A Day Inside Lucy's Felt Cave - Lucy Sparrow

A Day Inside Lucy’s Felt Cave

Inside Lucy’s Felt Cave you’ll find shelves lined with colourful felt, drying racks filled with painted felt pieces, and tables scattered with scissors, thread, and paint. It’s part studio and part workshop.

Every day in the Felt Cave looks slightly different, but it always begins the same way – with a hot cup of tea and a lot of felt.

Designing New Pieces

Each felt piece you see at Lucy’s immersive installations has been lovingly and painstakingly designed and adapted into felt sculpture form. Whether that’s a vintage grocery item, a nostalgic candy, or a plate of your favourite food.

Designing in felt means thinking differently: how will it translate into fabric? Where will the stitching sit? What details will be painted rather than sewn?

Templates and samples are created, proportions adjusted, and colours carefully chosen. Even everyday objects require such thoughtful design when they’re being reimagined in felt.

Cutting and Preparing Fabric

Once the designs have been finalised, and samples made, the cutting begins on Boris and Bertha (our fabric cutting machines).

Sheets of felt are laid out and carefully measured. Then, it’s up to Boris and Bertha to cut out the shapes needed to form the sculpture. We use cutting machines for consistency and accuracy when multiples (up to 100 and over) are needed to be cut.

This stage is all about preparation – clean edges, accurate shapes, and organised piles. Stacks of flat felt slowly become recognisable forms ready to be sewn and stuffed.

Painting The Details

Painting is where the pieces truly come to life and get their character.

Labels, logos, shading, and tiny details are added slowly, often with fine nib tools for precision. Leaving the paint to dry for 12 hours before moving onto the next layer (yep, it’s a very slow and thoughtful process). It’s careful work – especially on smaller items like sweets or grocery packaging where lettering and line work matter.

Each piece is painted individually by hand, which means no two are ever completely identical. Small variations are part of the handmade charm.

As the paint dries, rows of felt sculptures begin to look less like fabric and more like the real-world items that inspired them.

Stitching and Stuffing

Between everything else, there’s always sewing underway. That is the Sew Your Soul trademark after all.

Felt shapes are sewn together and carefully stuffed to create structure and weight. The way a piece is filled with floof determines how it sits, stands, or holds its shape.

Sewing is a repetitive, focused, and steady job but it’s one of the most important. It’s where flat fabric becomes something sculptural.

Packing Orders and Preparing for Installations

As the day winds down, any online orders are given their finishing touches by Lucy. They are then wrapped carefully, ensuring each item is protected and presented beautifully.

For larger projects or installations, items are sorted, counted, quality checked, and boxed up ready to be shipped to their destination. Considering the size of Lucy’s installations (up to 20,000 felt pieces sometimes) this can be a lengthy process, and is gradually completed during the months leading up to the show.

Lucy’s felt travels all over the globe – to collectors, customers, and exhibitions.

By evening, the studio rarely looks tidy. But that’s the nature of handmade work, and the Felt Cave is constantly evolving – new systems being implemented, new designs emerging, old favourites being remade, and Lucy’s vision coming to life every day.

A day in the Felt Cave is never just one task. It’s designing, cutting, painting, sewing, packing, filming and editing – and slowly building entire felt worlds, one piece at a time.