Mohair -- I love the stuff! It's the fleece from Angora goats, sheared like sheep's wool. In another life, it was my favorite fiber for spinning, my favorite hair for dolls, and now I use mohair fabric for my bears and critters. It is soft, fluffy, stiff, matted, long, short, curly, straight, dense, sparse. Like most bear artists, I have a stash of it. (A big stash) I have found that it's not the easiest thing to store, as the fabric is wide, takes on creases where it is folded, and has a pile that I don't want to crush. My mohair is stored on a shelf in my studio closet, each piece rolled (nap outward) into a tube.
When I go to select a piece of mohair for a project, I usually have an image in my mind of what I want to make and have sketched a drawing for reference. I go into my studio closet and start pulling out pieces I think might work well for the design. Soon the floor is covered in various shades of mohair. Then I take 3 to 4 pieces to my work table where I play with and manipulate them into semblences of three- dimensional shapes. I want to see how they react to being curved and bent, how the pile moves and changes, and if the base fabric is visible when the fabric is curved, do I like the effect. I pick one, but the others may be tucked into the back of my mind as possibilities for future projects.
