Ancient technique and dreamy landscapes collide in Kristin Colombano’s painterly felted textiles.
Kristin Colombano became entranced by felt while on a trip to Mongolia in 2010. After sleeping on a steppe in a cozy, felt-covered yurt, she walked into a souvenir shop in Ulaanbataar that was playing a video showcasing the 5,000-year-old method of wet felting. A few years later and some 5,800 miles away, she enrolled in a wet-felting workshop in San Francisco, where she still lives and works. Colombano, who was working as a photographer at the time, took to the physically demanding process immediately. “I love most mediums,” she says. “I fall in love easily with materials and immediately want to play and explore their possibilities.”
Today, Colombano uses the wet-felting technique—combining just water, soap, and friction to make wool fiber into felt—and a veritable library of wools to create her line of bespoke textiles, which she sells under the name Fog & Fury. Her pillows, blankets, upholstery fabric, and wall hangings—whose muted palette and varied textures evoke the cloudy environs of Northern California—are in demand by designers and decorators, who layer her lush home goods into their projects. Deborah Bishop wrote about Colombano’s work in “Felting with Feeling” in the Winter 2026 issue of American Craft.
Colombano lightly wet-felts pieces of wool, cashmere, mulberry, and Muga silk using a ball brause. The pieces will be layered and felted into a Lunaria blanket.
