Handcrafted Living

Felting with Feeling

Based in San Francisco, maker Kristin Colombano’s bespoke, painterly textiles are as dreamy as they are functional.

By Deborah Bishop
November 6, 2025

Winter 2026

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Portrait of Kristin Colombano wrapped in a piece of her handmade felt

Photo by Heidi Zumbrun

Kristin Colombano wraps herself in a piece of her handmade felt, created through an intricate, meditative, and physical process in her San Francisco studio.

Prior to 2010, when Kristin Colombano traveled to Mongolia on a photography assignment, her relationship with felt could be summed up in two words: poodle skirt.

“I think I made one when I was around eight,” says Colombano, now 56, perched on a stool in the San Francisco studio where she fashions the intricately patterned and richly textured felt pillows, throws, bedspreads, bolsters, wall hangings, and upholstery fabric sold under her label, Fog & Fury.

During her stay in Mongolia, Colombano, who studied painting and photography at the San Francisco Art Institute, discovered a textile that had little in common with the thin, mass-produced material used in kids’ crafts or to dampen the sound in pianos.

As Colombano slept snugly inside a felt-draped yurt on the windswept Mongolian plains, she was introduced to the material’s insulative qualities. Once back in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar, she wandered into a shop selling felt souvenirs—scarves, slippers, ornaments—and stood transfixed before a video demonstrating the 5,000-year-old fabrication process.

“The wool was splashed with mare’s milk, rolled into bundles, and dragged behind horses to agitate the fibers into binding and shrinking,” she recalls. A few years later, she came across a wet-felting workshop at the Sharon Arts Studio in Golden Gate Park, signed up on a whim, and was hooked. While Colombano keeps no horses, her labor-intensive technique for turning fiber into fabric without weaving hews closely to those old-school methods; for her, the dry needle-felting process developed in the 1980s tends to result in pieces that are less expressive, robust, and refined.

Photo courtesy of Fog & Fury

Colombano holds a skein of wool.

“Living here informs what I make—the Northern California landscape, palette, ethos, embrace of natural fibers, and the geology.”

— Kristin Colombano

Painting with Fiber

When Colombano embarks on a project, she makes a color sketch, then turns to her shelves, which are piled high with a petting zoo’s worth of assorted wools. Boxes devoted to sheep alone read like a who’s who of ovine breeds—Falkland, Merino, Manx, Rambouillet, Polwarth, Targhee, Corriedale, and Colombano’s favorite workhorse, Bluefaced Leicester (“perfect length, super strong, amazing luster”)—in colors ranging from pale cream to caramel, cocoa, and carbon. These are flanked by repositories of camel, yak, alpaca, rabbit, and three types of goat wool (cashmere, mohair—aka angora—and cashgora, a hybrid).

Like a painter prepping her palette, Colombano cards the wool and creates rolags, or neat little rolls of fiber, often mixing varieties and colors together. Working on top of a textured piece of shelf liner, she then pulls out wisps of wool and begins composing. “There’s no grid, no warp and woof. It’s like drawing or painting on a blank canvas,” says Colombano. As she builds overlapping layers (like arranging shingles on a roof), Colombano embeds what she calls inclusions—non-wool fibers such as silk, flax, and algae-derived SeaCell—that lend luster, color, and texture. Depending on the formula, a pelt might emerge smooth, nubby, silky, fuzzy, matte, shiny, swirly—or sprouting a froth of curly mohair locks.

Photo courtesy of Fog & Fury

Colombano, who started as a painter, incorporates dyes in a composed and considered way, sometimes starting with a watercolor study.

Next, Colombano covers the pile with netting to hold it in place, sprinkles it with soapy water, and rubs the surface with a waffle-patterned tool to help the fibers interlock via the tiny barbed scales that cover them. “And then the gloves come off,” says Colombano with relish, describing how she covers the piece in progress with bubble wrap and vigorously rolls it on plumbing pipes before squeezing, twisting, squishing, mangling, massaging, and repeatedly flinging the wet mass onto her worktable in a process called shocking. After several hours, the fabric shrinks up like a sweater in the dryer and acquires the density, softness, and warmth for which felt is prized. “So, that explains the ‘Fury’ part of my company name,” says Colombano.

As for the “Fog,” Colombano points out the window to a typical misty day in the city by the bay. “Living here informs what I make—the Northern California landscape, palette, ethos, embrace of natural fibers, and the geology,” she says, recalling trips with her father to such landmarks as the Devils Postpile National Monument, an unusual rock formation of columnar basalt near Yosemite. “Many of my patterns reflect the metamorphic processes of rocks, plus a bunch of other topographic, botanical, and cosmic phenomena—from cloud formations to salt deposits,” says Colombano. Her designshave such descriptive names as Strata, Laminae, Stalactite, Streaks, Chevron, Fracture, Whorl, Oxbow, Flare, Halo, Cirrocumulus, and Lunaria, whose delicate scalloped pattern was prompted by that plant’s distinctive dried seed pods.

Photo courtesy of Fog & Fury

Hand-carded green fiber bundles for color sampling.

Photo courtesy of Fog & Fury

To begin the process of wet felting, Colombano sprinkles the wool pile with water.
Photo courtesy of Fog & Fury

Working on a custom ombré felt, Colombano rubs the wet surface with a waffle-patterned tool to encourage the fibers to bond.

“Many of my patterns reflect the metamorphic processes of rocks, plus a bunch of other topographic, botanical, and cosmic phenomena.”

