Lakeland PBS presents Common Ground brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

Production funding of Common Ground is made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji, continuing their second century of service to the community.

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Welcome to Common Ground.

I'm producer-director Scott Knutson.

In the second of a two-part series Alethea Kenny and Linda Johnson-Morke take us through the process of the tapestry felted traditional Mongolian yurt project.

I've had the yurt project as a bucket list item.

I used to own a Kazakh yurt that was made in a factory but when we moved the last time my husband said you have to sell it and so I said okay I'll sell it, but the agreement is that I was able to use that money and buy Karakul sheep, whose wool is able to felt really well to make my own yurt.

I shared this story with Alethea at a fiber festival and she couldn't stop thinking about it and so she reached out to me and said if we put together a grant, would you be willing to lead the project to felt the outer covering of a yurt and I didn't think twice.

I said yes.

I'm in.

You know, when we started this, of course, I was so excited about yurts and I told my husband, oh I want a yurt.

I want a yurt please, I should get a yurt, we should get a yurt and that worked out grand because as I was working with Groovy Yurts, they said, you know, we can deliver two yurts for the same prices as we could deliver one yurt and so what that allowed us to do was I could get my cool little yurt, that once you start seeing the traditional Mongolian yurt, you go, oh yeah my yurt's cool but not quite as cool but it allowed us to half the amount of shipping because then I went ahead and paid for half of my shipping and the project only had to pay for half shipping, So, that allowed us a little bit of wiggle room again on monetary and financial and that helped us out a little bit and it was fun for me because then I get to learn how to put together a yurt and take it down and move it.

Alethea is part of the Sustainable Sheep and Fiber Community of northern Minnesota who is a co-sponsor of this project and many of the people who contributed were part of that community.

These were women and a few men who also contributed who came together for two weeks in Bemidji, Minnesota in 2020 and once all the wool was gathered these people got down on their hands and knees and laid out these beautiful pictures in wool on this ger.

It's hard to do an outline so just do the solid course.

What made this art really more than skill and technical was we wanted to not only make our traditional walls out of wool felt but we wanted to be able to have something that would be art, that would provide a learning experience for people who saw the finished yurt and so Linda designed with the help of Deborah McQueen-Coder, a mural, a scene that starts at one side of the yurt, goes all the way around.

So, if you walk all the way around this you'll have a completed scene and in this scene you start with tapestry felt technique.

We did characters that were starting with the sheep.

They were cutting the wool off the sheep.

They were laying it out and Linda showed us, demonstrated all of this for us and showed us what what you would do as you laid that wool out.

How would you separate that out?

Completely different than what we would do here now in modern times.

So, this is wool that's already been sheared off the sheep.

We want to make felt out of this wool.

In order to do that you need three things.

The first thing is a natural fiber from an animal which we have here, which is sheep's wool but the issue is it needs to be in a random arrangement and the wool we have here is not in a random arrangement because it's exactly the way it came off the sheep.

So, we need to put it in a random arrangement and the way we traditionally do that in Mongolia is to turn it around and beat it and fluff it with sticks.

So, it's one pull, one pull,one pull and we're going to get a rhythm.

So, Alethea, now flip it, yep again pull.

We actually intentionally do things more primitively.

So, I keep sheep who, they are primitive breeds.

I have crosses now that are crosses of two different primitive breeds and they will shed out in the spring.

It's called ruing and we don't think of sheep as shedding.

We think you have to shear sheep.

Well primitive breeds you don't.

They would have shed out.

That was normal.

I mean, you know, your dog sheds out and horses shed out in the spring.

Sheep would have shed out in the spring.

We bred that out of them and I think a lot of the reason we did it was because once you started shearing rather than plucking that off as it came off, which is not, okay today we're going to go out and we're going to do all the sheep process.

Is that sheep look like it's ready?

That one might be ready.

This one's not.

It could be a month before this one starts to shed out even though this one's completely shed.

So, there's not this easy management.

I was fortunate enough to able to travel to Mongolia about four and a half to five years after it became an independent republic and so I knew how the Mongolians traditionally made felt for their yurts and I knew we could do it.

We had the wool.

