging myself for being sad during the cold months, or trying to force myself to be "normal" during those times, I accept that I will not feel like my normal self and figure out what I need to do to cope with that reality now while I do feel normal.

Lots of people are hard at work making their own felted fantasy hats, either using one of my tutorials or what they learned during one of my face-to-face workshops. But there is one question my students ask me over and over: How do I make an extra wide brim?

That's a good question. The standard hat shaper that I use in my Wizard and Witch Hat tutorial only allows for a brim as wide as 4 inches, while some of the hats in my shop have brims as wide as 8 inches.

The short answer is that I had to figure out how to create an extended brim hat block using the simple materials I had at hand or that I could buy from the local hardware store. After months of experimenting I finally came up with a design for a custom extended brim hat block that would allow me to make all those wide hat brims you see in my shop. Since I've came up with the design I've made seven or eight more, and all of them have lasted for months and dozens of hat projects each, without much sign of wear and tear at all. The block is waterproof, perfect for wet felting projects, as well as sturdy and easy to clean.

If you are interested in making hats with brims as wide as 8 inches, and you are thinking about getting my tutorial, here are a few more things you need to know. First of all, this is a video tutorial. If you've bought any tutorials from me in the past you know they are all PDF tutorials with step-by-step instructions written out. I decided to make the change to video though because there are just some parts of the process that it would be hard to describe without the benefit of seeing it in motion. I also did lots of voiceover work in the video so you still get the benefit of hearing me describe the process as well as giving you some helpful hints along the way. Through the whole video you will see me go from describing the individual materials and parts all the way through assembly, start to finish.

For anyone worried about the video quality, this is not a low-res YouTube video. The video resolution is 1080p, with lots of lighting, and the voiceover work was done after the video was recorded using a Blue brand desk mic. (not using the camera mic or anything unprofessional like that). The file download is about 1.13 gigabytes and is in MP4 format, playable on most computers. But this is my first video tutorial so let me know if there are any technical issues, if you need the file in a different format, or if you need the video at a smaller resolution. I'm sure I can get Grumpy Husband to figure it out for you.

Keep in mind this is a video tutorial on how to make an extended hat block. The video does not include any information on how to actually make a hat, so you will either need to know how to make a felt hat already or you will also need my Wizard and Witch Hat tutorial.

For a full material list check out the tutorial listing. And good luck!

The "Design Deep Dive" miniseries explores some of the ideas and inspirations behind my different hat designs. This week I will be looking into one of my newest designs, the Witch Hat Fascinator. It has all the same wrinkles and curls you would come to expect from one of my hats, but on a smaller scale.

I'm definitely not a fashion expert, but the way I understand  the whole idea of fascinators is that they are supposed to be a decorative alternative to a full-sized hat. People wear them when a hat would also make sense, but they are more like a fashion accessory than something functional, like something between a smaller hat and an oversized hair clip. I first started seeing all kinds of fascinators a few years ago when I was dabbling with steampunk inspired top hats. Lots of steampunk models were wearing these tiny little steamer top hats fastened on with hair pins or bands. They really caught my eye back then because they were a whole new kind of hat design that I could play with, and because they were so cute! Since my hats are decorative anyway, and not really functional, it also made sense to experiment with fascinators. At that time especially I was really looking to try all kinds of hats and not settle on just witch and wizard hats. But that was years ago and I still had a lot to learn. The few times I tried to make my own steampunk hat fascinators back then they came out looking more like fuzzy cups than mini-hats. There was no real interest for steampunk hats anyway, and I eventually I moved on.

But every year or so the idea of making a fascinator hat design would come back up, usually after spending awhile on Pinterest and seeing fascinator hats come up a bunch of times. Last year I took one of my first solid steps towards creating a fascinator witch hat since I first attempted fascinator hats years ago. Right after Halloween I was out at all the stores picking up discounted Halloween decorations, and I happened to come across this mini-felted witch hat. It was obviously machine-felted and mass produced, and I think it was meant for dolls and not necessarily to be put on someone's head like a fascinator, but it was just the right size. I also had an idea to turn it into a miniature hat block that I could use to shape witch hat fascinators. I bought it and took it home and then dunked the whole thing in Plasti-Dip, which is supposed to make it water proof and rubbery, perfect for shaping wet wool. But then the Holiday Season started up and I lost all track of my personal projects. My fascinator hat design would have to wait, and I put the rubber coated hat in my closet with the hope of getting back to it one day.

