"About 7 years ago I saw on the Internet a picture of cute shaggy little mouse.
I couldn’t understand how it was made! It wasn’t made with any technique known to me.
It wasn’t sewn, knitted or glued.
I was very curious and I started looking for similar creations and discovered a whole new world of felting."
Irena Rudman has been making felted accessories for years now. Her pieces caught my attention, because they are like wearable paintings. The beautiful colors, the elegant shapes and details in all her accessories give them an almost surreal look, like out of a fantasy story.
Irena now lives in New York and she has been doing crafts and handiwork since her childhood: sewing, knitting, weaving, embroidery, beading and working with wire, macramé, and much more.
“At first I started to make felted toys, with time I began to make all kind of things with wool: flowers, brooches, scarves, bags, heats, shoes, belts and more.
Nowadays I am making only felted scarves. The reason for this is beacuse I love this accessory the most.
Creating scarves allows my imagination to go wild, allows me to be more creative than I would be with any other products.
I have created more than 1000 scarves and each one of them is unique, one of a kind item.
My great inspiration in work is nature.
Most of my ideas come to me while watching animals and plants.
Sometimes I would want to capture the colors of landscape, sometimes it would be the shape of natural objects.
I love working with colors and shades, and I pay significant attention to the texture as well.
The magnificent beauty of nature and the variety of colorful flowers, trees and her creatures are my constant and never-ending source of inspiration.
The power and the smell of sea, the rustling of the forest, birds singing , beauty of sunrises and sunsets - All this lays an indelible imprint on my work and reflected in the color palette.
Felting is a very time consuming process.
In average it takes me about 4 hours to create each scarf.
And that is without counting the dyeing and drying time.
And I have more complicated and time consuming scarves with 6 hours of continuous work, for example this blue butterfly scarf."
Recently Irena has been fascinated with the shibori technique - the Japanese art of dyeing.
Shibori is a Japanese term for several methods of dyeing cloth with a pattern by binding, stitching, folding, twisting, compressing it, or capping. Some of these methods are known in the West as tie-dye.
There is an infinite number of ways one can bind, stitch, fold, twist, or compress cloth for shibori, and each way results in very different patterns.
Each method is used to achieve a certain result, but each method is also used to work in harmony with the type of cloth used.
Therefore, the technique used in shibori depends not only on the desired pattern, but the characteristics of the cloth being dyed.
Also, different techniques can be used in conjunction with one another to achieve even more elaborate results.
In Japan, the earliest known example of cloth dyed with a shibori technique dates from the 8th century; it is among the goods donated by the Emperor Shōmu to the Tōdai-ji in Nara.
Irena revives dying technologies while inventing new ones. She loves inventing designs and special felting techniques.
I’m using a lot of techniques, approaches, professional tweaks and secrets.
She is happy to share her knowledge and skills with students and gives them the opportunity to sell their work in a special section of her online store. You can also check our her website.
Sandra Kemppainen, Irena Rudman;
Photos: Irena Rudman.
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