Meet the Maker Crafting Stunning Home Accents from Handmade Felt
Fog & Fury founder Kristin Colombano creates beautiful, tactile upholstery, pillows, and home accents from handcrafted felt in rich, earthy colors
The first time Kristin Colombano experienced what she’ll now describe as “real” felt, in a tiny shop in Mongolia, she didn’t realize it would become her life’s work. “When I was in that shop in Ulaanbaatar, it felt really different,” she recalls, comparing the handmade material she discovered there to the craft and industrial varieties she had previously experienced. “I had a bit of an ‘aha’—I didn’t walk away going ‘I’m going to make felt now’ but that was a real changing point.”
Though the felt she saw in Mongolia wasn’t quite her aesthetic (“very crafty, not very elegant”), the impact lingered.
Back in San Francisco, searching for art classes for her children, she stumbled across an adult felting workshop. “That’s when my problems began,” she jokes. “It’s a love affair, essentially. I really love making this. The more I make it, and the more I think about it, I realize that I chose it and it chose me.”
What began as an exploration quickly became an obsession. After that inaugural adult class, she spent several years studying her newfound love, through weekend workshops led by artisans considered rock stars in the felt-making field, and a lot of trial and error in creating and honing designs, selecting materials and mastering surface textures.
In 2016 she launched Fog & Fury. “I liked the symbolism of both words, and thought it spoke to a duality of calm and reflective with wild and forceful,” she said of the name. “Fog is obviously a weather feature specific to San Francisco that also works for my water-based process. And I once heard another maker say wool felting was described as ‘the angry fiber’ because it takes intense pressure and agitation to transform wool into felt fabric. I leaned into that fire-in-the belly meets the divine in choosing ‘fury.’”
Felting gave Colombano, who graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute with a double major in painting and photography, something that her earlier textile excursions in knitting and weaving never quite did. “I think one of the reasons why I like felt-making as a textile more than others is because it does relate back to my painting days where it is a blank canvas,” she says. “I can start anywhere, at any time, with any layer. I can go top down, I can start from the corner, I can start from the middle. It’s this incredible freedom.”
It is also incredibly laborious, a process that requires vision, muscle and a lot of patience. Her efforts were not for naught. A designer friend encouraged her to show her work to DeSousa Hughes, one of San Francisco’s top trade showrooms. Their response was an immediate and enthusiastic “yes.”
Others followed, including Thomas Lavin in Los Angeles and Trammell-Gagné in Seattle. Since then, the likes of Nicole Hollis, Jay Jeffers, Anne-Marie Barton, Kendall Wilkinson, and Geoffrey De Sousa have specified her designs, from throws and pillows to custom yardage for upholstery. But Colombano isn’t resting on her laurels. “It’s a real challenge to get people to learn about [felt], understand it, and want to use it or choose it,” she admits. “It is different. But it’s also so rare and unusual, and so spectacularly beautiful.”