Finally things started to slow down for me and I was able to catch up with my 2017 orders. As the Summer started up I found that I had some time to experiment again and make hats that I wanted to make, just for fun and just to see what I could do. The results of that work are several one-of-a-kind and experimental hats that you can check out here. But I also pulled that rubberized hat block out of the closet and decided to finally give it a real solid try. Another reason my attention turned back to witch fascinator hats was that I have been getting lots of requests for smaller hats this season, sometimes for children or dolls or other reasons. My fascinator hats are not necessarily designed for children or dolls, but those requests kept the whole concept of mini-hats fresh in my mind. I sat down and began putting together prototypes, trying to figure out just how to create a miniature hat that still looked unique (and similar to the full-sized hats I already make). It took a couple of weeks of attempts before I finally got the design down.

If you are curious about what the final product is like check out the listing page, which has more details about the hat, the decoration options, and lots of extra photos. Instead of going with built-in hair clips to hold the hat in place I decided to go with a milliner-grade band. But you can hardly see the band as the pictures show, so I think the whole thing turned out well.

Last week I took a break from the Design Deep Dive miniseries to talk about some great news. But this week I'm returning to the format. If you're new, this miniseries explores some of the ideas and inspirations behind my different hat designs. This week I want to talk about one of my more eye-catching designs, the custom silhouette. This is not really a specific design, but a technique of felting patterns and images directly onto my hats.

One of the things I like the most about wet felting (which is how I make my hats) is how sculptural it can be. I used to do a lot of painting, but that was all flat on the canvas. When I make hats I'm making three-dimensional things that look different depending on the angle you look at it from. As I started making hats though I began to realize that even though the hats had shape they could also look a little flat if they are all just a single solid color. I tried to fix this problem early on by using different colors to make colorways, adding decorative details like leaves and hat bands, and using special blends of wool to get different color effects (like marbling). For the most part this is still how I do things.

Then one day I received a custom order request. Someone wanted me to make a white hat and add some blue color, not in shades or lines, but in a particular shape. The process itself was simple enough. Wet felting is all about adding layers of different wool, so all I needed to do was add layers of blue onto the white hat in the proper shape. Up until that point though I never even considered adding specific shapes to my hats.

From there I began to experiment with all kinds of different "custom silhouettes" on my hats. I call them silhouettes because most of the time I'm just adding a shape of a solid color onto the hat, like the shape of a crescent moon.

My favorite custom silhouette so far was a custom order I received three years ago. The customer wanted a hat that had big orange eyes that almost resembled the eyes you would cut into a Jack-o-Lantern. The finished product was spooky and fun, a hat that watched you as you watched it.

This week I was so excited to find out that my work was featured on the front cover of the German felting magazine FilzFun! In honor of that honor I thought I would put up a sneak peek of what you might find in that issue. I'm posting a few (not all) of the interview questions they sent me and my responses.

Question: What was the initial spark [that made you become an artist]?

I have always gravitated towards the fantastical even as a very young child. I can recall how I spent most of my 6th grade study-hall time illustrating a little book I wrote myself about unicorns. It wasn't until I combined my love of fantasy with my developing felting skills that I created my first Witch Hat. When I sold that first hat at a local craft fair I remember being so relieved.  This really cool couple bought it and I was thinking "...wow I am so glad somebody bought that really weird hat..." and I almost didn’t make any more because sometimes it takes more courage to be different than most might realize and highlighting a difference can make you feel vulnerable. But asking someone to give you money for being different can touch you down into your deepest ego and leave you the most vulnerable of all.

Question: How does your artistic work influence your life?

