SPRING FARM ALPACAS...

Last weekend found me on the mainland, deep in the Sussex countryside at Spring Farm Alpacas, home of Vicki & Chris Agar and their herd of prize-winning alpacas. 

I had been invited there to hold a workshop specifically to show a group of alpaca owners how to felt alpaca fibre. The 110 acre farm is in a wonderful location, close to the Ashdown Forest in an area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and Vicki has over 80 alpacas at the moment including many show champions.

 

When I arrived on Saturday afternoon the 'girls' were being bought back 

to the farm to spend the night in the barn...

 ...see the wide range of fleece colours - click on the photos for more detail.

Everyone of these amazing animals are treated as individuals, with their own 

identity and character. They even respond to their own names! 

They are handled with such care and kindness by 

Vicki and her dedicated team. 

They are incredibly friendly, inquisitive and very difficult to photograph!

On Sunday morning I met with a lovely group of ten enthusiastic ladies. 

Many were new to wet felting so making lattice scarves was a perfect 
introduction, taking the beginners through the basic felting techniques and 
getting them used to handling the fibres. 
It is also a relatively quick process - laying and wetting out, then rolling, 
throwing and shocking the felted fibres in the final stages. 
Physically quite hard work, but easily achievable in just a few hours! 

Here is everyone at the end of the afternoon with their felted scarves - 

just in need of a final rinse to remove all the soap before drying.

And here are a couple I made earlier so you can see the effect when dry.

Made from alpaca fibre in natural shades of grey with a black/silk blend

and pale fawn with browns.

These lattice scarves are light-weight yet warm, with a very distinctive 

organic look and feel. Their characteristic twisty locks & fringes are 

quite reminiscent of their original owners!
 

It was a really great weekend at Spring Farm Alpacas and I'd like to thank Vicki & Chris for being such generous hosts. 

Everyone created a wonderful scarf - totally unique, practical & wearable - and hopefully this will inspire them to continue making felt using the fibres from their own alpacas...  

For more information about the alpacas at Spring Farm follow this link

CHRISTMAS GREETINGS & THANKS...

With Christmas just a week away now I wanted to take 
this opportunity to send CHRISTMAS GREETINGS 
to all my felt making friends and blog followers...
   

THANKS to all of you who came along to see me at the Christmas shows.

 It's always lovely to see everyone, especially at this time of year.  

My last fair will be at the Alpaca Farm this weekend 
Saturday 21st & Sunday 22nd from 10.30 - 4pm

so if you still have some last minute shopping to do here's your chance

and there's more details here...

THANKS to everyone for the wonderful support over the past year! 

The workshops continue at Oliven the Patchwork Cafe
 in the New Year, with all the dates here. 

We are working on even more ambitious ideas & plans for felt making in 2014. 

I shall be teaching on the mainland for the first time at the end of January, 

which is really exciting! And I have a project to be featured in the March 2014 

edition of 'EMBELLISH' the Australian magazine. 

There's a busy year ahead and I will keep you posted...

THANKS to all my blog followers, where ever you are! 

I was hoping that I might possibly reach 100,000 views by the end of this year,

which is an amazing total! It's almost there, so please keep checking in 

and thank you all so much for taking such an interest in all the 
felt making going on in the Isle of Wight... 
Finally THANKS to Greta for letting me feature her stunning wreath here. 

It really is the perfect felt makers' Christmas decoration and what a wonderful 

warm welcome it makes! 

I hope you all have a well-deserved restful, peaceful Christmas 

and I hope your 2014 will be happy, busy and very creative.

AUTUMN update…

It's the beginning of another month… October sped by so fast & furious that I'm sure November will be just as frantic! Here's just a quick update. My work will continue to be on display at Anne Toms' Gallery in Yarmouth until the 18th of this month. Having photographed the pots and pebbles on a very bleak beach last month, it made a dramatic change to photograph them in the warm interior setting of the gallery, 

surrounded by some wonderful work... 

 And everything seemed to take on a completely different character...

Thanks to all of you who braved the worst weather for decades and visited the gallery 

last Sunday to see the demonstrations. In these situations it's not always practical to demonstrate the wet felting process and explain techniques, so many thanks to 

Anne for making it possible.

It was extremely blustery in Yarmouth with record gusts of 99mph at the Needles just a couple of miles down the coast! But the Islanders are such a stoical lot and certainly not deterred by threats of a mere hurricane, so we had quite a steady crowd of interested people throughout the day. 

I have a number of craft shows coming up this month - more details and dates here - if you are planning on shopping early for Christmas there's plenty of opportunities.

I hope to catch up with you at one of the shows!

YARMOUTH GALLERY Showcase...

FELT Display : October 23 - November 18. Open Daily 10 - 5

FELT Demonstration : Sun 27 Oct. 11 - 4

Anne Toms' Yarmouth Gallery is a small stylish exhibition space located at the heart of the ancient harbour town of Yarmouth in the westerly corner of the beautiful Isle of Wight. 

It has always been the aim of the gallery to promote art, craft & design by Isle of Wight artists, as well as those from all over the UK, with a constant programme of exhibitions of work by professional artists from many disciplines. Imagine my delight when Anne invited me to be one of her 'featured makers' in the first of a series of showcases planned for the winter months.

Anne asked for some material for publicity purposes and this prompted us to take 

some of the new feltwork down to the Bay for KC to photograph. 

Here's a preview and you can click on the photos to enlarge... 

