I caught up with one of our resident legends, @Harlan, and asked her a few questions about her craft, her life, and more!
You are famous on Lettuce Craft for your needle felted cozy woodland mice. Tell us how you started making these creatures and is there a backstory to their world?
Around 2006, Jack and I were browsing in Borders book store and I happened upon a book showing you how to make cute needle felted dogs. I said to myself: “I can do that!”. Went home, bought a kit for making a needle felted mouse. When it arrived, I read through the instructions, threw them away, and have been teaching myself and others about needle felting ever since! Needle felting was something creative I could do while my paints dried sufficiently for me to continue on my oil paintings.
Maurice – the first mouse I ever made.
What is your favorite felted mouse (or other animal) you’ve ever made? If you can’t pick just one, how about your top 3?
I don’t tend to think in terms of favorites.
There’s Wixie, who is far from the “best” cat/pritten (pretty kitten) that I ever made. I made her for Jack and she is probably the only cat figure I did that had a full armature. So, she’s special to me for those reasons, but mostly because she got me the position teaching at CraftArtEdu! I had seen a notice that Donna Kato (polymer clay artist) had sent out about forming CAE and looking for teachers. I emailed Donna this photo of Wixie. At first glance she thought I was sending a photo of my cat. Lol! I ended up teaching at CAE from 2010 when they started to 2017 when they closed.
Expert Catch – He’s patterned after a Japanese sculpture that my parents had. I always loved it and eventually my mom gave it to me and I still love it. So, this mouse is sort of a way to tie together my past and present and express gratitude for having parents that were involved with art and artists.
Calgon Take Me Away – I found and bought the tub while out shopping with my dear friend Denise, so that is one reason. The tissue paper I used to decorate the tub survived the fire that consumed our office and my studio so that is another reason. I gifted this mouse to a dear friend of mine after her husband died and between the grief and suddenly have to deal with all sorts of details that her husband used to handle; she was very stressed! It helped and now and then she will remind me how much she enjoys it!
You also make gorgeous felted jewelry. What is the inspiration behind these wearable works of art?
I grew up near Cranbrook Art Academy. My parents were very involved with the academy, commissioned work, bought art. Their areas of interests were primarily the metal smithing department, ceramics, and weaving. There were some exceptional jewelry artists there. Over the years I developed an interest in polymer clay which is how I happened to be following Donna Kato and found out about CraftArtEdu. I had done some lost wax casting – that is I sculpted the wax and a friend in the art guild to which I belonged at the time did the casting. I never learned metal smithing. I’m a fair hand at polymer clay, but after working with the exceptional polymer clay artists who were also teaching at CAE, I decided to see what I might be able to do in the second medium of choice as I was still oil painting at that time.
One of my “Tapered Rope” necklaces which was the first to have gotten some notice by a popular blog. I recall them remarking on how smooth the piece was given that it is fiber and they liked the composition as well. I still wish I had come up with a more “professional” clasp, but I used what I had and given that I ended up creating a CAE class for the tapered rope necklaces it’s okay to use a clasp that students would readily have and not cost a bundle.
A lot of my jewelry ideas have been inspired by what my favorite polymer clay artists are doing.
One of the very odd things about my jewelry, which I love making, I don’t wear any of it. I don’t wear a lot of jewelry. I wear a couple of rings and four earrings and I have worn the same ones for years.
Besides being an amazingly talented artist, you are also a teacher. What do you like most about sharing your skills with others, and where can we take a class?
Well, thank you! I consider myself gifted, but I’m not sure about “amazing”.
I have always been very analytical about the mediums I have really spent time using. With oil painting there is a lot of good information out there and I was able to study that and I’m talking basic foundations. There is a reason why oil paintings are painted the way they are – well traditional oil paintings. Modern art tends to not care about such things as oil absorption ratios.
With needle felting there wasn’t as much foundational information out there. I like knowing how and why something works. That sort of knowledge gives you greater control over whatever it is you are making. When I was teaching myself needle felting, which is mostly really paying attention to the needles and what they are making happen, I would make sample pieces that I would cut in half to actually see what was happening.
Wet felting is a very old craft and people have learned about the scales on the fiber and how agitation, water, and soap can produce a cloth which opens up more possibilities. Needle felting is a relatively young craft born out of a couple taking the felting needles which, in great looms of thousands of needles, are meant for industrial production of non-woven fabrics and tried using it by hand on some wool fiber. Wet felting makes use of the scales on fiber and the agitation to lock the fibers together. Needle felting is a mechanical means of tangling fibers together allowing the scales to lock them in place. It is possible with needle felting and a great deal of effort to achieve the sort of density and durability that can be achieved with wet felting. They’re just very different processes …. And you can see from how I have blathered on about how this all works; I love sharing information that helps someone be more successful with their creative efforts!
I am not actively teaching anywhere. I have tutorials available in my Etsy shop: IntimateForest. There are a variety of tutorials, creatures, and jewelry, beginners to expert levels and all are inexpensive because these are the tutorials I made for CAE.
What is this I hear about you being an author??
Yes, I am. I have three books (all available on Amazon because they are all self-published).
