Annual Holiday Show

Cathy Ritter is happiest when she’s making something—almost anything. Her only real obstacles are too many ideas and not nearly enough time. Lately, her passion has settled on felted objects.

“Everything is a surprise,” she says. “I start out thinking I’m making one thing, and once it takes shape, it becomes something completely different. I’ll begin a bird, and it turns into a teddy bear.”

Cathy loves experimenting, often adding clay, beads, stitches, or paint to her felted pieces.

Her journey began about 25 years ago in a gift shop in Peterborough, NH. “I walked in, and a woman was sitting there petting an Angora rabbit while spinning yarn from its fur—and knitting as she went,” she recalls. That moment drew her into fiber arts. She began needle felting, even making a few clutch purses with no stitching at all—she needle-felted the lining right in. But needle felting alone proved slow. “I realized it was going to take forever. So I went online, learned about wet felting, and started experimenting.” Today, her work blends both techniques.

While needle felting is precise, wet felting is faster and better suited for larger forms.

Needle felting uses an extremely sharp single needle to repeatedly—thousands of times—stab wool roving (washed, combed, sometimes dyed wool). Wet felting, on the other hand, begins by laying out roving in layers. To create three-dimensional shapes, Cathy uses a “resist,” a nonporous material that keeps the wool from bonding through it. Wool fibers behave like Velcro, with tiny barbs: needle felting pushes those barbs in; wet felting encourages them to interlock.

Cathy lays her wool on bubble wrap, adds recycled sari silk, sprinkles everything with warm soapy water, and flips it to layer the other side. Then comes the agitation: traditionally rolling it tens of thousands of times, but she often wraps the piece in toweling and tosses it into her dryer on the air setting. “The dryer does what you’d do by hand,” she says. (She even knows someone who straps felt to the back of her truck and drives country roads to achieve the same effect.)

After the felting begins, Cathy unrolls the piece, switches its direction, sometimes rubs it by hand, and continues until it reaches the right consistency. Then she cuts out the resist—revealing a flat, hollow form—and begins the process of fulling: rubbing, twisting, or even throwing the piece across the room to strengthen and shape it.

Once she’s happy with the shape, she stuffs it with plastic bags to hold a shape and lets it dry on a radiator or outside. And if she still doesn’t like it? She reshapes it. Wool is forgiving. “If I really don’t like something, I can comb it back into roving and start over.”

After nearly 20 years in New Orleans, Cathy has returned to the region where she grew up, originally on Sacandaga Lake. By day, she works as a copy editor—formerly for cooking publications in Louisiana—and spends the rest of her time felting.

Her biggest mishap? “Everything I make has my DNA in it,” she jokes. “Because of all the needle pricks.”