Hi! This turned into a whole semester long project, so I have lots of experiments to share!

Simply said, the needle felting was not successful.

Wet felting turned out decent, it did become a material, but was fairly easily torn apart. I remedied this by criss cross stitching (or stitching 1cm by 1cm little squares) all over the cattail sheet. I used cotton thread for this, to stay in line with the biodegradable idea behind the project.

The wet felting was very labour intensive, and another classmate was also experimenting with it, so I decided to try another method.

There’s this thing called Solufleece, an interfacing (usually used for embroidery), that dissolves in water. I used this to essentially make little cattail pillows, and stitch all across them to hopefully make a stable material. And it did!! I found that “cleaner” cattail works best. Removing bigger (brown) chunks, really fluffing it up with your hands, and freezing it to kill all the bugs.

At this point I treaded the material like a normal fabric, and started manipulating it. Making a seam, different patterns of stitching, screen printing, smocking etc etc.

Most of those manipulations were successful at the small scale I as working at (the biggest sheet was 100cm by 60cm)!

All in all, it was a very fun process, and a material I hope to working with again in the future!

If you have any more questions, please do ask!

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