ELY — Take a large handful of clean, naturally colored wool and start poking it with a barbed needle, and something magical happens.
The barbs in the needle start “felting” the wool into a stiffer three-dimensional shape, and once the final shape is created, after literally thousands of pokes in and out, layers of colorful dyed wool are slowly added, poke by poke, to give the creation its final form.
“I like that you can create anything you want to,” said Zoe Lampman, a needle-felting artist who will be displaying her wares at the Ely Blueberry/Art Festival this weekend.
This art form requires only a few simple and inexpensive tools and materials, but does require an artist’s eye, a steady hand, lots of patience, and a tolerance for occasional finger pricks by the very sharp needle.
Lampman likes to create whimsical animals and fantastical creatures, but she can also create realistic replicas of area wildlife and even people’s pets.
Lampman has always been creative, but previously spent her time painting watercolors and doing large paper-mache sculptures. She and her mother created a six-foot-long and five-foot-tall paper-mache moose, which won a top prize at the Ely Greenstone Art Show when she was a senior at Ely Memorial.
“I’ve always been creative,” she said.
Wildlife is a focus of much of her work, though she loves adding brighter colors and non-traditional accessories to her little critters, which led to the name of her businesss, Felted Whimsy Decor.
A history major who also spent a lot of her career working with children, Lampman only started needle-felting a few years ago when her young daughter received a felting kit for Christmas. The kit was a little too complicated for her daughter, who is now 9, but Lampman fell in love with the process.
“I was really good at it,” she said. “I really enjoyed it.”
Her felting prowess is almost entirely self-taught, and learning to get the felted creations the perfect shape and texture is not easy and takes a lot of patience.
“I like being able to make a sculpture without clay or paper-mache,” she said.
She has taken a couple of online classes through the Rustic Fiber Academy. And she was excited to be able to source some of her wools locally from the Eveleth Print Shop and General Store, which sells felting supplies and hand-dyed felting wools.
Last year, she left her job at Ely Community Resources, and then took the leap to being a full-time artist.
She gets her inspiration from the animal world around her, as well as from favorite childhood stories like Beatrix Potter.
“I like to add whimsical details to my little animals,” she said. “I work from my imagination.”
In 2024, she shared a booth at the festival, but this year was ready to stock her own for the three days of sales. She said she learned a lot from last year’s show on what items sell best at the festival, which are the smaller and more whimsical pieces.
Getting ready for Blueberry has been a bit more of a challenge than she initially thought, because at the same time, she is selling her creations to Meadows Gallery in Ely, Siiviis Gallery in Canal Park/Duluth, and Sivertson Gallery in Grand Marais.
“I still have a lot to do to get ready for the festival,” she told the Timberjay on July 11. “I will be working really hard between now the then.” She works out of a small studio space in her home in Ely.
Her best sellers, right now, are smaller pieces that can be used as ornaments: birds, chipmunks, frogs, chickens, otters, bees, and mushrooms, as well as brightly colored monsters straight from her imagination. She also likes to create larger, more realistic felted sculptures and has been taking commissions to create felted three-dimensional portraits of people’s pets.
Whether or not Lampman will continue to work full-time as an artist is uncertain.
“It is a boom-and-bust lifestyle,” she said, “but I am lucky to have a good family support system in Ely.”
You can find Felted Whimsy on Facebook, Instagram (felted_whimsy_decor) and at Booth 57 at this weekend’s festival.