— Kristin Colombano

Expanding the Spectrum

With her visual inspiration so rooted in nature, Colombano long eschewed working with dyed fibers, but eventually took the plunge at the urging of designers who commission her work. “But first, I needed to learn how to exploit all of felt’s possibilities for expression, without any of that shiny distraction,” she says. Once she began to integrate color (using Italian acid-dyed wool), Colombano opted to treat it as an extension of her neutral palette—the dyed shades melding rather than shouting—as if lavender goats and saffron sheep might plausibly be grazing in the fields. “And that’s deliberate,” Colombano explains. “After years of learning how to mix fibers, I gained the confidence to concoct hues that feel subtle and organic rather than artificial or—God forbid—garish.”

Photo courtesy of Fog & Fury

Color Field pillows, 2025, felted wool, camel, yak, silk, 22 x 22 in.

It’s telling that Colombano started out as a painter. When a client asked her to translate the verdant landscape of the Napa Valley into a couch cushion, she first made a watercolor to capture the quality of light bathing the surrounding hills. For Colombano’s collection of Color Field pillows (a shout-out to Mark Rothko’s abstract paintings), she frames floating shapes of color—lilac, sky blue, peach—with an edge of mocha and softens the surface with a lustrous sheen of undyed camel down and mulberry silk.

“Working in this very painterly and considered way has only expanded demand for Kristin’s work,” notes Erik Hughes, cofounder with Geoffrey De Sousa of the De Sousa Hughes showroom in San Francisco, one of Colombano’s early champions. “Another factor has been her artful approach to upholstered furniture,” he adds, indicating a commodious sofa on the showroom floor covered in Colombano’s Steppe pattern, which evokes the Mongolian landscape by striping the Manx sheep’s distinctive, cocoa-colored wool with lines of natural flax. As it happens, felt is ideally suited to home furnishings, because wool’s lanolin content acts like nature’s Scotchgard—rendering it water-repellent, stain resistant, and lightfast.

Sofa in showroom upholstered with brown and white felt by Fog & Fury

Photo by Jose Manuel Alorda

Kimberly Denman’s Grace sofa, 2025, upholstered with Fog & Fury’s Steppe felt, 2024, in the De Sousa Hughes showroom in San Francisco.

Design for Dreaming

Colombano is sought out by designers for the rigor and precision of her approach. One of her first forays into making upholstery was at the behest of interior designer Kristen Peña, of San Francisco’s K Interiors, who invited her to cover a daybed and bolster in shades of textured cream. Soon thereafter, Peña tapped Colombano to craft a blanket and pillows for the primary bedroom in a home-addition project. “We wanted to evoke a feeling of beautiful tranquility,” says Peña, who enlisted decorative artist Caroline Lizarraga to paint the walls and warmed the floors with one of Rosemary Hallgarten’s handwoven alpaca rugs. The crafted oak bed is a place for respite and reverie, dressed with felt pieces in Colombano’s Striation pattern, which riffs on the layering of sedimentary rock and the veining found in marble.

Felted blanket and pillows incorporated in a bedroom design

Photo by Bess Friday

Colombano crafted this Striation blanket and pillows for a 2020 primary bedroom design by San Francisco’s K Interiors.

Serenity Mode

“The idea of creating a zen retreat was part of our project mantra,” says Suzie Lucas, of Seattle-based Lucas Interior, describing the design for a remodel that evokes a Japonesque vibe. Because the bedroom is so large, Lucas sought elements that could both harmonize and hold their own. Walls are clad in cerused oak; a rustic teak bench abuts the bed, and woven copper lanterns from Alexander Lamont glow from the sides.

Lucas chose Colombano’s Brush pattern in black and white for the lumbar pillow and bed runner, as its strong graphic presence helps anchor the room. “It reminds me of an ink drawing—very gestural and strong,” says Lucas. Made with black llama and a mixture of white sheep’s wool and silk, the pattern also suggests the tips of Asian calligraphy brushes.

Time Travelers

When Geoffrey De Sousa scored a pair of Arthur Elrod Lucite chairs (featured in a 1974 issue of Architectural Digest) in a Palm Springs vintage furniture store, he sought to replace the Ultrasuede cushions with something that would acknowledge the chairs’ pedigree in a fresh and modern way. “This was soon after Kristin had brought her extraordinary work to our showroom,” says De Sousa. “And I knew her organic and textural felt could give the chairs new life.” In Palm Springs, the gray-and-cream Striation-patterned upholstery echoed the ever-shifting aspect of the San Jacinto Mountains, but it is equally evocative holding court in an 1874 building with arched, cast-iron windows overlooking Manhattan.

Ottoman with wool, silk, and mohair felt

Photos by Michelle Keim

Troscan’s Jackson Ottoman upholstered in Fog & Fury’s Striation felt made with wool, silk, and mohair locks.

Mongolia Moderne

Over the summer, Colombano was invited by the Seattle-based architecture firm Olson Kundig—known for pristine modernist buildings that sit lightly on the landscape—to talk with their interior design team about her craft (part of a monthly “mini trade show” organized by the firm, with whom Colombano has collaborated). “I love that juxtaposition of something so modern—maybe potentially cavernous or cold—coexisting with this warm and ancient material, which is so tactile and sound absorbing,” she says.

Even as demand for her work continues to grow, Colombano keeps a reminder in plain sight of where it all began. On a shelf in her studio sits a jar filled with shagai—the small ankle bones of sheep and goats, which in Mongolia are rolled like dice and used for playing games and telling fortunes. “Thinking back, I couldn’t have predicted how wandering into a souvenir shop on the other side of the world could change the course of my life,” says Colombano. “But the more I work with this material, the more possibilities I find for expression—and the more I realize I’ve only scratched the surface.”

Deborah Bishop is a longtime contributor to American Craft.

Photo by Maren Caruso

Colombano holds up the fine netting she uses to secure fibers while felting.

Visit Fog & Fury online.

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