In her wet felting studio, Sequim artist Lora Armstrong explains how ruching happens in felt work. (Emily Matthiessen/Olympic Peninsula News Group)

In her wet felting studio, Sequim artist Lora Armstrong explains how ruching happens in felt work. (Emily Matthiessen/Olympic Peninsula News Group)

Sequim artist uses fabric, color for unique creations

‘Brave combinations’ highlight her work

SEQUIM — Sequim’s Lora Armstrong “is an incredibly talented artist who loves color and processes,” said friend and fellow painter Virginia Ashby.

“Her felted and textile art is fanciful, fun and gorgeous,” Ashby said. “Often it defies description and simply must be experienced in person.”

Armstrong is known for her fiber work. She retailed for years at the now-closed Bag Ladies, featured and sold in exhibits curated by the Peninsula Fiber Artists and the North Olympic Shuttle and Spindle Guild, and she has pieces currently for sale at Harbor Art in Port Angeles.

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“I’ve always been into fiber,” Armstrong said. “I love the color, I love the texture. I pretty much dream in felt. I truly do.”

Armstrong said felting first involves wool. She’s into mixing merino sheep’s wool with silk, called nuno felting.

“I do wet felting,” Armstrong said. “I’ve done needle felting, but I’m not really into it. It’s dangerous. I poke my fingers.”

Felting begins with a combination of soap and water — warm or cold — and agitating the wool, she explained.

“If you look at the fiber structure, it has prongs or barbs,” she said. “When you agitate it with water or soap on it, those barbs go away from the core and kind of reach up and grab whatever’s there and pull it back down, and it shrinks. So felting is shrinking the fiber.”

With nuno, she said, “silk doesn’t shrink, it ruches. Those fibers open up on the wool, go up and grab the silk and pull it down. It creates little ruching, like little silk waves on your surface.”

With that material, which she also dyes in the wild wide palette she is known for, Armstrong makes her creations.

She credits Su Nylander for getting her into dying fabrics and fiber, spinning and weaving and for encouraging her to take her first felting class.

“She has a great sense for colors,” said felt artist Flóra Carlile-Kovács, a teacher who became a friend.

“She loves vibrant colors and she is often using brave color combinations. She loves to explore various ideas in her work, to combine different materials and to use different techniques in an innovative way.”

“Felt is a perfect medium for her to express her joy of life: it is malleable, it has no limitations in shape, size, color or texture. She is a very productive artist, and her art is super playful and very versatile, and it pulsates from energy and joy.”

Felting is just one medium in which Armstrong is proficient.

“I delight in her paintings,” Ashby said, “which often feature comfy luscious rooms where anyone would love to relax and natural environments that touch the soul. Lora is constantly learning new techniques and shares her immense knowledge freely and with joy and humor.”

Another teacher who became a friend, painter Julie Read, said Armstrong is “one of those artists who can shape-shift styles and themes. She has a very active imagination and dream-like realm that her creations seem to be coming from, lots of dynamic skies and waters, swirling and seducing.”

“She has a good sense of humor and play too, and her work often elicits smiles and laughter and good-natured narratives. She has a unique color sense and pushes the envelope there. She doesn’t have to do what nature tells her.”

Lifelong interest

“I’ve always been a very tactile person,” Armstrong said. “I’ve always loved color.”

She began knitting when she was about 5, and she preferred to draw, color or sew than play with dolls.

“I’d rather be using crayons or watercolor when I was in high school,” she said.

Her art teacher “was awesome.”

“That was my favorite class of the day,” she said. “Go in and paint!”

She worked in a local fabric shop while in high school in Bothell, “and did a lot of sewing for my boyfriend and other guys. Adidas sweats were really in — you know, the three lines. We’re kids, we couldn’t really afford them, so I made knock-off Adidas for some of the guys on the soccer team.”

When she was in college, she made wedding dresses and bridesmaid dresses, and she worked at a yarn store for a couple years.

Armstrong went to college to be a paralegal.

“I dabbled in design classes the first couple of years in college … I loved fashion, but it was like, I need to make money,” she said. “That was my driving force — not that I made a lot of money, but I supported myself. And then I married. My husband is a carpenter.”

Craig Allan Armstrong’s business, Allan Armstrong Construction, builds custom homes locally.

After the couple’s first baby was born, Armstrong continued to commute to Seattle for paralegal work, as she’d been doing since she moved to Sequim.

“I said, ‘That’s difficult.’ And my husband looked at me and said, ‘We’ve been here for three years. Why don’t you just stay home and run the books and do the designing for me?’”

“We started small,” Armstrong continued, “little houses here in the area. We work collaboratively. We’ve always been a team. It’s worked out great.”

Her husband, “is an amazing man” who has been very supportive of her artistic blossoming, she said.

“I absolutely adore him,” she said.

With her two children now grown and son Jacob being trained to take over the business, Armstrong’s time has been more and more her own.

“I’m feeling confident enough as an artist,” she said. “I know that there’s so much more to learn, but I finally feel like, OK, I’m kind of getting there.”

The changes that come with midlife are an inspiration, she said, evidenced by felt pieces called hot flashes and insomniac hours in the night that send her to her studio to manifest more creations.

“I wake up in the middle of the night and it’s like, ideas and color combinations,” she said. “Like I said, I dream in felt.”

Colorful and whimsical

“A visit to (Armstrong’s) studio and home is like stepping into a Lora-styled fantasy with whimsical and dazzling items all about,” Ashby said.

Armstrong’s house is clean, neat and bursting with objects she’s made, and it was custom-designed and built by Craig and Armstrong, reflecting a person that “effortlessly can do many things very well,” Read said.

“She has a creative gift, a keen eye for design and craftsmanship, she is smart and organized, energetic.”

“When people walk in here they’re like, ‘I’m on overload,’” Armstrong said with a laugh about her two studios. “I don’t even think about it anymore.”

Orchids bloom in perfect health at windows hung with vividly colored felt sculptures — or are they ornaments?

“Some of these pieces (people) look at and say, ‘What is it? What is that meant to be, a shell or a heart?’” Armstrong said. “Well, it’s not really anything, you know. I just love the color combinations and the bling.”

She said she has “a strong passion for both painting and felting. I truly love working in both mediums — color and bling! Silk and wool are so tactile, which I love, and I’ll probably always work with fiber — whether felting, knitting, spinning, weaving or sewing.

“Felting I will do as long as I physically can,” she said. “It is very arduous and hard on the body and hands.

“I just know that I have to create because it makes me happy and fulfilled.”

Armstrong’s website is ladesignsequim.com. Her paintings can be seen at Alderwood Bistro in Sequim and her felt work can be purchased at Harbor Art in Port Angeles, where she will be the featured artist in October. The Grover Gallery in Port Townsend will feature her work in March.

________

Emily Matthiessen is a reporter with the Olympic Peninsula News Group, which is composed of Sound Publishing newspapers Peninsula Daily News, Sequim Gazette and Forks Forum. She can be reached by email at emily.matthiessen@sequimgazette.com.

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