Ingenuity in bloom Where there’s wool there’s a way for inventive fibre artist The Creators
By: AV Kitching Posted: 2:00 AM CDT Saturday, Jul. 5, 2025

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/07/2025 (442 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Christie Peters works swiftly, stretching and folding colourful pieces of wet wool.

Akin to sculpting, but with fibre instead of clay, her fingers pinch and pull and press and crimp and pluck and ruffle to create the poppy-petal shape of her felt flowers.

She’s just finished making a batch of 30 elegant paper-wrapped wire stems topped with blooms in neon shades of pink, yellow and red, bright peach, emerald green, royal blue and chartreuse.

On a table, approximately two dozen circles of merino wool fibres with the texture of cotton candy are neatly laid out. Also known as roving, the puffy shapes await their transformation from fluff to felt to flower.

“The medium I work in is called wet felting. It is one of the oldest forms of making fabric,” Peters explains. “I take fluffy wool or roving and compress it with soap and water. I roll and rub the roving, fusing the fibres so it loses its fluffy appearance as it flattens.”

She makes it sound simple but this is no easy task. The felt for each of her flowers is made one at a time.

Peters could buy ready-made sheets of wool felt to wet and shape — it would certainly make her job a whole lot easier and faster — but that’s not a path she wants to go down.

“I like doing it this way. I like being able to control the shape. Often I am using two layers. I lay it out in one direction and then in the opposite direction so it creates many different ways for the overlapping scales (found on the surface of the fibre) to interact. It makes the felt stronger, more reinforced, which then helps with holding the shape,” she says.

“I think it gives it a more human touch; you can see parts where it is thicker and thinner. It’s not homogeneous. It is something a machine cannot do. It ends up really beautiful.”

Peters has been felting since she was a teenager. She established her studio, Margaret Jane Design (named after her grandmother and mother), nine years ago but only began pursuing it seriously in 2022. She started off making scarves, then neckerchiefs, fusing wool fibres to triangles of silk and cotton fabric in a process called Nuno-felting.

Her first flower, created in January 2024, was a two-toned yellow creation with a saffron petal and a honey-coloured centre that “looked more like a Dr. Seuss bloom,” she laughs. “The first ones all looked really alien.”

Last September she decided to experiment, moulding wet felt on wine bottles and peanut butter jars as well as vintage vases sourced from thrift stores to create felt vases. Similar to tea cosies but for bottles and jars, she’s come up with a clever way put empties to good use.

She has just finished a new collection of vessels — 18 striped Cirque vases to slip over small jars of varying sizes, and five larger vases called Shape Shift that fit over Adams-brand peanut butter jars — which are off to Montreal at the end of the month as part of pop-up market Petit Magasin’s showcase of vase and floral-inspired treasures.

Peters feels a compulsion to create with wool. She is excited at what else she can make from the natural fibre and has just embarked on fabricating small lampshades which she calls light caps.

“Wool is such a versatile medium, I just see so much potential in it. I love playing, I love how something soft can hold a shape. Seeing these two contradictory states at once, there is a tension there.

“I love the idea of housewares and lighting (made) out of wool because I think it highlights the beauty of nature. I have lot of fun coming up with something new, I love designing new things… it just scratches an itch for me,” she laughs.

av.kitching@freepress.mb.ca