These Tiny Kitchen Animations Are Mesmerizing

Somewhere at the crossroads of fiber art Instagram, culinary Instagram, and animated Instagram are a series of super-cute and cozy “Cooking With Wool” videos, animated by Andrea Love. They’re totally addicting to watch.

When posting her animation projects on her Instagram account, Love found that the videos that resonated most with people were the ones that rely on visual language and universal, relatable activities, like cooking:

…baking:

… or doing the dishes:

“Everyone either cooks or they eat — I had an image of turning on a burner and having it go from black yarn to red yarn, and so I wanted to play with that idea,” she says.

Love, who is based in Port Townsend, Washington, creates her animations in her basement. Her studio has one room for set-making and puppet-making and one light-controlled room for filming.

“I’ve definitely always been crafty and artistic,” she says. “I grew up playing music — violin and piano — so getting to use my hands a lot, and I got into drawing and painting and I learned how to knit as a kid as well, so my introduction to fiber art was pretty early on.”

She got the idea to use wool and felt for animation while wandering through a farmer’s market. “I spotted a little fiber farm … and they had this little needle-felted sheep on the counter,” she says. “I was just totally blown away by that technique and really wanted to try it with my puppets, and that kind of unleashed the floodgate.”

For many of her projects, Love has drawn inspiration from the woods and wildlife of the Pacific Northwest.

Love is just beginning to dabble with interior sets and “trying to figure out how the fiber aesthetic can work in that arena,” she says. “The kitchen set was the first set I made fully out of felt and wool that takes place inside.”

Next on her list? “It’d be fun to do a living room with a crackling fire and maybe some subtle plaid wallpaper, just really taking the lead from that wool world,” she says.

If you, too, are entranced by Love’s wool world, you’ll be excited to know that she has a “Thumbelina”-inspired animated short called “Tulip” premiering at the New York International Children’s Film Festival, happening now. Check out the trailer here.