Painting with Wool: Wet Felting (Beginner)
Sunday, November 22, 2026 | 1-4 PM
FREE
This workshop has been developed exclusively for Immigrant, Refugee, and Newcomer participants, with thanks to Toronto Arts Council Funding via their Newcomer and Refugee Arts Engagement program.
This workshop introduces participants to wet felting as a tactile and accessible textile practice. Using wool roving, warm water, soap, and simple reusable tools, participants will learn how loose fibres can be layered and transformed into a cohesive textile through touch, pressure, movement, and time.
Rather than approaching the process as traditional image-making, participants will be encouraged to think of wool as a form of paint: fibres can be placed, blended, layered, shifted, obscured, and built up to create colour fields, abstract forms, patterns, textures, and symbols.
The workshop is structured to support both individual exploration and collective exchange. As participants work alongside one another, the shared process creates opportunities for conversation and connection without requiring anyone to disclose personal experiences. The finished panel becomes a small textile record of the participant’s choices and process, a material expression of home, whether that home is remembered, imagined, inherited, newly created, or continually changing.
This is a beginner-friendly workshop with no previous weaving experience required. All materials and step-by step guidance will be provided.
For any accessibility needs, please email Marium Durrani (mdurrani@textilemuseum.ca).
This workshop is part of the Museum’s workshop series: Liminal Threads. In this workshop series, the Museum aims to create space for newcomers, refugees, and immigrants, where they can bridge the divide of settling in Canada. Taught by local Immigrant, Refugee, and/or Newcomer artists, participants learn new modes of sustainable thinking, textile making techniques, and creating new community. We would like to thank the Toronto Arts Council Strategic Funding: Newcomer and Refugee Arts Engagement, for funding this program.
Facilitator Bio:
Camilla Leonelli Calzado is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher whose practice explores diasporic memory, transculturation, and the material languages of home. Born in Santiago de Cuba and raised in Canada, her work navigates the space between cultural inheritance and geographic distance. By treating treating textiles as both method and archive, Camilla reimagines how everyday materials can carry personal and collective histories. Her work is committed to accessibility, community engagement, and expanding the role of craft within contemporary art discourse.
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