Pattern Testing + Knit-along (12A*)

Soft Plants (Belgium 2008 Dir Emma de Swaef 11 min) 
The daydreams of a live-action office worker, rendered in felted wool. The worker’s woolly avatar awakens deep in the forest, and has a sequence of encounters, good and bad – adventures that touch on yearnings for softness and companionship, and feelings of desolation and alienation.  

Whose Woods Are These (US 2024 Dir Kate Nartker 6 min) 
An ominous, fairy-tale feeling pervades this animation, created entirely from textiles and inspired by the story of the director’s great-grandmother. A woman goes into the forest, and perhaps never comes back.   

The Island of Us (Taiwan 2022 Dir Yu Yu 19 min) 
If David Lynch had ever got into felting, perhaps he’d have come up with something like this, a nightmarish, near-unintelligible story set on a woolly island made from and inhabited by all kinds of strange, toothy, one-eyed felt creatures.  

Criss Cross (Slovakia/Czech Republic 2023 Dirs Nina Rybárová, Tomáš Rybár 8 min) 
An animated fable combining a video games aesthetic with cross stitch embroidery.  .  

Fadenspiele I (Toying with String I) (Germany 1999 Dirs Ute Aurand, Detel Aurand 8 min) 
This gorgeous stop-motion animation ‘plays’ with a variety of natural artefacts – pebbles, seedheads, rosehips, sticks – and lengths of yarn, sometimes animated against sold-colour backgrounds, sometimes outdoors. Like an abstract painting come to life

Dialtone (US 2023 Dir Cole Montminy 5 min) 
Two fuzzy needle-felt characters – neighbours, in fact – run around embracing, fighting and answering telephones. This is the realm of the soft and the woolly, but in a wholly unexpected register, both unsettling and grotesque.  

Lake Monsters (Canada 2018 Dir Hiné Mizushima 3 min) 
An embroidered music video featuring a form of Japanese embroidery called Kogin, a folk craft originating in the north of Japan. The director used special Japanese Kogin fabrics and threads which she hand-dyed to the desired colours. 

Enough (UK 2018 Dir Anna Mantzaris 2 min) 
This funny, relatable, animation features felted-wool characters who in various ways have had ‘enough’ and begin acting on their impulses. A glorious ode to moments of lost self-control.