My art and my daily life are very intertwined. When my art became my family’s main source of income the amount it influenced my life grew. My art is both a job and a joy, some days it can be overwhelming, but I am so happy that I get to do what I love for a living. Packing hats to be shipped, answering dozens of e-mails from customers, and posting on social media are more the job end of it. I know that without my art I would not be doing fun photoshoots, going on trips to teach felting workshops, or traveling to wool conventions. So my art has shaped my current life greatly!

Question: How do you work? Exact planning or spontaneously?

I might draw a few sketches, but I sit and think about how to craft the envisioned design in a technical way before I make the hat. Once I have walked myself though the process enough times in my mind I begin. At this point I let things become a little more spontaneous. Maybe this color instead of that. I don’t like to go into a new design without a plan but I do allow for moments of spontaneity. In my early felting days there was lots of experimenting! Which means I have a box in my closet filled with projects that didn’t work out. But I have a rule that every person who visits my home studio for the first time gets to choose an item from the box of misfits.​

Welcome back to my miniseries of posts called "Design Deep Dive," where I explain some of the inspirations and ideas behind my favorite hat designs. Last week I began this series by writing about one of my favorite hats of all, the tattered brim side-curl hat. This week I will be tackling something a little less complicated but still very important to me because it was my very first witch / wizard hat design. It is called the "short-tail" witch / wizard hat. There's lots of history with this design, but I will try and keep it brief.

Ideas & Inspirations

It wasn't long after I learned how to wet felt that I started thinking about making hats. Things really got going when I found affordable plastic hat shapers (which had the added bonus of being water proof, which is really important when it comes to wet felting). But my earliest hats were all pretty normal as far as hats go. I tried to make them subtle, focusing on color choice and just a few embellishments. With time I started to add more structural elements, like fold and curls, but overall the designs remained simple.

In general though I just wasn't satisfied. I liked my hats. I enjoyed making them and I thought the designs worked well. They just weren't memorable. They weren't hats I would want to build an outfit around, or necessarily take out to a special event. They weren't eye catching enough.

Fantasy has always been a big part of my life (as I've already written about), but at this time in my life I was really relying on fantasy audiobooks and games to help me cope. Based on all that fantasy that I was ingesting I finally decided to try a more fantasy-inspired hat design rather than something plain. This was riskier for me than it sounds because at the time I was also living in a community that generally frowns on "witches" and fantasy stuff. You can even see some of my reservation in my original design. The tail is small and easily explained away if I encountered anyone who I knew would give me some trouble for a witchy hat design.

That original design was based on the classic conical witch and wizard hat. You probably know the kind I mean. It has a very triangular shape, with a point at the top, like the Wicked Witch of the West. I added the ridges though to make it look more like a wizard's hat which is usually more slumped over and worn out. I wanted it to look more organic, like it was collapsing a bit, but still structured and pretty.

Tail Design Evolution

If you have been to my shop anytime in the last couple of years you may have noticed that my witch and wizard hats have changed quite a bit since that first hat I made six years ago. What really fueled that change was the positive feedback I received early on. People online, and even in the conservative community I was living in, told me how interesting the hat looked. They started selling right away. Because of that I felt more confident with each hat I made, increasing the tail a little bit and a little bit more, slowly inching towards the big colorful fantasy witch and wizard hat design I had always wanted to make.

Recently though I have been receiving lots of requests for me to bring back some hats in my older styles, especially hats with shorter tails and less rounded ridges. I completely understand some people's desires for smaller hats. They are more manageable, easier to care for, and not too overwhelming if you have a certain costume in mind. Some have said they are a more realistic fantasy hat design, while still being artistic too. As a result I've decided to start bringing back some of my older styles. They will be featured all through the month of August, and it is my hope to have some brand new photos of my short-tail hats soon.

This is the first post in what I hope will be a mini-series focusing on how I came up with some of my favorite hat designs. If there is a particular hat that you would like me to cover just leave me a comment here or on my Facebook page. Let me know why you're interested in that hat in particular and I will likely do a design deep dive of it in the coming weeks!

The first hat I want to look at is one of my favorite designs of all time. It brings together two design elements in such a way that makes the hat completely unique and yet still "witchy" and wicked in a recognizable way. This hat features a side curl and a tattered brim, and these are the two design elements I will be focusing on for this post.

