Monster Felt project a convergence of stitches, steps in Vancouver woman’s life

When Janice Arnold was a little child, she and her whole family used to spend their weekends surveying Clark County: Driving around and measuring roads for father Phil Arnold, who worked with his kids’ calculations, a slide rule and India ink to make maps that are still treasured around here.

“We didn’t have toys, we had tools,” Janice Arnold said. “I’ve always been a maker. I learned to make and sew.”

But Arnold never thought of herself as an artist, she said. She took high school art and studied “textile traditions” from around the world, she said — but didn’t really feel any magic until she was commissioned by Nordstrom to make felt sculptures for store windows. Her feltmaking textbook for that project was a National Geographic magazine about Mongolians who compressed wool into felt by rolling huge, heavy swaths of it behind horses; eventually she visited Nepal and Kyrgyzstan and Mongolia, learning directly from felt makers who’ve been practicing their art in the same way for 6,000 years, she said.

“The fiber turned to fabric in my hands,” she said. “That was my ‘aha!’ moment.”

Back in Washington, Arnold was contacted by Tieton Arts and Humanities, near Yakima, to create an immense felt carpet that could be used for everything from a soft platform for barefoot dance parties to a beautiful backdrop for performances. That’s what led to Monster Felt, an ongoing community (and potentially global) art project that spans everything from ancient feltmaking traditions to Phil Arnold’s meticulous drawings of Clark County landmarks and lines. (Phil Arnold died in 2012 at age 96.)

On Thursday and Friday, Janice Arnold took part in the weeklong Vancouver Chautauqua festival, hosted by The Historic Academy, by displaying a 15-by-32-foot rectangle of felt she made in 2012 in Tieton with a group of community assistants who added blue edging, wool fiber and a layer of netting, then rolled and unrolled it all, wetted and dried it, and spent hours walking around and eventually dancing upon it.

Felt is a miracle material, Arnold believes, because it’s not woven together — it’s simply compressed and compressed some more, until its internal structure becomes amazingly strong and unified. Then if you slice through the fabric, she added, its fascinating inner contours are revealed like geologic layers in the landscape.

Arnold, now based in Olympia but “increasingly itinerant,” is pretty sure her Monster Felt is the largest piece of handmade felt in the nation. “I don’t know anybody else who has attempted to make a big thick slab like this,” she said — and she added that lifting this and other huge hunks has had a major impact on her body: “I have had both my hips replaced because of this medium,” she said. “It is my passion and my quest.”

Experienced and newbie stitchers showed up for four different sessions on Thursday and Friday at the Providence Academy building, where they heard Arnold’s story and the story of ancient feltmaking before taking up needles and threads and stitching a 1981 Phil Arnold map, in silk sections, into the edges of Monster Felt. They traced the very roadways, streams, town boundaries and little landmarks that Arnold drew by hand, decades ago — adding both stability and symbolism to the piece.

“Clark County is the foundation of my life,” Arnold said, so she wanted Clark County — and her father’s lines — to frame what’s evolved into a larger, longer map project. (She didn’t see that coming, she said: “I make it up as I go along. I listen to the material. What does this project want next?”) As she travels the world and holds more Monster Felt workshops, folks in all sorts of far-flung places will stitch their own local maps to the center of the piece, section by section, she said. “Everyone can map where they are,” she said. I am so jazzed about this being a community effort — from many communities, all around the world.” This fall, she said, she’ll be in Azerbaijan.

Back in the here and now, Arnold urged her visitors to take a mindful, in-the-moment approach to their labors. She wasn’t after technical perfection, she said, but an authentic social experience as her stitchers worked and chatted side by side, just the way they would have done throughout Asian feltmaking history.

“Some lines are heavy and some lines are very faint, just like the roads of our own lives,” she said. “Each stitch is a step. We take our lives in steps, one step at a time.”