Why the felt pods?

“The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.”
Wendell Berry

My felt pod obsession started 20 years ago when I discovered how to turn the fluffy stuff into fabric.  At its most basic you take fleece from sheep, perform some simple processes and end up with something useful. For me it sits in the realm of sourdough where simple ingredients again create something humans have used for eons. These ancient arts were handed down generation to generation until modern industrialisation intervened.

Eradicating and domesticating our interconnectedness with all of nature we almost lost many of these skills.

In the case of bread along came the Chorleywood process with additives to reduce time in production, and prolong time in shelf life. Bread became a highly processed food full of things we were never intended or designed to consume.  But hey ho, the industrial growth machine is not concerned with such things. It’s all about the bottom line how much profit can be made, and how quickly.

Felt making is another slow paced method.  

Like sourdough it produces something which resonates with what remains untamed. They speak to something ancient in us, something modern consumer madness can never satisfy. The white stuff, be it fluffy bread or bleached fast fashion has no real substance, nothing to fill and sustain us.

Years ago I collected wool off local fences to make a hanging into which I worked heather, bog myrtle and various bits of moss. The only fitting place for it was outside where it was gradually consumed by nature. Gone, it left no trace.

If only everything we make could be like that.

Early on in my felting journey I was determined to make three dimensional objects.  My first attempts were crude and frustrating. Way back as a student at the London College of Fashion I learned to make clothing patterns. These flat pieces of paper were the method by which two dimensions became three.

But how on earth could I do that with wool?

Templates, you use templates. These are the pattern pieces, the method by which fluffy becomes firm, flat becomes full and pots or pods are born. Recently, while flicking through an old felting sketch book I found something that took my breath away. In 2016 shortly after I finished my first walking around Loch Creran I wrote;

“Felt Pod Project – make pods out of the naturally dyed wool and leave them somewhere on the walks I go on.”

OMG! Ten years on and here I am actually doing exactly that. I’ve spoken previously about the cosmic groove I’m following and there written in black and white was even more evidence of this path I find myself on. It seems I have been apprenticed to Spirit for longer than I thought.

The Felt Pods

The first felt pod I made was from local shetland wool. It hung in our plum tree and was used to feed the birds. Eventually the seed sprouted and rotted the bottom. The birds then used it as nesting material until it completely disintegrated and disappeared.

I gifted anther pod to my Mum. This one was more fancy. Touchingly she took it with her to the care home where she eventually died.  It then hung in our conservatory until I discovered blue tits coming through the window to build a nest in it. Afraid they might fry I put it outside undercover. They continued to build and eventually hatch some babies. It was an utter delight to listen to all the chatter before they took off.

The next tenants were bees.

A nature savvy friend assured me they were harmless, “just to leave them alone”, so we did. This beeswax soaked, faded and battered pod still hangs outside awaiting its next adventure.

My final felt pod story is of the red one still hanging in my garden. This is an experiment. Hung in March 2025, I am monitoring what happens. So far its still intact, some what faded and beginning to go green.

Over the years other pods have come and gone – one a hanging biscuit barrel for teacakes in my sisters art studio, another in Texas awaits natures interest.

This parade of pods has now led to my art and activism project Walking Loch Creran.

I intend to leave a felt pod somewhere on each of my twelve walks around the loch. They will be made out of naturally dyed wool I made years ago and kept. As seems to be the case with this project, that wool was waiting for this. Connecting one walk to another these hand dyed wool beacons can safely be reabsorbed back into nature.

They are symbolic, representing the conscious choice to do no harm.

Our planetary home is in trouble and we each have choices to make.  Do we continue trashing this sacred place or do we choose to contribute to her healing? This loch is an example for us all. Visible evidence of harmful choices litter the shoreline. The debris from the fish and shellfish farms can be found almost everywhere alongside plastic bottles, food wrappers, and other stuff someone thought it was ok to throw away.

There is however, no away.

The industrial growth model is the problem, it made environmental harm the norm. Nature became a resource, a  commodity to be utilised. Chasing growth and greater levels of profit scant attention was ever paid to the environmental cost.  Loch Creran, her water and shoreline embody this tragic human history.

I wonder what this loch would be like if every industry large or small around her shores chose to consciously do no harm?

”We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”

Aldo Leopold