We had the technology and so we just needed the community to be able to pitch in and get it done.

It also releases any vegetable matter if there is some, you know, because the sheep are outside in the grass, get weed, seeds.

How would you wash it?

How do you get ready to felt it?

All of this is depicted in a mural of a traditional way to do this and as you walk around this finished yurt, you see in the background there's a river.

So, they had to have the water in order to do the felts.

There's the mountains in the background and in the foregrounds you see the scenes of the different people working with the wool and bringing it to completion and it's a fascinating process from beginning to end.

I also wanted to be able to tell a story with the yurt.

So, there's different panels that tell the story of how the Mongols would prepare the wool and make the felt for their gers or their yurts and I am not a grandiose artist but I was able to reach out to Deb Coder and she agreed to work up some sketches for me so that we could have some artwork on the outside of the yurt, to tell the story and to have it be an educational tool.

She took plastic and she kind of lightly drew in what we were going to be doing and you lay out the wool design in the colored wool that you want it in and then you take some spray soap and kind of spray it onto that plastic to sort of hold it there.

So, we call our yurt a wet tapestry inlay technique that's used in felt.

So, it started out with the sketches from Deb Coder and I worked with her a lot to understand what kind of detail we could display after it's felted because during the felting process things actually shrink and so things change.

We wanted to be able to get the point across in the picture and get enough detail but not too much so that it would get muddied.

So, we used mostly natural wools, different colors on the outside with the exception of a blue river that runs through it because water is so important to felting and also to the culture of of anybody's culture.

It's important to life.

So, the river runs all the way around all the panels of the yurt and that we use dyed blue locks for but the remainder is all very natural colors which we laid out after we got the sketches kind of blown up into a large format that's going to be the size of the yurt walls and then carefully get the wool wet and lay them out individually.

This took a lot of time to lay out the actual shapes of the people and the work that they're doing and the animals on the outside of the yurt.

So, individual locks were used, very small pieces of wool and then it's stabilized by using a rather large bat, working that all together so that the fibers intertwine just like our lives.

We had local shepherds and anyone who had some wool they wanted to donate, we had well over 200 pounds of donated wool that we were able to take to St. Peter and they were processing that into bats for us and those bats became the walls So, we have quite a few different shepherds who donated wool whose sheep now are incorporated into this project which was part of the community aspect of this.

So, we spent a lot of time on our hands and knees getting the artwork just right.

Everyone had their own little section.

Some people like to do animals, other people wanted to do the people and do the faces.

I personally am not very good at faces but other people love that challenge and everyone I think worked at their best speed and we were able to get that yurt completed with beautiful scenes.

In order to do that, it takes little bitty finger movements and carefully laying out the pre-wetted fiber along the lines, to kind of painting with wool is the way it's described a lot of times but it's very intricate and it takes quite a bit of time and a lot of willing hands to be able to do that but we had that and people were very, very interested in doing their best work.

And then you apply the back of our wall which would at that point be wool bats that we had done at St. Peter Woolen Mill.

Here's a white thing underneath and then you can really see that you're making progress.

That's amazing!

It's like when you drum parting and then you look at the trend and you think, so it still needs work.

It does.

If it feels lumpy then that's not good.

Right.

So, it still needs a little bit of work but it's much much different than what we started out with.

Isn't it?

Yeah.

What kind of wool is that?

It's Karakul.

A first, it's a fall shearing from a ewe.

So, it's shorter than it would normally be.

What you would do, let's pretend this is done.

This is rolled this way because what they would do this to prepare the wool so then you have to store it, right?

So, this is rolled up much tighter.

So, if you want to grab that end Alethea and keep twisting in that direction, keep twisting, pull pull, there good, good, good.

Twist again, pull.

Okay twist tight now, twist really, really tight and then go like this and let it twist on back of itself and that's how they would have the fleece stored until they would lay it out for felting.

And you can see all of the, you know, this vegetable matter here that got, that was out of the wool.

So, it does a two-fold thing, separates it and then gets all the vegetable matter off which now is on the tarps.

Now we have all of our beautiful pictures fastened to a rather thin piece of wool.

It's very delicate at this stage.

