- About Felt rocks
Felt rocks are sculptural pieces, made from 100% pure wool felt - solid all the way through, and are individually hand dyed in a painstaking process. felt rocks come in sets of 5 hand selected rocks, contained within a natural grey wool felt bag. The rocks vary in shape in size, but average about 4-6 inches across.
Part discovery, part invention, felt rocks in their raw form are lumps of felt formed as a byproduct in the industrial process of making felt polishing wheels for optical lenses. Small bits of wool fluff gather more and more felt fiber, growing like snowballs, as they tumble around in a big drum with the polishing wheels. Each wool fiber is a tiny hollow tube with burred sides. In the felting process, with steam and pressure, these little hollow tubes become entangled with each other forming a strong bond without any glues or binders. Like rocks formed by the tumbling action of a river, each piece takes on a unique shape. The pieces are selected, processed and finished through a series of steps into the final product - felt rocks.
Felt rocks have a tactile, sculptural, curiosity that mysteriously attracts children and grown ups alike. After watching children and adults play with the felt rocks, balancing, building and imagining that they are everything from telephones to landforms to creatures they talk to…we realized that the material palate of toys is mostly plastic, occasionally wood and almost always made into predetermined, realistic figures, animals, spaceships, guns, cars…it seems there should be more room for imagination and exploration.
Enjoy!
- About the designers
Stephanie Forsythe and Todd MacAllen of Forsythe + MacAllen Design, have been operating a multi-disciplinary design studio since 1996 and are currently based in Vancouver, Canada. Their early projects, before and after earning their Masters Degrees in Architecture in 2000, were a series of houses in Canada and the United States that they both designed and built. These projects have since won international awards and have been published in several design and architecture books and magazines around the world.
Forsythe + MacAllen have always endeavored for hands on experience in making whatever they design. This represents a fundamental part of their ongoing exploration; a need for ideas to pass from mind to hands and back again, ingraining a sense of materiality, making, space and experience. Forsythe + MacAllen work back and forth between the intimate scale of furniture and objects to the larger scale of buildings, landscapes and cities. Product design allows them to experiment directly and quickly with materials, and variations of these material studies are also investigated at the scale of Architecture. Working at the smaller scale with materials heightens their sense of the scale of the body and human experience in Architecture. Conversely, the furniture design benefits from the perspective of thinking in the greater context of place.
- About Molo Design
molo, based in Vancouver, Canada, is a design studio dedicated to materials research and an exploration of space making. As a design and manufacturing company, molo creates and distributes unique and innovative products to clients around the world.
The design of molo products grows from Forsythe + MacAllen’s architectural explorations, inspired by the idea that smaller tactile objects and elements can have a real potency in the physical experience of a space. molo’s float tea lantern and paper softwall exemplify ideas of intimate, temporal space making and the original thinking behind all molo products. float glassware and the soft line of products in particular have received numerous international awards, and molo’s softwall has been acquired into the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, in New York.
molo is led by Stephanie Forsythe (B.EDS, M.ARCH), Todd MacAllen (B.FA, B.EDS, M.ARCH) and Robert Pasut (B.COM, MBA), providing a depth of talent and experience in design and international business.
molo’s products are offered internationally through a select network of resellers, and directly from molo. We invite you to visit our site regularly to learn more about our company and products, as new explorations come to fruition.
[ Read more of Molo Design here ]