Needle Felting to the Point
Needle Felting to the Point 2 When things go Wrong
The World of Dahvear
Obviously the needle felting books are on needle felting and were written when my husband was in the hospital for a year and I was trying to find ways to improve our income. They were written in 2008 & 2009 and are not “project books” although the second book does have some projects. Both books were about teaching an understanding of how needle felting works and helping people use that information to improve their skills. Every now and then I think about doing a third needle felting book which might be remaking the first two with better photos since cameras and I have never been on the best of terms, coupled with additional insights I have had working in this medium for almost two decades, or maybe just a book on making mice, or maybe a book on felted jewelry, or …
The third book: The World of Dahvear is a role-playing game that I wrote (the game, not the book) in the mid-1980s and ran online in text only chat rooms for a dozen years or so.
Wow! I want to hear more about this game that you created!
A friend of mine was playing chat role-playing games on Compuserve which seemed like a lot of fun so I got online and spent a lot of time in the Gamers’ Forum there. That’s where I got to know Jack.
I joined playing a game that was written by another friend of mine. While I wasn’t playing Dungeons and Dragons back then I had a niece who was (and still is to this day – she holds the record for longest running female DM of a D&D game) so I had some familiarity with how this all works.
I played a mage or something of the kind in this game my friend had written. Our party got into a situation where we needed light which was something I was able to cast. According to the mechanics of her game, I had enough mana to cast the spell “Light” 9 times and my probability of success, being a newbie mage, was 33%. No problem, right? Wrong. I rolled and failed 9 times and I found that to be so frustrating/disappoint/not fun that I wrote my own game, and developed a game mechanic in which it would not be possible to roll and fail 9 times in a row.
I was very, very fortunate to have an amazing group of friends join in and play my game. In fact, when the pandemic happened, one of them contacted me and asked if I might consider running the game again! Among my players was a woman studying to be an actress. She did become professional and she married one of the other players in my game and they are still together! I am not greatly experienced in role playing games. Back then I played Bushido, and ElfQuest and some others all online on pre-internet we have nothing but text chat rooms what also have a dice function (and if you were really lucky there would be a private message with in the text chats too).
My game wasn’t about getting rich, or becoming really powerful which are goals that a lot of people really love about playing role playing games. It was about interacting with one another, helping one another. The game mechanics are relatively simple, but players could combine their own skills or combine with the skills of the other players for new and different purposes. It was a very flexible system which relied upon the creativity of the players. Most of the game play was exploring an interesting and beautiful world that is mostly filled with good “nems”. The word “nems” is a good representation, I think, of what my game was about. Nems are people without the emphasis on what gender they may be. We did have “heroic quests” (Find the Ancient Lost Library) and we also had some seriously bad nems (Sarlinii) that we had to vanquish, but mostly we had a lot of fun!
I was fortunate to write and run my game when I did and with the friends I had back then. Playing the game in text only, I believe, allowed the players to be less self-conscious and really get into playing their parts, being their characters.
I thought I had lost all the documentation on the game in the fire, but Jackson had moved the files from my area to his area, which had been Jack’s music room. That was the only room that did not burn to the ground and as the documentation was in a metal file cabinet, while they did get burnt around the edges, it survived.
What the heck are Pookies & Osts and why do you have so many?!
Pookies are small magical lion like creatures – Jack and I bought some stuffed lions made by Daikin and started telling stories about them to Jackson.
Every night while we were asleep, the Pookeys would turn the car into a Tardis and veeboop to the nearest Dunkin Donuts where they would play field hockey with the crullers and munchkins. Originally they were going to PJ’s Ice Cream & Donut parlor and using the peppermint ice cream to make the hockey rink, but when PJ’s closed it’s doors (the Pookeys still maintain that they are NOT to blame) they switched to Dunkin Donuts.
Osts are creatures from Dahvear. They are tiny cute (very cute) dragons that are bigger on the inside than on the outside. They love berries and were extremely disappointed when they found out that the great quest for the Lost Lieberries was just a bunch of really old books and scrolls.
While playing Dahvear, both Jack and I played osts in the game. They were a lot of fun!
What is the most challenging project you’ve ever worked on, felted or otherwise?
Years ago a friend of mine who owned/ran several restaurants was gifted by the Brighton Historical Society a paper mâché sculpture which had hung in the Canopy restaurant for about a bazillion years. This piece was something like 6’ x 4’ and in very bad condition:
The piece is supposed to represent the story set in the Berlin Zoo where the zookeeper’s daughter became very close friends to the lion that was held in captivity there. When she was engaged to marry the lion killed her (out of jealousy – it’s a story). My friend asked me if I could and would I restore it for him. I did and it was quite a piece to work on and heavy to boot.
The frame for this massive piece was a least a foot wide all the way around and included cage bars. After I restored it, he hung it in his Stout restaurant. Someone else owns that now and I have no idea where this thing may be.
What is your favorite project that someone else has posted in the Fiber & Textile Category?
I’m totally unable to answer that question. We have such an amazing community with so much talent and skill, how am I supposed to single out even a few amongst all that we’ve seen posted here? I tend not to think in favorites. There have been so many amazing quilts and other sewing projects. I consider myself a fair seamstress, but the sewing skills some of our members have – WOW! I can knit and crochet and I’ve made some pretty kewl things with and sometimes without a pattern, but all the different things that people here are making, it’s amazing!! What is even the best amazing is how friendly, supportive, and inspiring this community is to all its members! I’m so happy to be here!
Thank you so much, @Harlan! It is always a pleasure to chat with you. I know I speak for the whole community when I say we are so happy you are here!
