Spent all of Saturday and Sunday at Craft in the Bay, the wonderful gallery, workshop space and cafe of the Makers Guild in Wales. I was on a course entitled 'Experimental Felt' with Claire Cawte. It was a very stimulating weekend - although I have been making felt for a while, and am quite competent in the techinques, there is always the risk of getting stuck in a rut. It's good to see someone else's way of working, and also to spend some time 'playing' with different styles. The course covered a range of techniques including flat felt (my challenge was to make really fine felt, as I have a tendency towards thick, dense felt), cobweb, nuno, and 3D. I will upload a photo of the things I made (including the large pot which I made at home on Saturday evening when I got home from the workshop!).
Cobweb was a challenge - not something I'd really done before, and it's surprisingly hard to make felt with so many holes in! I needed far less fibre than I thought - in fact, my more successful sample was made with one eighth of the fibre I originally thought I would use. I want to do more of this - it's a good discipline, and makes wonderful floaty scarves!
Nuno felting is where you start with a fabric (cotton muslin, cotton scrim, or silk) and felt wool fibres onto it. As the felt shrinks during the felting process, it scrunches up the base fabric in a very pleasing way. All sorts of unexpected results happen, and it can be very beautiful. Liz Clay is a leading British maker in Nuno felt, and you can see some of her work at the Devon Guild of Craftsmen exhibition space in Bovey Tracey.
For 3D felt we made pots - I had done this before, too, but had forgotten what fun it is! Which is why I rushed home and made another pot myself - it is very robust as it's made from 5 layers of fibre, the inside is the dark brown of Welsh Mountain fleece, and the outside is light brown Blue Faced Leicester. It is what Winnie the Pooh called a useful pot for putting things in...
Finally, I had a go at encapsulating stitched linen fabric and cutting away to reveal the stitching - a technique of Claire's which I found very interesting.
Claire Cawte is a textile artist and felt maker who is into natural dyes, organic forms and inclusion of found object into felt - and also very good indeed at leading workshops like this.
The other participants on the course were great - a very varied lot, with all sorts of interesting back stories, and it made for a really good atmosphere in the workshop and at lunch breaks. It was interesting that a number of people were recovering from serious illness and had consequently given up demanding jobs to rediscover what was important to them and be creative. It felt like a wake-up call to me - don't wait until the day job makes you ill before you start to focus on the creative side of life!
No comments:
Post a Comment