Felt with us: holding creativity, community and connection

There is something special about making art in a place where another artist once lived and worked.

On Saturday, October 3, I’ll be teaching a wet-felting workshop at the Olive Rush Historic Artist Home & Garden at 630 Canyon Road in Santa Fe. For three hours, we’ll gather with wool, plant fibers, warm water, soap, and our hands to experience the transformation of loose fibers into sculptural felt.

But the place where we’ll be making feels just as important as what we’ll make.

An Artist’s Home as a Vessel

Painter Olive Rush moved to Santa Fe in 1920, at age 47, and purchased the adobe home at 630 Canyon Road from the Rodriguez-Seña family, who had farmed the property for more than 200 years.

Rush transformed the front room into her studio and created a life there centered around art, friendship, spirituality, and community. She added spaces that she often rented to other artists and established a garden beneath century-old apple trees, adding fruit trees, grapes, vegetables, shrubs, and flowers. Friends and neighbors gathered at her home for dinners, teas, parties, conversation, and creative exchange.

Rush was also part of Canyon Road at a remarkable moment in its history. When she purchased her home in 1920, she was among the street’s early artists. As more artists and creative people arrived, her house and garden became a gathering place within this developing artistic community.

Today, the home still contains traces of her creative life: her studio, paintings, frescos and painted decorations, furniture, brushes and art materials, along with the garden that was so important to her. The nonprofit that now cares for the property is intentionally returning it to its historic role as a place for art, community, and creative exploration.

That history inspired the theme of our workshop: the vessel as a container for creativity, community, and connection.

What Can a Vessel Hold?

A vessel can hold something physical—flowers, stones, seeds, treasured objects, or things gathered from the landscape.

But I’m also interested in what a vessel can hold metaphorically.

A home can be a vessel.
A garden can be a vessel.
A studio can be a vessel.
Our hands can hold knowledge and memory.
A gathering of people can create a temporary container for conversation, experimentation, and connection.

During our afternoon together, each participant will create a vessel of their own.

We’ll begin with loose wool and plant fibers and slowly build layers around a resist. With warm water, soap, movement, pressure, and patience, those individual fibers begin to entangle and strengthen until they become a seamless three-dimensional form.

It’s one of the things I love most about wet felting: you participate in the transformation, but you don’t completely control it.

The material responds.

Felting as a Mindful Creative Practice

My workshops combine technical fiber-art instruction with mindfulness, curiosity, and material exploration.

Wet felting is particularly suited to this approach because it is such a physical and sensory process. You feel the temperature of the water, the softness of loose wool, the resistance gradually developing beneath your hands, and eventually the moment when something that began as fragile fiber becomes strong enough to hold its own form.

There is repetition. There is movement. There are moments that require concentration and others when your hands can simply work.

I’ll guide participants through the entire process, from laying out fibers to shaping and finishing a three-dimensional vessel, while also encouraging everyone to experiment and respond to their materials.

You don’t need to have felted before.

You don’t even need to think of yourself as an artist.

Beginners and experienced makers are equally welcome.

Finding Inspiration in an Artist’s Home

I find historic artists’ homes particularly inspiring because they allow us to encounter artists differently than we do in museums.

Instead of seeing only a finished painting or sculpture, we can spend time within the environments where creative lives actually unfolded.

There are worktables and windows. Gardens and kitchens. Collections of objects. Half-practical decisions about where to put supplies. Places where someone sat, thought, experimented, entertained friends, looked outside, abandoned ideas, and began again.

At Olive Rush’s home, visitors can still see her painting corner beside a north-facing window, her easel and brushes, painted cabinets, pottery, textiles, frescos, garden furniture, and the spaces where art and everyday life overlapped.

Spending time in places like this reminds me that an artistic practice isn’t only the work that eventually hangs on a wall.

It is also a way of inhabiting a place.

And sometimes stepping into another artist’s environment can shake something loose in our own thinking. We notice a color combination, a garden path, an old tool, the quality of afternoon light through a window—or simply the evidence of another person having built a creative life there.

That can be enough to make us want to make something ourselves.

Artists as Spiritual Adventurers

In 1925, Olive Rush wrote:

“Artists are spiritual adventurers, and the strange beauty of the Southwest invites us to dare all things.”

Nearly a century later, her home is once again becoming a place where contemporary and historic stories meet and where art is not only displayed, but taught and practiced.

I love the word dare in Rush’s statement.

Making doesn’t always require a grand gesture. Sometimes daring can simply mean working with a material you’ve never touched before. Letting go of what you think the finished piece should look like. Following an unexpected texture. Slowing down enough to notice what your hands are doing.

On October 3, we’ll spend an afternoon doing exactly that.

We’ll make with wool, water, and our hands in a home and garden that have held more than a century of art, friendship, contemplation, and creative exchange.

And we’ll each leave carrying a vessel of our own.

Join Me at Olive Rush

Wet-Felted Vessels: Holding Creativity, Community & Connection
Saturday, October 3 | 1–4 pm
Olive Rush Historic Artist Home & Garden
630 Canyon Road, Santa Fe, New Mexico

All materials are provided, and no previous felting experience is necessary. Beginners and experienced makers are warmly welcome.

Come spend an afternoon slowing down, learning the transformative process of wet felting, and making something entirely your own in one of Santa Fe’s incredible historic artist homes.

Space is limited. Register here.