I have been fascinated by felt for as long as I can remember so I was thrilled to hear that Samantha Tannous has secured internationally acclaimed felt and fibre artist, Catherine O’Leary, to run a two-day workshop at Arts Muster, 23-24 August 2025. After speaking to Catherine and hearing about her felt sculpture workshop in detail—which sounds wonderful—I encourage you to book a place today.
While Catherine is a highly accomplished artist—who has been practising for more than 30 years—able to make technically complex fabrics and garments, she is also a teacher who delights in working with absolute beginners, so uses a very simple, easy to grasp technique that lends itself to achieving endlessly imaginative outcomes.
“I love having absolute beginners in my workshops. They work so freely without preconceived ideas—just exploring and discovering—making amazing things. At the end of a workshop you can’t pick what the beginners have made.”
For this reason Catherine specialises in a form of felt making not typically used by many tutors, using merino wool ‘pre-felts’. Pre-felt is a kind of loose fabric made of partially processed wool fibre, meaning it can be easily torn or cut (rather than starting with ‘wool-tops’, the wool ropes more typically used in felting workshops, requiring more complex techniques).
Easy on the hands
Working with pre-felts makes Catherine’s workshops highly accessible. She says she does the same workshops with children that she does with adults because the technique is simple, and it is easy on the hands, not requiring particular strength or dexterity.
“It’s a wonderful medium to work in because there’s a lot of ease in the actual fabric making it easy to stitch into or onto. You can easily go right through the felt or you can just skim the surface with thread. If you embroider and stitch the 3D felt sculpture object after it’s finished, as opposed to working on something flat, there’s something magical about the way it’s always moving that’s like a beautiful dance.”
Participants can easily tear and cut pre-felts, using them to design in a similar way to paper cutouts.
Catherine says, in a way it is going back to primary school type designing, using a very simple process, avoiding getting caught up in technical difficulties. There are things that can go awry, of course, which Catherine is there to resolve, and allow participants to be free to imagine and innovate
One of the great beauties of felt is that things can be made without seams, so there are no join lines. You can make an endless variety of fluid shapes and there’s usually a way to construct any sort of shape you can think of. Plus you can do the most amazing things with layering, trapping felt within felt and creating structures that look quite impossible.
“I find keeping the technique simple helps encourage people. Everybody takes home something beautiful, especially my sculptural workshops like the one I am doing at Arts Muster.”
Book a place today in Catherine’s two day felt sculpture workshop via the Arts Muster website.
Meet Catherine
Teaching & Travel
As well as being a practising artist and teacher, Catherine is the author of two lavishly illustrated books. Her most recent publication is Felt Forward: New Technologies in Feltmaking (2020), available to buy through her website.
Catherine’s first book, From Felt To Fabric: New Techniques in Nuno Felting, was published in 2011 by Lark Crafts, an imprint of a big American publishing company. She described this book to me as a sort of business card that introduced her to an international audience. The invitations to travel and teach soon followed, showing her how sought after Australian tutors can be, having a reputation for being highly knowledgeable and having a broad repertoire of skills.
One such invitation came from Korea where felt-making wasn’t widely known or available.
Catherine describes it as an amazing experience, particularly as she doesn’t speak Korean and none of the participants speaks English. She finds herself in a very small work room with 30 Korean women mostly middle-aged or elderly.
Catherine is wondering how she is going to manage the felt-making process which usually requires quite a lot of room. The answer is a surprise and delight when Catherine sees the group work collectively in all aspects of the process, ‘with someone on either side of the table, one person rolling, one unrolling, taking it in turns’.
When lunchtime comes, everything gets packed neatly away while the group eats. There is another surprise in store for Catherine when she realises she is to be treated as a living treasure and hand fed, with chop sticks, ‘like a baby bird’.
Find out more about Catherine and her art practice on her website and Instagram @cfelt61