The Side Curl

Ever since I made my very first witch hat I have been obsessed with hat tails. That's probably pretty obvious since the tails of my hats are what really sets them apart. But even back in the beginning when I first started making witch and wizard hats with tails I was trying to figure out how to make my hats even more unique. Sometimes that lead to strange side projects where I stuck hat tails all over everything (as I posted about on Facebook last week). Sometimes though those early experiments were simpler and more subtle. Years ago when I had just started taking pictures of my hats I noticed that when I took a picture of the hat straight on the tail looked almost like a fin. You couldn't see the tail's details. I decided I wanted to make my hats look more three-dimensional and interesting, even when looking at the hat straight on. I tried changing the orientation of the tail just a little bit to see what would happen, hoping you would be able to see more of the folds and details no matter what angle you were looking at the hat from. This led to my very first side curl hat.

After making that first side curl hat though it would be years before I tried the design again. One of the reasons it took me years was that I became fixated on simply making the hat tails larger and more detailed in general. Then things just became so busy that, for a time, I didn't really have the time to try anything experimental. But one day a customer contacted me and actually asked for a hat with tail that was a little bit more on the side. I instantly remembered that old experiment from years previous and I was able to incorporate that older design into a brand new hat!

The Tattered Brim

Compared to the side curl the tattered brim design element is much newer. I came up with it only two or three years ago. As I've mentioned in other posts, sometimes I've been a little too focused on the hat tails while the rest of the hat looks pretty ordinary. The tattered brim idea was one of my first attempts to make the rest of my hats as interesting as the tails. It all began with a customer contacting me and asking me how I might make the hat look a little more "lived in" and less pristine without necessary dirtying the hat or making it less structurally sound. I thought about it for a little while and looked at lots of pictures of worn out hats. I then realized that one of the common elements between all those pictures were holes and rips in the brim. From that realization I came up with the tattered brim design.

I was happy with the way it came out, as it really made the hat look ghostly. But I also thought that maybe I needed to tone down the tattering some to make it look a little more naturally distressed and less like it was unraveling. I made a few hats with just a few chunks carefully cut out and a few slits and cuts along the brim. This had the desired effect in that the hat looked more natural. But then I worried that the hat was not engaging enough. I enjoy fantasy designs that are a little over-the-top, so I tried out a few more design variations of the tattered brim, coming up with two alternate designs that are still available in my shop. There is the icicle brim for my frost mage hat and the cobweb brim, which is the newest tattered brim variation.

Finally I go the chance to put these two design elements together. The hat also featured a leather hat band made out of a belt that I had been saving for months waiting for the perfect hat to wrap it around. I think the end result was spectacular. Even the photo shoot seemed to be blessed, as you can read about here.

And that's how the tattered brim + side curl hat came to be!

www.FeltWicked.Art

One of the biggest challenges for me when I make my wet felting tutorials is taking photos where people can clearly see what I'm doing. Hundreds of the photos I take while I work are useless because my shoulder is in the way, my hair sticks to the lens, or the whole picture is at a weird angle so that no one can really tell what's going on. Now that I'm beginning to put together video tutorials the problem is even worse. My husband has to try and keep the camera still, find a good angle to record at, and avoid bumping into me as I move all around the work table.

After weeks of setting up tripods all over my workshop trying to figure this out I finally have a solution. I purchased a small video camera and hung it up from the light fixture right over my work table. Now anyone who looks at my video tutorials will get a bird's eye view of the action without the camera moving around all over the place or being stuck at an odd angle.

We are still working some of the kinks out of this new process though. Since there is only one window in my workroom whenever I stand in front of it and block some of the daylight from getting in the camera goes a little wild trying to readjust. Lighting in general is a problem, making the video look grainy sometimes. The camera also swings a bit when the people above us start to walk around. But generally I am very happy with the results. When this new setup works well you can really see exactly what I'm doing as I make my hats.

Most of the hats and items I make I am able to sell on Etsy. I've been selling on that platform for years and overall it has been a great experience. I have interacted with all kinds of people and sent my hats all over the world. Since I don't have a brick-and-mortar location I am able to enjoy a certain flexibility in the way I market my art and in the way I approach my business. To put it simply, selling on Etsy works for me.

