STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

She called it “Yarmageddon.”

And, indeed, Dori Florig’s class started with 12 would-be artists picking through scads of yarn colored various shades of blues, greens, reds and yellows as they envisioned how to “paint” a tale of sheepdogs, sheepwagons and the pasture that stretched before them.

Florig, a frequent teacher of the Wool Classes at the Trailing of the Sheep Festival, passed out tall wooden Navajo-style looms that her husband Dennis Clancy had made and then proceeded to show how to weave a picture using grid lines.

Artists in the En Plein Air Tapestry Weaving Class pick through yarns.

“I don’t want you to weave what I tell you. I want you to be creative. I want you to learn from each other and I want to learn from you, too. I learned from looking over shoulders, and I want you to do that, too,” she told the students.

Florig, of Angels Camp, Calif., is among the many wool artists who have flocked to the Trailing of the Sheep Festival from tiny towns like Superior, Mont., over the past 29 years.

She’ll be back at the 2025 Trailing of the Sheep Festival, which runs Oct. 8-12, teaching people to make Felted Pumpkins, weave a Sit-Upon and make Art Fabric.

And she’ll be accompanied by other familiar instructors, including Jan Bittenbender of McCall, who teaches people how to make colorful “Postcards from the Flock”—colorful portraits of landscapes—and Tammy Jordon of Lincoln, Mont., who will teach Beginning Spinning.

Jill works on a teddy bear head in the animal sculpture class.

Local instructor Amy Mistick will teach a Knit & Needle Needlepoint Keychain class that even 12-year-olds are welcome to join, while Linda Stirling teaches Knitting 101 and Susan Coons fashions Snow Globe Ornaments.

Those who attended Florig’s En Plein Air Tapestry Weaving Class during the 2024 Trailing of the Sheep Festival came from as far away as North Dakota, Utah and Pennsylvania. They followed her to the Championship Sheep Dog Trials being held in a field north of Hailey where they set up their looms and proceeded to work, trying to remain oblivious to the hubbub of sheep jumping over the fence separating the sheep and dogs from spectators.

“The nice thing about textile artists is that they don’t keep secrets. It’s a lot like being in a sewing circle,” said Shara as she quizzed Florig about the colorful Peruvian braiding she sometimes augments her tapestries with.

Florig, known for her ongoing “Mother Tree” project, suggested that the weavers weave on the reverse side.

Almost finished!

“It’s not necessary, but it makes it easier to add different colors,” she said.

Florig buys 25 pounds of yarn at a time, and she dyes everything herself using dyes made of plant material.

“I use everything I see on the ground when I walk out the door,” she said, showing how she incorporates twig and other items into her pieces. “You have to make the background first—you have to make the sky first before you put a moon in it.”

While those students painted their picture in wool, Florig helped others sculpt animal heads in felted wool.

An artist works on a border collie sculpture meant to represent her own pup.

The class, she said was inspired by her own time living in the Tetons where she sculpted a life-size bison that was displayed at the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole, Wyo., along with her wool painting of the landcape.

This class, too, started with students picking through a huge pile of felted wool pieces—wool that had been transformed into matted fabric pieces by wetting the wool and poking it with barbed felting needles.

One woman created a sculpture resembling her dog, referring to a picture of the dog on her lap top. Maddie worked on a sculpture of a ram’s head while her friend Laurel fashioned a bison head. Jill created a teddy bear head.

Florig has been experimenting with what she calls the “unlimited possibilities” of fiber and wool since the early 1970s, always looking for new creative ways to express what she sees. She has learned at the knees of Cree Indian weavers and by watching men weave fishnets in Haiti.

“I weave the environment I see around me to help people appreciate the world around us,” she said.

Want to try a Wool Class for yourself? See this year’s classes at https://trailingofthesheep.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/TOTS_program2025_WebRevised2.pdf.

Or, pick up a Trailing of the Sheep Festival booklet at Sheep Headquarters when it opens Wednesday afternoon at The Argyros in Ketchum.