Work currently found at the Sawdust Art Festival are more whimsical pieces that happen in the pauses. Living under the theme of: Love, Hope & Entanglement.
Textiles that heal
We gravitate to wool, a natural fiber that brings us warmth and comfort.
For your home
Wall art
Architectural installations (reduce echo and improve sound quality)
Throws and curtain panels
For your body
Tunics, kimonos, scarves and wraps
For your things
Bags & love letter pouches
Hollow pebbles to hold your most precious treasures
Candice (aka Dice, pronounced Deece) can usually be found in her Laguna Canyon studio, where she creates art and functional objects with wool – felting, spinning and dyeing it naturally with plants and extracts.
At an early age she was drawn to life in theater – earning an appreciation and a jack-of-all-trades sensibility for the many artistic skills involved in live production, each with an emphasis on telling a story.
Building on that foundation Dice moved to a career in experiential design, conceiving experience narratives and staging them around the world for various industries, including automotive. For several years this entailed being on assignment in Detroit with clay underfoot in an automaker’s concept design studio.
This creative journey enabled further exposure to different mediums of storytelling and further training in design, color theory, textiles, and material sustainability.
Following the body of work ‘Journeys that I’ll never Take’ which asked questions about our physical and psychological boundaries, new work will be coming that explores where and when we Yield.
Commissions to your specifications are welcomed.
How is felt made?
Felt is an ancient textile and the wool from which it is made is wondrous! Wool has antibacterial properties and it’s insulating for both sound and warmth. It is able to hold up to 50% of its own weight in water without feeling wet (great if you are a sheep in a rainy climate, or a fisherman wearing a woolly in a stormy sea!). And unlike synthetic fabrics, wool cannot melt, plus it’s incredibly hard to ignite. Wool is so dense there is not enough access for the oxygen required to burn it. It really is the perfect fiber to be next to our skin and in our homes. But how do we turn this amazing raw wool into interesting felt?
#1. Know your wool
Sometimes I buy wool as roving, but a lot of times the wool comes directly from a sheep that has been sheared on a farm (in the spring the sheep give up their woolly winter coat) and I have to clean it. I like to know the names of the sheep which share their fleece. You might find wool here from Spock, Romeo, Phoenix or Dash.
Wool primarily comes from Sheep but we can call the hair of some species of alpacas, goats, camels and rabbits, wool too. There are so many breeds; some might have fine straight wool and others have long and curly wool locks.
#2. The magic of color
Dyeing is a multi step process. First the wool needs to sit in a mordant so the dye will fix to it and be wash-fast. Mordants tend to be natural metal salts – alum or iron but I can use soy beans too. Then a dye bath is made so we can extract the color. I only use natural dyes from sources such as flowers and bark. And finally, the wool is placed into the dye bath to soak up the color.
#3. Amplify the texture
Sometimes the wool is put through a drum carder to blend it with silks and hemp. Or maybe it is spun into yarn and crocheted into thicker sections of wool.
#4. Create the composition
The wool is laid out in the chosen design. Then it’s time to sprinkle on warm water and soap with a watering can. This helps the microscopic scales in the wool open up, ready to slip and attach to adjacent sections of fiber when agitated i.e. rubbing the wool, so each separate strand latches its scales to another strand. And after many hours, and sometimes days, the result is a piece of cloth or woolly object.
The felt you find here is not only toxic free, it will add color, warmth and comfort into your home.