Now we're going to stack for the thickness of felt.

The felt that we have on the yurt is between three quarters of an inch and an inch thick.

So, we laid out wool a true full foot thickness of wool over the top of these beautiful drawings again made with wool and now we had to get that wet.

That took a lot of water and so we needed a lot of water brought up.

We got it all wet and saturated because that wool needs to be saturated with that moisture and then we had to very carefully roll it up.

Now this was extremely heavy at this time so it took a lot of teamwork to be able to roll this up and get it transported to where we were actually going to do the ongoing rolling which was in a horse pasture.

Traditionally, after the felt is rolled up, it would have been wrapped in a fresh Yak hide because rawhide is like the original Spandex.

It's very stretchy and it would hold that wool nice and tight and keep it clean too and it would have been pulled across the steps behind a horse.

We didn't have a horse at our disposal, so we pulled it behind a Durango in one of the member's horse pasture.

She helped us understand how you build that up.

How would you make these be a three-dimensional wall and then what do you do to actually make this be felt and of course you have to have water.

It helps to have heat and then you have to have some kind of pressure or agitation and so she taught us how to do all of that and then traditionally what you would have done is you would have taken that slightly felted wall and you would have rolled it up and you would have drug it behind a horse because it would have rolled, you know, picture a wheel that's got an axle going through the middle of it and if you had wrapped something around that wheel as you turn the axle the wheel turns and this stuff just keeps turning and turning well that's a pressure and an agitation and so you would traditionally have drug that behind horses on the felt road in Mongolia.

They had a particular area that they would do this and they would go back and forth with these horses dragging this behind it until these walls had solidified and they would unroll them to see how they thickened up, had they become as strong and as hard as they needed them to be, to be lasting walls and we had an added step because we did a mural which would not be traditional and we did that so that we would have that design.

We would have that art and education on the outside of that so that you could see it.

So, we learned a lot and we now have a piece of art that helps with the education aspect and brings more of the Mongolian culture.

During the rolling process, we had to start out very slow and careful.

So, we were going at a very slow pace because we want to ensure that the fibers are actually moving and intertwining the way we want them to.

So, we had to go slow and we checked more often and once we were able and sure that, oh yes we've got this the way we want it.

Now it's just a matter, now we're able to move at a much quicker clip and less checks in between so that it can really do its work and the fibers can intertwine and get tighter and tighter and tighter.

I'm tired already.

Okay good job Carrie.

This is a good speed.

After we would roll it around and around and then we would unroll it, check it, add more water in certain areas, re-roll it from a different direction because it would tend to shrink in the direction that we're rolling and then we would once again go around that horse pasture and pull it behind the Durango.

After that we just would keep measuring until it was to size and once we had it to size then we had to rinse all the soap out that we used and give it a final vinegar rinse because wool likes an acid as opposed to a basic situation.

So, at this stage now, we've got it to the size we want.

We've got those fibers intertwined very tightly.

We've rinsed the big piece of felt and we've actually had a final vinegar kind of rinse.

Then we hiked it up on a side of a building and the water just ran out and so it was able to dry on a roof of a shed and it took about the overnight for that to dry and get it all ready to go and then we were able to roll it up and work on the next one.

So, the perfect place to show the finish of our project was the Bemidji Woolen Mill, how it's been in Minnesota for a hundred years and this was the culmination of a Minnesota project.

One of the big parts of this project was the need to get this out in front of people and educate and it was part of our grant, the one that we got, it was continuing education that we needed to do and so we worked with local entities who might want to host this yurt, to get it out into the public, county fairs, fiber festivals, other locations like that and of course most of this got derailed during COVID and last year turned out to be a year where there wasn't a whole lot happening but Linda pulled a rabbit out of a hat as she usually does and was able to have North House Folk School.

They're interested in having her bring the yurt, the Textile Center is going to host it.

I think they've also done a virtual and now that things are more open, of course, she's taking the yurt places.

It's so important I think to show what Minnesota is capable of.

We are some hardy people and we're able to accomplish great things.

So, lately I have been taking the yurt to different states.

