Cooking with Wool: Watch Mouthwatering Tiny Woolen Food Animations

Our fas­ci­na­tion with tiny food can be traced to the mouth­wa­ter­ing illus­tra­tions in Beat­rix Potter’s The Tale of Two Bad Mice.

Just like the doll­house-sized comestibles that so con­found­ed the tit­u­lar rodents, Tom Thumb and Hun­ca­munca, ani­ma­tor Andrea Love’s minia­ture pas­ta with red sauce is as ined­i­ble as it is appe­tiz­ing.

The self-taught stop motion specialist’s medi­um of choice is wool.

In an inter­view with Drag­on Frame stop motion software’s com­pa­ny blog, when they fea­tured Cook­ing with Wool: Break­fast, above, Love explained:

I like to make short per­son­al projects exper­i­ment­ing with the dif­fer­ent ways to ani­mate wool. The tech­nique is called nee­dle felt­ing and it involves shap­ing wool with a barbed nee­dle. I love the fuzzy aes­thet­ic, and feel like the pos­si­bil­i­ties are end­less. Every­thing in this video is made out of wool or felt, and is built over rigid insu­la­tion foam. This was a weekend/evening project, done over the course of three days… It is very chal­leng­ing work­ing with tiny bits of wool, but also amaz­ing how much detail can be achieved on a small scale when you con­sid­er that it is just tiny clumps of fur.

For­get the showstoppers—the melt­ing but­ter, the fried eggs flip­ping in the pan, the steam ris­ing from cup and ket­tle…

Let’s take a moment to admire the atten­tion to detail that went into the back­ground aspects—the rub­ber spat­u­la, the bananas, the cheery flecked wall­pa­per…

The only thing miss­ing is a pothold­er to han­dle that pip­ing hot cast iron skil­let.

Per­haps she ran out of wool?

The Port Townsend, Wash­ing­ton res­i­dent, who grad­u­at­ed from Hamp­shire Col­lege with a con­cen­tra­tion in film stud­ies and sus­tain­able agri­cul­ture, whips up her tee­ny wee­ny wooly meals in the same base­ment stu­dio where she crafts pro­mo­tion­al videos for local busi­ness­es, includ­ing the yarn shop where she sources her wool rov­ings.

View more of Andrea Love’s fiber-art stop motion ani­ma­tions, includ­ing a “dig­i­tal” banana paint­ing cre­at­ed with a woolen tablet and sty­lus, on her web­site and Insta­gram page.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Online Knit­ting Ref­er­ence Library: Down­load 300 Knit­ting Books Pub­lished From 1849 to 2012

Behold an Anatom­i­cal­ly Cor­rect Repli­ca of the Human Brain, Knit­ted by a Psy­chi­a­trist

20+ Knit­ters and Cro­chet Artists Stitch an Aston­ish­ing 3‑D Recre­ation of Picasso’s Guer­ni­ca

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Feb­ru­ary 3 for New York: The Nation’s Metrop­o­lis the 21st install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.