The Newsmagazine of Long Beach Island and Southern Ocean County

By Victoria Ford | on June 29, 2022

PLAYFUL POKE: Setzer brings the ‘felt-by-numbers’ templates for participants to work on.

Fiber artist Sara Setzer brings her love and talent for felting and needlecraft back to the Long Beach Island Foundation of the Arts and Sciences in Loveladies the second week of July. Her popular needle felting class, July 11 and 12, teaches the basics of working with wool and natural fibers. Participants leave with a hoop-framed original artwork of their chosen design, ready to hang.

Design options include the inimitable Barney.

The designs for the class are prepped and stenciled ahead of time, so it’s like a paint-by-numbers situation (minus the paint), Setzer explained – but it’s also a craft-and-gab session, she added with a smile. Or sometimes a quiet settles, when everyone is in the zone, and the only sound is the poking of wool, she said. The process invokes the charm of the traditional folk-art setting where women would sit and quilt or weave for long periods.

Once she gets her students set up and started on their projects, there isn’t much more to teach about, so they’re just working, Setzer explained. She walks around, checks in and offers help if needed, but for the most part it’s an easy technique.

Needle felting is manipulating the wool by poking it with a barbed felting needle. One type of wool can be applied to another, and it just sticks, she said. Wool fibers have scales, so they lock together when agitated. The felt pad, needle and all other materials are provided, so participants need not bring a thing.

The felters leave happy, she said.

She often has repeat participants, so she always looks forward to catching up with friends.

“I miss it down there,” she said.

The Setzer family (Sara and Eric and their two kids, Odin, 10, and Sage, 5) lives in the mountains of Pennsylvania, outside Dushore, about 20 minutes north of Ricketts Glen. But Sara Setzer (née Tillison) is a Manahawkin native, and Eric Setzer grew up in High Bar Harbor. So their annual week on LBI, which coincides with the summer camp (7- to 13-year-olds) and adult needle felting classes Sara teaches at LBIF, is a homecoming, or “working vacation,” as she called it. It’s also a beach birthday celebration for Odin.

Setzer works mainly with wools and silks to create felted and eco-printed items. She makes and dyes her wares by hand. One of her specialized skills is nuno felting, a labor-intensive method of meshing wool and silk together into one fabric, by rolling, felting and fulling, i.e. adding heat/pressure/moisture. By nuno felting, Setzer makes scarves, baby blankets, soaps and other felted goods. Sara Setzer Feltworks encompasses such felted gifts (dryer balls!) and decor as well as wearables and instruction.

The funny thing is, she went to school to tag bears. She was planning to pursue wildlife management and had traveled to Kenya to study.

Felting “is not the type of craft people fall into,” she said, but that’s what happened.

A friend from the Tom Brown Jr.’s Tracker School for wilderness/survival training had a quantity of wool she no longer needed, so she gave it to Setzer, who then schlepped it around for years. One day she dove in and started to play. Right away she loved it. That was 10 or 12 years ago, she recalled.

At first her whole felting hobby fit in a tote bag – then a bigger tote. Before long it got a designated cabinet, room, studio space.

Setzer started selling her work when Odin was about 18 months old. Her public launch of Sara Setzer Feltworks was at the St. Francis Community Center’s holiday craft show. Since then, she has taught herself the ins and outs – that’s a needlecraft joke – of felt, fiber art, running and promoting a business, and art education.

By instructing, she passes along her love of the craft and hopes participants gain something beneficial from it.

A self-taught success, Setzer sometimes pauses to reflect, “Wow, I did this” ­– as in, built a business she’s proud of.

Though she’s not tagging bears, Setzer enjoys living in bear country, where encounters with baby birds and other wildlife occur often and where her surroundings nurture her eco-friendly art by providing plenty of raw materials and inspiration.

Follow Setzer all around the web, on Twitter @SaraSetzerFelt and Instagram @SaraSetzerFeltworks.

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