Textile Artist Tiffany Loy Teaches Us How To Mend Wool
In this DIY guide, textile artist Tiffany Loy teaches us how to mend wool garments and fabrics using a felting method – no sewing required.
Crafting (be it professionally or as a hobby) has become one of the biggest trends since the onset of the pandemic: we’ve been spending more time in; Its elements of tactility and slowness soothe in a manic world. And have you seen the amount of crochet on the runways recently?
In this series of DIY stories, four Singapore artists – each with her own fashion-related discipline – share a project that lets you create something to add to the wardrobe at home.
Textile artist Tiffany Loy
When the pandemic hit last year, Tiffany Loy – then a final-year student under the Master’s in Textiles programme at London’s Royal College of Art – had to change gears for her graduation project. And not only because she had to return to Singapore. She had originally intended to create large-scale woven sculptures to be displayed at an in-person exhibition, but could not find a studio here that was spacious enough for her to make them.
What she ended up doing is telling of her eye and artistic concerns: build smaller forms that highlight the microstructure and colour composition of textiles (coloured surfaces made up of yarn and fibre, for example, have a different effect from that on, say, a painting, she points out), and present them online – the perfect medium for zooming in on such details.
A sculptural textile installation from The Weaverly Way, 2020, showcases the scale and ambition of Loy's work.
This ability to marry tradition and technology so deftly is what makes the 33-year-old one of the most exciting names on the scene. This year, in addition to an artist’s residency at what was formerly the Straits Clan, she’s continuing to build on her graduate project (for which she scored an “Excellent”, FYI): She intends to scale her sculptures up to the ambitious size she had first intended them to be.
Here, Tiffany teaches us a simple way to mend and patch holes on wool garments such as socks, scarves and sweaters depending simply on the fabric’s structural qualities (yes, no thread needed).
1. Roving wool (read: fibre that hasn’t been spun into yarn) or animal hair
2. Felting needle
3. Felting pad or high density foam
4. A wool garment – like a sweater, sock or scarf. This felting method can be used to mend holes or to create decorative patterns
1. Place the fabric to be mended over the felting pad. Note: This technique works best on wool as its fibres have tiny scales on the surface that catch onto each other and tangle up, so to speak.
2. Place a thin layer of wool fibre or animal hair over the portion to be mended.
3. Using the felting needle, stab the wool fibre repeatedly. The goal is to have it blend into the fabric, in turn attaching onto it.
4. Repeat until the hole is fully covered.
5. You can also use wool fibre of different, contrasting colours for a decorative effect.
A version of this article first appeared in FEMALE‘s June 2021 Fashion Activity Book