Featured Artist: Sharon Costello

Artist’s Statement

Sharon Costello started as a fiber artist in the mid 1980’s with a small flock of sheep and a love of creative experimentation. She has been a full time, professional feltmaker since 1995. She is well known for her prize winning needle felted art dolls and felted vessels. She has studied feltmaking in the US, Turkey and Scandinavia and shared her knowledge of the craft teaching workshops throughout the USA, Canada and Europe. She has also worked in Guatemala (Mayan Hands), Mongolia, and Kyrgyzstan (Snow Leopard Trust) designing felt products for economic development projects and training indigenous women in feltmaking.

Sharon has produced six popular teaching videos: Introduction to Needle Felting: Sculpting a Doll; Needle Felting Animals; Painting with Wool; Featherweight Felt: Making Felt Scarves; Nuno Felt; and Wet Felting. Her work has been featured in several books:1000 Artisan Textiles (Quarry Books), 500 Felt Objects (Lark Books), Uniquely Felt (Storey Publishing), How We Felt, (Interweave Press), 500 Handmade Dolls (Lark Books), Needle Felt (Felt Crafts), Yet More Felt in the Kitchen and Felt Figures Great and Small (Ewa Kuniczak).

She has written articles on feltmaking and been featured in several magazines including Shuttle, Spindle and Dyepot (Handweavers’ Guild of America), Fiber Arts, Spin-off and Felt (Interweave Press), Echoes (International Feltmakers’ Association), North American Felters’ Network, Cloth Doll Magazine, Soft Dolls and Animals Magazine, and Hudson Valley Magazine. Her work has been featured in one woman and group shows from New York to California, as well as on the Home and Garden Television Network. Her feltmaking business, Black Sheep Designs, specializes in feltmaking kits and supplies. Sharon has a design degree from Syracuse University and an MBA from the State University of New York at Albany.