Hi everyone and welcome to my blog! My name is Kiyoshi and I like to make things out of wool. I grew up in Chicago, and went to school in Massachussetts. I joined the army right after college and was introduced to Afghanistan. I found it so interesting that I went back after getting out of the military to do aid work. My experiences in Afghanistan helped me to realize that life should be less about "success" and more about spending time with the people we love. In keeping with this, when I got home I married the woman I'd been pining after since my first day of college (about 10 years) and decided to become a farmer! My wife Emma and I are currently spending a year learning to farm in the Practical Farm Training Program at The Farm School in Athol, MA and this fall we will be headed to Central Illinois to start our very own farm. For more details you can follow us on Emma's blog.
I was introduced to needle felting in January in our farm school class on fiber arts and have been hopelessly addicted ever since. For those of you who are just like I was 4 months ago and have no idea what the hell needle felting is, it is quite simply poking clumps of wool with a barbed needle. Wool fibers have microscopic scales so when you push them together they hook on to one another. The more you push them together with a special felting needle the more tangled up they get, which means that if you are patient (or obsessive) enough you can eventually poke a clump of wool into whatever shape you want. I loved to draw when I was a kid but I never in a million years would have thought I might want to be some sort of an artist. My discovery of needle felting changed that, and I guess it's because I love being able to produce tangible objects. Also, depicting three dimensional things in three dimensions is just easier for me than trying to take a three dimensional subject and turn it into a two dimensional image. Finally, I've always loved animals of all kinds and wool seems to me to be the perfect medium for sculpting them.
I was introduced to needle felting in January in our farm school class on fiber arts and have been hopelessly addicted ever since. For those of you who are just like I was 4 months ago and have no idea what the hell needle felting is, it is quite simply poking clumps of wool with a barbed needle. Wool fibers have microscopic scales so when you push them together they hook on to one another. The more you push them together with a special felting needle the more tangled up they get, which means that if you are patient (or obsessive) enough you can eventually poke a clump of wool into whatever shape you want. I loved to draw when I was a kid but I never in a million years would have thought I might want to be some sort of an artist. My discovery of needle felting changed that, and I guess it's because I love being able to produce tangible objects. Also, depicting three dimensional things in three dimensions is just easier for me than trying to take a three dimensional subject and turn it into a two dimensional image. Finally, I've always loved animals of all kinds and wool seems to me to be the perfect medium for sculpting them.
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