 

These felt bowls and pebble weights, along with other designs will be on show at the 

Gallery from October 23rd to 18th November. I will be there on Sunday 27th October 

to explain more about my work and the practicalities of felt making with 

demonstrations on-going throughout the day...

  so it would be great if you are able to come along.  

  

The Yarmouth Gallery is situated in the High Street, Yarmouth, PO41 0PL 

and is open all year round. 

For more information and details of opening times follow this link...

TEXTURED TREASURE...

LOOK what my Mum unearthed in a local charity shop today! This amazing collection of threads of every kind of texture, shade and thickness imaginable.

Each colour selection jam-packed into large plastic sweet jars, so old and discoloured that you couldn't make out the contents properly through the smokey plastic, until they were tipped out at home and their true colours revealed...

Embroidery silks, crochet cottons, some famous names and foreign labels, DMC, Appletons fine wools, mohair, chenille, slubby hand-dyed textures, variegated threads old & new…

Apparently they belonged to the grandmother of the lady working in the shop. She obviously led a very creative life and appreciated the value of her threads, saving every scrap left after finishing projects (just like Mum & I)

Coincidently, 10 minutes earlier we had been looking at new threads for sale and in particular skeins of Cotton Perle at £1.30 each! 

EACH jar of threads cost just £2...  And these are the contents of THREE jars...

Green must have been a favourite colour as this was the most tightly packed jar, with such an interesting mass of skeins and tiny twists all neatly tied up.

I just love colour and texture so apart from any practical use they just look amazing!

As someone just starting out on the embroidery road I don't yet have a stash of threads and certainly couldn't afford to buy this range and quantity, so this sets me up very well. Also, acquiring threads in this way just appeals to my frugal nature!

As I've been sorting through them I can't help thinking of their previous owner. What did she make with all these threads? And how she treasured all the left-over scraps thinking that one day they would come in handy! Now they've found their way to me and what I personally don't use in my sewing and felting I will take along for everyone to use in my workshops.

Our local charity shops are absolute treasures troves and it's been my lucky week...

I found this large Melin Tregwynt cushion a couple of days ago, 

I'm not going to say what I paid for it, but needless to say it was another bargain!

FLOWER CUSHION - Alpaca Style...

There was a noticeable chill in the air this morning as the seasons change and we slip into September... But what a wonderful summer we've had, and a busy one too with lots of new workshops for children & adults at West Wight Alpacas.

As well as the usual felt making workshops at the farm I made a variation to my Shibori Felt Cushion design, this time using natural shades of alpaca. This 'Felt Cushion' workshop has proved to be very popular as it suits all abilities - beginners who come along to learn how to felt and experienced feltmakers who want to experiment with the alpaca fibre...

I simplified the original cushion project decorating the centre piece with beads instead of the cluster of 'shibori' felt balls. The rest of the flower design was made as before, using layers of pre-felted petal shapes. The dark brown petals were completely felted into the grey background square and the lighter shaded petals were partially needle felted over them to give the 3-D flower effect. 

Then the beads were stitched onto the grey felt circle. I also hand-stitched through the base of the petals to strengthen the needle-felting, attaching the layers firmly to the felt background as I know the cushion will get plenty of handling! The finished centre piece was placed over the top and stitched to hide the ends of the petals.

I particularly like the way the alpaca fibres give the petals wonderful tufty edges

Finally I made up the cushion by machine sewing the felted flower square to a fabric backing and stuffing a cushion inside...

And you can see it certainly has got Toffee's approval!

There's a new programme of workshops planned for this autumn at West Wight Alpacas. We are including another Felt Cushion workshop, as well as workshops for children during half-term and the Christmas holidays when they can come along and make a special Christmas stocking using alpaca fibre. 

I will be posting up the new dates very soon...

NEW STEPS with Stitch & Thread...

During the summer shows I wanted to have some work in progress, something new that I could show visitors as well as my usual pile of samples. It's really difficult to felt in these situations as space is limited and you're constantly drying wet hands so I was looking for something else to have on the go...

Never being one to throw any piece of felt away however small, I have acquired plenty of colourful off-cuts over the years so I decided to experiment with some hand-stitching... 

Now this may sound like a confident casual remark, but my last attempts at running stitch take me back to Mrs Rigby's class when I was age seven! My stock of threads are a jumbled mess and I've never actually bought a sewing needle in my life...

BUT I just started to stitch into the felt regardless - a nice colourful off-cut about A4 size which I thought might make a book cover. The felted pattern vaguely suggested leaves, so I began by outlining shapes with running stitch. I worked out how to do a French knot, then some little stars... 

Now a convert to beading it became obvious to include some in with the 
stitching, plus some tiny buttons

I've been felting pebbles recently so the next step was to try and embroider on these 

I love the idea of working in the round, just trying out 
different stitch patterns… 

and these pebbles made perfect samplars.

This is such an exciting development and I can see endless possibilities of stitching and working into the felt that has been made so plain - up to now!!!

In the autumn programme of workshops at Oliven we have a new 'Stitch in Felt' workshop with expert embroiderer Su Douglas. This class is specifically aimed at felt makers like myself who have no real experience of hand-stitching and would like to learn some basic stitch patterns that can be used to embroider felt pictures and 3-D forms such as bags, bowls, pebbles and decorations for Christmas. All details about the new workshops dates can be found here.

Judging by the response from those who have seen these samples I think stitching into felt is a natural step forward for many. 

Now I'm looking around at some of my felt pieces wondering whether they could be embroidered and this little bowl just needed some decoration. I particularly like the way 'Feather stitch' has such an organic feel and suggests ferns, feathers and even seaweed...

So what's next? 

Embroidered slippers or maybe gloves...