Hyppanie was the name the children gave me in the Himalayas when I travelled in India, in 1997.
In 2000, My passion for Colour Therapy lead me to attend the City and Guild Felt making course in London taught by Lizzie Houghton. I found that the wonderful quality of Wool and colours permitted me to create bespoke useful items and made me feel good about myself and what I could achieve. It gave me great confidence to enroll in a teaching course, to share my passion. I now cater for workshops tailored to your needs and aspirations.
I am working with Schools and Language schools around Brighton and Hove and I am now able to deliver my felt making workshops to the community again.
Children workshops: from 8 years old.
I cater for after school workshops and all-year groups workshops.
30 students per class. My sessions answer the schools needs for creativity for all the taught topics and allow every child -who might think they are not very artistic- to actually create a great piece of Art.
Living in Brighton is a Unique experience and it offers many many possibilities!!
I created workshops suiting different categories of people in East Sussex.
Felt a Fanny with Stephanie is becoming extremely popular
I am a Member of the International Felt maker Association since October 2019.
Felt making is frequently associated with warmth and comfort. I invite you to experience for yourself and with my technical expertise, this remarquable material.
“Through creative workshops, the HYPPANIE Experience encourages participants of all ages to explore their capacities, their imagination, to feel confident to create some amazing bespoke items and therefore bring a feeling of achievement and empowerment to each and everyone.”
Felt Making is a non-woven fabric formed when sheep’s wool or animal fur is subjected to boiling hot water and pressure or agitation.
Soap, helps the felting process by creating an alkaline environment. Heat and moisture cause the outer scales along the fibers to open, and the soap allows the fibers to slide easily over one another thereby causing them to become entangled and woven into each other.
The wool fibers are made up of a protein called keratin.
The keratin in the fibers becomes chemically bound to the protein of the other fibers thereby resulting in a permanent bond between the fibers, making the felting process irreversible.
The oldest archaeological finds containing evidence of the use of felt are in Turkey. Wall paintings that date from 6500 to 3000 B.C. have been found which have the motif of felt appliquès. At Pazyryk in Southern Siberia archeological evidence of felt was found inside a frozen tomb of a nomadic tribal chief that dates from the fifth century B.C.
The evidence from this find shows a highly developed technology of felt making. The Romans and Greeks knew of felt. Roman soldiers were equipped with felt breastplates (for protection from arrows), tunics, boots and socks. The earliest felt found in Scandinavia dates back to the Iron Age. Felt sheets believed to be from about 500 A.D. were found covering a body in a tomb in Hordaland, Norway.
Wet felting two-dimensionally is to first lay out thin, cross hatched layers of fibers to a desired thickness and compressing the wool with soapy water and agitation.
This wool sheet of loose fibers is then rolled up in bubble wrap and rolled so the bubbles gently move and agitate the fibers into knotting or intertwining between the layers.
When the fibers have felted into a stable piece of fabric, the felt is then removed from the roll and fulled or thickened by increasing the agitation, often on a ridged surface. This further tightening of the knotted fibers compresses out the remaining air, making a stiffer, more durable fabric.
To felt three-dimensionally, either agitates the fibers in hand to create solid wool forms or wraps layers of fibers around flat or form resists and other waterproof templates, which are then removed after the fibers has been agitated into felt, leaving a hollow form that can be further sculpted by fulling.