So, recently I went to North Dakota and next year I'm planning to go to Michigan and to the Sheep and Wool Festival in Wisconsin and it's so awesome to be able to represent Minnesota fiber artists in this way.

Everywhere I've taken the yurt or the ger people have been so impressed and no one walks away without learning something.

I didn't tell you what happened, so we went to North Dakota last weekend.

So, in North Dakota I'm standing there, we have the yurt set up and I hear this voice wow this is very authentic and I am like, oh that's interesting.

So, she said it again.

Wow, this is very authentic then she took her husband around the yurt and explained the pictures to her and I didn't even do it.

So, I was listening and she goes are you affiliated with this yurt and I said yes I am and she said I grew up in one of these.

So, here's this woman in Fargo, North Dakota who grew up in a ger or in a yurt in Mongolia and it was the most awesome thing that happened that weekend.

It's going to be on tour for at least a year and after that the Sustainable Sheep and Fiber Community of Northern Minnesota would like to work on a lease with Linda in order to have her continue to take that yurt around the state or anywhere else she thinks she can do that and promote because we want to keep it in front of people, because it doesn't do anybody any good if you fold it up and you put it away in a shed.

It's meant to be out and it's meant to be visible and so that was really important to us, is to keep it out there, keep it in front of people, give people an opportunity to see it continuing.

So, as I travel from place to place with the yurt, I think that the best thing that I can achieve is to encourage people to understand that we can live a more sustainable life and to see that people have done this for thousands of years.

It was a community and we had a lot of volunteers who came out and put in hours and hours just to be part of making this, understanding how this goes together, learning techniques and just learning about the Mongolian culture and people.

That's what part of community is, is working together to be able to have something like this and I think that's part of the symbolism to me was, we cannot do this alone.

We couldn't have done it alone.

No one can put a yurt up all by themselves.

It really is a community event.

You cannot make one all by yourself.

You're going from the soil which grows the plants, which support the sheep, which produce the wool, which can be used to make the felts, to insulate this.

The water which feeds all of this, also grows the trees that are used to make the framework.

All of this comes together in a house that symbolically is not meant to last.

It's going to end up turning into soil which supports the plants, which supports the sheep, which produces the wool and all of this is managed by communities of people and I think if there's one take away from that it's the interconnectedness of that and you just cannot get away from it when you see the yurt, when you go through the process, when you see the mural and when you talk to the people.

It was such a great honor to work with the members of the Sustainable Sheep and Fiber Community of Northern Minnesota.

People offered their buildings.

Trudy offered her the use of her buildings and offered me a place to stay, as did Carrie Jensen offered the use of their horse pasture and their Durango, without that we would not have been able to accomplish this project.

I wanted to thank the people and the organizations that helped make this possible, of course Region 2 Arts Council and their grant program which is just fantastic and I cannot recommend highly enough.

We want to thank them but we also had some individual sponsors, Back in Balance Minerals, Bear Dan Handwovens, Marsh Creek Crossing Farm and North Central Feed Products were instrumental in helping support this project and of course we had a myriad of volunteers and board members who came out, who really went out of their way to spend hours and hours to make this happen.

Linda, of course, was really great about that, Deborah McQueen-Coder as well and some of our board members who donated their time and their resources to make this happen.

When the last place I went, people said this belongs in a museum and I would hope someday that perhaps this is in a museum for more people to see.

The mural that we've done, being art and the takeaway from that I would say as they can see that it doesn't have to be complicated.

Here's a people that took sheep and some wood that grow along the river and they made a shelter and it's a shelter that's it's winterized.

You can you can live in the winter in a yurt, you know, you could go through a northern Minnesota winter in a traditional yurt.

Wool is very insulative, it resists water.

Take away the connection that comes from going from sheep, all the way to shelter and having a shelter that it's not meant to last.

You know, every so many years they're going to be replacing felts.

They get together as a community.

They make another wall felt to replace this felt.

They use that felt on the floor.

It's just a cycle.

Everything is a circular cycle and we've gotten away from that I think in our culture and it's nice just to see that circle from beginning and you can't say beginning to end because it's a circle.

There's no beginning and end and that's what I want people to take away.

It's a circle.

Thank you for watching.

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