When Rachelle Royer-Llamas creates an ‘earth ball’ out of raw wool, it’s not as much about the finished product as it is about the process.
“I give my work to people and ask them to pray for the Earth and to take a deep breath,” Royer-Llamas says. “It means more than just creating something from wool.”
In the past, Royer-Llamas has completed painting and murals — she has always had an artistic spirit, she says — but when she picked up a needle and wool and started felting several years ago, she fell in love.
Needle felting is a process using barbed needles to interlock wool fibers to form a more condensed material. Wool fibers have scales that, when rubbed against each other, catch and lock into place to create a denser material called felt. Needles entangle the fibers.
According to Royer-Llamas, the first thing she does when she starts a project is grab the wool with her hands and smell it.
“It’s tangible and smells like lanolin,” she says.
In this, she is an “experimental learner,” always taking chances and seeing what will happen if she tries something a little different each time.
“I started out mostly giving my work as gifts, but the more I got into it, the more pieces I made, and now I’m showing them and selling them,” Royer-Llamas says. “I found a medium I’m most comfortable with at this point.”
Her pieces have been hanging in McCusker’s Market in Buckland for the past month. The show will end Saturday, but she says she’s always looking for other places to show her work. The local artist from Conway says she’s open to anything.
“I love walking into my friends’ and family’s homes and seeing something I made hanging or sitting there,” she says. “This is truly my passion, and more than that, I love sharing it with others.”
Royer-Llamas, whose sister-in-law is also her best friend — that’s how she met her husband — draws artistic inspiration from women’s circle she attends in Montague. She says it has helped her focus and finds herself producing a lot more than she expects.
“I love making felted flowers and indoor toys so much,” she says. “The toys are really good for children, because they can throw them at each other and not get hurt.”
Born in Lowell, Royer-Llamas went to the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, where she lived for several years. She moved to Western Massachusetts in 1989.
“My love of nature brought me here from the city, which was too loud and hectic for me,” she says. “I was doing African dance at the time, so I found places out here that offered it. I had to keep my creative juices flowing until I found what I really wanted to do.”
Later, she attended Blazing Star Herbal School in Ashfield and worked in administration, then with youths for a while and later at Mole Hollow Candle in the accounts department. All along, Royer-Llamas says she knew she was an artist at heart and, at one point, created artistic signs for the candle maker that once sat above the potholes in Shelburne Falls.
“A while back, I started talking with local artists who were promoting good things for the community, nature and the arts,” she says. “I wanted to be with them in that, so I decided to change my course.”
With that, she started looking into mini-grants that help artists concentrate on their art, and received a lot of encouragement from other artists.
“They were encouraging me to find my niche,” she says. “I moved to the hills of Conway after I got married in 2012, and started felting.”
She has spent the last eight years focusing on what she loves — wool. She learned felting from a sheep farmer who had set up at the Farmers Market in Greenfield. These days, she offers workshops now and then, and hopes to start teaching soon and would like to see her business, Wool Works, grow. She has her own “felting space” in her home.
“I like to teach,” she says. “I first took a felting class in Northfield where they used cookie cutters, a felting needle and some wool. Then, we were off. The first piece I made was a small dragonfly.”
Personally, Royer-Llamas says she is drawn to the dragonfly because she says it has helped her along her path and sometimes just through the day, so she likes to start there.
“I call on my helper — the dragonfly — whenever I get discouraged or feel like I can’t finish a project,” Royer-Llamas says.
Many years ago, she told someone wool was her future and that she would be doing something with it for the rest of her life. She never dreamed she’d be so happy about it.
“I’m always learning, and always willing to teach someone what I know,” she says. “I love that I work with my hands now,” she says. “I’ve tried a lot of different things in my life, but this is it, my passion. Needle felting nurtures me, calms me. I want to give that feeling to others and to the world.”
While some of her pieces are for sale, she isn’t quite ready to let go of others. Everything is one-of-a-kind, even if two people want a dragonfly, for instance, because she makes each with a little something different, in a different way.
In her experience, some people want useful things, like baskets or wall hangings, while others just want something that’s beautiful and has meaning, of some sort, to them. Regardless, she says that each time she picks up a needle and wool, something magical happens.
Royer-Llamas buys her wool from local retailers, because, she says, the material “speaks” to her when she knows someone local took the time to get it ready for sale.
“Each time I buy wool, it leads me to something new,” she says. “I love the way it stretches and how it feels when it comes out of the washing machine, though I don’t always wash it, because I like it raw.”
Royer-Llamas says wool and a felting needle changed her life and she will be forever grateful for finding it.
Her sister-in-law, Kathy Llamas, says she sees this first hand. When she watches Royer-Llamas do her felting, she realizes it envelops her.
“You can see Rachelle in her pieces,” Llamas says. “It’s a process of discovery for her each and every time. It’s beautiful to watch.”
Most of all, through her art, Royer-Llamas says it’s important for her to be playful with her craft, because playing leads to discovery.
“I love that kind of freedom,” she says.
For more information about Royer-Llamas and Wool Works, email her at rachellemroyer@yahoo.com.
Reach Anita Fritz at 413-772-0261, ext. 5269, or afritz@recorder.com.