The lady who wears the fanciful hats describes her life as a revolving door.

It leads to the garden, around to her art and back to the garden again.

Fine Gelfand (pronounced “Feena”) is a surface-design artist with a background in textiles. A love of fiber came out of an early passion to knit, crochet, sew and weave as a teenager growing up in Germany.

The fashionable set may have seen the Greenbank artist around town wearing one of her signature hats which, the artist said, often garners comments from the gents.

“It’s funny, I’ll often wear one of my hats out to dinner or around town and more often than not, it’s the husbands who come up to me and say, ‘I love your hat.’ I find that quite interesting,” Gelfand said with a sly smile.

Gelfand is a sometime milliner, and one of her hats was recently accepted into an international show at the Atelier-Musée du Chapeau (Hat Museum) in Chazelles-sur-Lyon in the South East of France.

The show, entitled “Variable Geometry,” includes hats chosen by a jury that required the pieces to change form and function. The artists were also required to incorporate felt as a nod to the local French artisans who have been making rabbit-fur felt hats for centuries. The other condition was that the hats must be wearable in addition to having artistic merit.

The show opened in May, with 108 hats by artists from 21 countries, and runs through Oct. 4.

Gelfand’s hat is called “I’ve Got Your Number,” inspired by the artist’s playful incorporation of an old flexible phone pad with rubber keys on the front of the colorful and whimsical creation.

“This I used before my husband had a chance to throw it out,” Gelfand noted.

The body of the hat is knitted and crocheted with novelty yarns of grey and black and adorned with pointed, felted strips of vibrant colors.

Gelfand has been making hats for years, and immediately found her comrades-in-arms upon moving to the island eight years ago and discovering the Whidbey Weavers Guild. Hat lovers can see Gelfand’s hats on display the first weekend in November during the guild’s annual sale at Greenbank Farm.

Her childhood dream to become a milliner morphed eventually into a general affinity for fiber art. Her ever-curious nature and inclination toward new things led the artist to the development of her current passion: to combine technology and the natural world to create the surface-design pieces she calls biocollage.

Gelfand’s previous home in Seattle, where she and her husband raised a family, had an extensive garden.

“But after the many years that we lived there, it was all planted,” Gelfand said. “Now I’m building a new garden from scratch.”

The garden and the bucolic areas of Whidbey Island have been the main inspiration for the artist’s most recent pieces.

You may have seen examples of Gelfand’s current biocollages at the “Promenade au Jardin” show at MUSEO Gallery in Langley this past April.

“I use natural dried materials such as petals, leaves, grasses, lichens and twigs as my materials and intertwine them in a very personal style,” Gelfand said.

“I juxtapose the age-old technique of using preserved natural materials with the cutting-edge technology of digital printing in an attempt to bring a fresh perspective to my work.”

Her interest in combining art with science and technology prompted her to buy Photoshop software, a scanner and a printer and teach herself something new.

“It came out of a yearning to preserve the beauty of nature; the natural world is close to my heart,” Gelfand said.

“Knowing it’s a fleeting world and that the plants I use are on their way to deterioration, I wanted to use them in a way that revealed the beauty in the deterioration.”

It’s this juxtaposition of the eternal and the present, that excites Gelfand. Using the dried plants and the digital image of the plants in the same work preserves an aspect of nature in such a way that was impossible to capture before the digital age.

“My subjects are gardens, plants and light as they evolve throughout the seasons, but the essence of my work is a deep identification with the cycle of life and death, fruition and deterioration,” Gelfand said.

“At the core is an intense longing to hold on to the ephemeral incarnations of nature’s beauty.”

Gelfand recently finished a wall hanging that was commissioned for a private home. The piece is entitled “Madrona Madrigal” and reflects the changing of the seasons that are revealed through a beloved madrona tree on the client’s property.

It is with such a large piece, using leaves and their digital images to create a wallpaper of sorts on which Gelfand has placed the life of the madrona through all its seasons, adding her designer’s eye for color and placement, that she has come into her own and married her love of fiber art to her love of that which grows in the earth.

“Beyond my history of passionate involvement with textiles that gives form to my work, its spirit is now infused with the delight I take in gardening,” she said.

Interested in more of Gelfand’s work? E-mail her at finegelf@att.net.

To see the hats in the “Variable Geometry” French show, click here.