Recently though Etsy has made a controversial decision to significantly raise the fees they charge sellers like me. In some cases they are nearly doubled. I'm not writing this to complain. I pass no judgment on Etsy and I won't even try to figure out the why and wheretofor of their decision making process. But this change does have real-world implications for sellers like me. It tugs on the strings of my already tight budget.

If you are interested in buying a hat from me though there is a small way you can help.

Not many people who follow me on social media realize that I sell some of my most popular hats right through my website. The immediate benefit to me is that there are no seller fees when I use my shop. I pay one lump sum every couple of years and I can sell whatever I want without additional fees. For my customers the shop may also be simpler and easier to navigate, and it is just as safe and secure as Etsy with the ability to pay using PayPal or Square. And you don't have to sign up for an account to buy things off my website like you do with Etsy.

Some of my hats have a brand new customization option that adds depth and shape to the brim. I call it the wave. But there has been some confusion about what it actually means to add a wave to a hat brim. This post lays out all the details so you can figure out exactly how to get the hat you have always wanted.

For the last few years I have been focusing most of my attention on the top half of the hat, trying to make hat tails with perfect arcs and ridges. Then one day a customer asked for their hat to look more "lived in" than usual. I took a step back from my usual hat designs and tried to figure out what was missing to get that slightly more unstructured look. After some experiments I noticed how breaking up the bowl-shape of the brim with a ripple or a bump could give the whole hat that much more personality. The wave was born.

Some of my customers prefer the more structured look of a hat without a wave so I decided to make it an option rather than adding waves to all my hats. If you are considering adding a wave to your hat here are a few things to consider:

Pros: Adds a new dimension to the brim and makes them look more organic and "lived in." Adding a wave does not change the structural integrity of the hat. It is just as durable as any hat without a wave.

Cons: Adding this customization option does have a cost. Check individual listings for details. Waves are done by hand (since my hats are completely handmade). They might not look exactly as they do in the listing picture, but I do not sent out any hat unless I believe they are perfect.

Have you ever heard of the illustrator Trina Schart Hyman? She is why I became an artist in the first place. My felted hats, my own drawings and paintings, even the way I decorate my home are all influenced by her art. What follows is a short celebration of the artist who continues to mean so much to me.

I grew up in the country during the early 90s. My family didn't have the money to give me art lessons and my school only offered the most basic art classes. I had no one to teach me how to draw. There wasn't even the internet to turn to. I am fully self-taught artist, but I only was able to teach myself anything because of Trina Schart Hyman. She mostly did children's book illustrations and she drew with a style that was organic, detailed, and full of human warmth. My mother took the family often to the library (which was a good 40 minutes away by car) and I would take out every single fairy tale and fantasy book I could, anything with even a scrap of illustration in it. It didn't take me long to find her work, and I borrowed her books from the library over and over, putting most of the creases in the spine of those books myself.

I tried to mimic what I saw; the curve of a cheek, the shape of a heel, a flowing strand of hair.  With her books all scattered across my desk I drew and drew and then redrew what I saw through her eyes, and slowly began to figure out how to move the pencil across the paper in some way resembling art.

I have kept all my sketches from that time, and I recently just went through them again. My very earliest works are from the 6th grade and as I flipped through each page I saw my own progression of skill and her influence sprouting up everywhere. I graduated to painting in high school, which was an even greater pleasure to me because Trina Schart Hyman primarily used watercolor paints herself. By following her lead I saw myself becoming braver and braver in my own art.

Trina Schart Hyman died in November of my freshman year of college (2004). When I heard the news I was devastated. It had been a childhood dream of mine to meet her one day and tell her how, even though she didn't know me, I was who I am today in large part because of her. I wanted to thank her from the depths of my heart. Even as I sit down to write this post though I'm not sure how I could ever communicate the fullness of that feeling to her.

If you have never explored the work of Trina Schart Hyman now is the perfect time to start. Online sellers like Amazon and eBay have new and old copies of her picture books in constant rotation. Or you could do what I did decades ago and hop in your car and head to your local library.