STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK
Gabrielle Tierney exuded utmost concentration as she composed a picture of sheep frolicking in a green meadow against a mountain backdrop.
She did it not with paint and brushes but by gently pulling strands of colored wool fiber across a bamboo sushi mat.
She and 19 other paid homage to sheep during the 27th annual Trailing of the Sheep Festival this weekend by creating painterly felted pictures that their teacher—Jan Bittenbender of McCall—called “Postcards from the Band.”
“So fun!” said Tierney, who lives in the Sun Valley area. “I always love to learn—trying something new turns your brain on. And this is a different type of art than I’ve ever tried.”
The artists started by gently stretching a loose foundation of wool fibers across the bamboo blinders. They then layered it with blue yarn for the sky, gold for the field and green yarn for grass. Bittenbender urged them to add some vertical strands of grass on top of the horizontal strands.
“Go crazy with grass. Grass is not even, and some vertical grass gives a feeling of movement.,” she said.”
She picked up a poof of purple yarn.
“This is your mountain,” she told her students.
Once the students had an impressionistic first layer outlining where they wanted their aspen tree and flowers to go, Bittenbender’s assistant Mary Chown squirted the pieces with a solution of hot soapy water. The artists then blotted their pieces before taking a styrofoam rolling pin to them, allowing the fibers to weave together into a single piece.
They used needle felting to create the sheep and other details.
“The key seems to be a gentle hand when it comes to pulling the yarn,” said Jan Dyndiuk.
Bittenbender is self-taught. She’d decided to make a felt hat but then made a picture instead. She has yet to make that hat but she’s made a hundred felt paintings in the past five years, including landscapes with vivid maroon sunsets, birds sitting in pink dogwood trees, Native American picture stories, foxes and other animals and, of course, sheep pictures.
She calls her business “Just Felt Like It.”
“I research Native American lore,” she said.
She picked up a portrait depicting a Native American woman with a white buffalo.
“This is the story of how some Native American cultures believe they got the peace pipe,” she said. “Other pictures depict the sacredness of the number four in Native American culture—the four winds, the four seasons…”
Jill and Danielle Fioriello came from New York for the festival after having heard about it from a Sun Valley resident they met during a tour through Spain.
Bonita Bertovich, who was visiting her daughter Jenny, decided she wanted to put swirls, ala Van Gogh, in her picture.
“I came out here from Virginia to see the Trailing of the Sheep with my daughter Jenny because I want to see the sheep coming down from the mountains. It’s so beautiful here,” she said. “We decided to take the felting class because it seemed like it would be easy for beginners.”
Chown confirmed her suspicions.
“Felting like this is very forgiving. If you don’t like it, you just rip it out.”