Leslie Owens is a graduate of Haywood Community College, Clyde NC, with a Professional Crafts - Fiber Arts concentration, where she learned weaving, dyeing and spinning with Catherine Ellis. She has studied tapestry with Archie Brennan and Felted Garments with Jorie Johnson at the Penland School of Crafts. She has exhibited her woven garments at Convergence in Vancouver, BC., where she won 2nd place in the Fashion exhibit. She has also shown at the Southern Highland Craft Guild show as a student and at the Folk Art Center and Grovewood Gallery, both in Asheville, NC. In Atlanta, she has shown at the Fireball Collective and Inman Park Festival events.

In her former life, she was a corporate graphic designer in Atlanta, designing magazines for BellSouth, IBM and Georgia Pacific. Long hours doing press checks and art-directing photography honed her eye for color and dramatic layout. She has a degree from Vanderbilt University in Social Psychology.

"I take pleasure in the doing and sharing of the work. Felting in particular is such immersive fun that I just don't want to do anything else. Wool is so responsive and felting is such a tactile process that it fulfills my need to handle, caress, touch, and hold my creations, because all those obsessive impulses are a natural part of the felting process. It's the ideal expression for a fiber addict!"

"The application of wool to silk can be considered a new process, though probably it is just re-discovered. The first fiber artist to popularize this process in modern times may be Polly Stirling, when she was in Australia in the 1990's, and she called it "Nuno" felt, after the Japanese word for fabric. This should not be confused with Nuno, an innovative Japanese fabric atelier, and I personally prefer the name "Laminated" felt, since it is more descriptive of the process. "

"Laminated felt has many advantages for the feltmaker and the garment. There are fewer layers of fleece required to make a durable garment, which means a more lightweight garment, more suitable for southern climates. It also allows an interplay between the fabric and the fleece, since the shrinking of the wool during the felting process gathers and poufs the fabric in open areas and can create effortless ruched effects. For a garment designer, this is play, not production!"

Leslie Owens has recently moved to Asheville, North Carolina and will be showing her work and teaching in that area.