Warmly Welcoming Winter - Helen Winter
What a pleasure it was to meet Helen from Helen Winter Textile Art this week!
The full interview replay is available to watch inside the membership, but read the overview of the interview below to learn more about Helen and her fabulous felting and art business.
I love doing guest interviews as we meet such a wide range of amazing people, but I especially enjoyed meeting Helen; another talented artist with such humility despite her many accomplishments!
Helen actually had her 6th anniversary of starting her business this week on 29th January 2026, making it a fitting week to interview her!
Living on the Isle of Man, Helen draws inspiration from the local scenery and animals, and started her business with the help of a course run on the island after redundancy caused her to turn her hobby into her career.
Read on to find out the highlights of her inspiring story. 😍
An early start in Art
Helen's passion for art was evident from an early age and is a topic that has really resonated with her throughout her life, so it's no surprise that she ended up pursuing it further in education.
Despite her deep-rooted love for art, the limited work opportunities after graduating from art college led her to opt for a corporate career and so art/ crafts became her escape in the evenings. At the time, Helen's main hobby was focussed on knitting, but she had a love of all things art and craft such as painting and embroidering, and later she also went on to discover needle felting!
It was around 13/14 years ago that Helen tried her first felting project - a bunny tutorial by Fit to be Loved. Blown away by the way you could take wool and turn it into something tangible, Helen quickly found a local workshop, and before she knew it, she'd fallen in love with this incredible craft, and was soon on her way to becoming a felting addict!
From Redundancy to Resilience: Helen's Entrepreneurial Leap
Helen's love of art and crafts remained as a hobby whilst working in the corporate world, but at the end of 2019, she got a shock which would launch her into the next chapter of her life.
Just before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, Helen was facing redundancy in her corporate job. As a single mother, this unexpected turn of events was daunting, but it also presented an opportunity for something new.
One of her colleagues encouraged Helen to pursue her creative passions full time, and so she decided to start her own business, officially launching it on January 29th 2020 (6 years ago).
With no prior business experience, Helen was able to take advantage of a local government-sponsored course, which helped to equip her with the skills needed to navigate the complexities of entrepreneurship.
As the sole provider for her family, her determination to make her business work was fuelled by necessity, but was also an opportunity to fulfill her artistic aspirations.
Niching down to Needle Felting
Initially, Helen's business was all crafts, including knitting and needle felting. However, with the guidance of a mentor she honed in on needle felting, which proved to be a very good move.
As well as loving her creative process, Helen also loves to pass on her skills to others (something that I can relate to 100%!) so she decided to combine her love of needle felting with her love of her home island, and created a kit based on the endangered Manx Loaghtan sheep native to the Isle of Man.
After launching her kits, she also reached out to her local community to see if anyone would like to learn from her in person, and with that her first needle felting workshops were born, allowing her to share her skills with others and foster a community of creativity in her local area.
Helen also started felting new subjects and began taking on pet portrait commissions which proved popular as memorial portraits, and later she found herself branching out further into experimenting with felting other animals. This also led her to combining her felting with her art, incorporating paints and pastels into some of her pieces, thus showing that the only limit to creativity is your imagination. She also entered her lion into a competition which was awarded the overall competition winner. You can see why!
Empowering Creativity Through Teaching
Helen's enthusiasm for teaching is evident in her workshops, where she encourages others to explore their creativity through needle felting. She loves seeing her students' transformations as they create their own projects, and overcome any initial self-doubt regarding their artistic abilities.
It was lovely to see that Helen feels as I do, that everyone has the potential to be creative, and her teaching approach, like mine, is to make people feel empowered that anyone can be successful at needle felting given the right guidance.
The joy of seeing her students succeed and being able to share her knowledge with others, makes teaching one of the most rewarding aspects of Helen's work.
Social Media Success
Although Helen has gained a large following online, her journey with social media wasn't smooth sailing, and like so many other businesses, her posts initially were rarely seen by anyone. Helen was determined to learn how to improve though, and her commitment to daily posting and engaging with her audience finally paid off in the last year or so, especially on Facebook, where she now has approximately 37k followers.
Helen now finds that she enjoys managing her social media presence herself, and so despite needing to think about outsourcing some aspects of the running of her business, she would like to continue creating her posts herself to ensure she remains authentic for her followers.
I admire Helen's dedication to growing her audience online, and think it is a good lesson for anyone with business social media accounts: to just keep going, even if it is slow at first, and eventually your hard work will pay off!
Overcoming Challenges as a Solopreneur
As a solopreneur, Helen has faced many challenges in her business since starting 6 years ago. One being that for about the first 4 years, she was hardly making any profit from her business. She tried, unsuccessfully at first, working with different coaches to help her. Eventually though, Helen was able to find a coach she really connected with, who had a good understanding of the creative mindset, and that has helped her to stay on track, and helped her decide which direction to take her business in order to succeed.
It can also be quite isolating working on your own, but Helen is able to overcome this with another creative outlet, a wool spinning group she attends regularly.
It really is important for everyone to be part of a community and be able to interact with like-minded individuals, so I would encourage everyone to seek out some sort of community, either in person, or online, where you can share with others. This is one thing I love so much about my Move the Needle membership- being able to meet and chat/ felt together online each week, and to be able to meet amazing people like Helen through our guest interviews.
Future Endeavours and Expanding Horizons
Talking of memberships, Helen is also planning her own membership which will be coming soon, so keep your eyes peeled for that!
After the success of her 3 current books, which she self published on Amazon, Helen is also working on even more books, including one focused on pet portraits, and another exciting one! Her books go into detail of every single step you need to needle felt and they look amazing. Why not take a look at her books on amazon: https://amzn.to/4kb17KP
She is also in the process of creating another competition piece, which I'm sure you will enjoy seeing updates of, on her Facebook page.
Words of Wisdom
Helen's advice for others starting with felting is to keep going/ keep persevering even if your felting is at an ugly stage in the creative process. It will 100% come together in the end!
If you are starting a business, Helen encourages persistence and the importance of seeking a good mentor or coach, and she stresses the importance of believing in yourself, and having grit and determination to get there. Great words of advice for anyone!
Helen's journey really is a testament to the power of resilience and the fulfillment that comes from pursuing your passions, so if you follow her advice, I'm sure you won't go far wrong!
It really was so lovely to meet you Helen, so thank you once again for joining us! I hope to be able to interview you again in the future to see how you are progressing with your amazing goals, but in the meantime, we wish you all the best in achieving them!
Please connect with Helen through her links below 😍
You can find her at:
Website: https://helenwintertextileart.co.uk/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/helenwintertextileart
