Felt Hats, Slippers and more...

It's been a very busy couple of weeks with the last workshops of the year and the start of the Christmas Fairs. I had some more 'Hats' and 'Slippers' days, plus a wonderful 'Painting with Fibres' workshop, which resulted in these stunning pictures...

All the workshops produced amazing work, as the photos below show and there will be more workshop photos to follow ...

 

The 'Slippers' workshops continue to be really popular, together with 'Hats'. They are both ambitious projects and take a lot of hard work to complete in the day...

The 'Hats' workshops were new for this autumn. Not being a hat wearer myself I did have some reservations so I decided to keep things as simple as possible offering two basic shapes - a beret or cloche. Everyone had made either a bag or bowl previously with me, so the process of working around a resist was understood. It was just a question of sizing templates and thinking about the various design aspects of the hat, colour & shape. Perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned that the hats can be reversible… that really did complicated things! 

During the felting process it does help to actually put the hat on to check for fit. The fact that the hats were very wet did not deter my determined feltmakers - plastic bags were worn, hats were massaged in situ and everyone went home with rather flat hair… 

I'm hoping to get some better shots of the finished (DRY) hats and will post them up as soon as I can…

At the moment I'm right in the middle of the Christmas events and I've just had a wonderful weekend at Dimbola's Art & Craft Fair. Thank you to everyone who came along and bought their felt work to show me. It was free entry to the Photographic Museum so lots of people took the opportunity to combine Christmas shopping with seeing the exhibits. I had my usual spot in the Dining Room and was able to display my felt bowls on Julia's mantle piece as last year (see "Connections with the Past...")

This week finds me back at Quarr Abbey and the weather promises to be mild & sunny, so it couldn't be better for some more Christmas shopping...