FELTING with ALPACAS...

These are exciting times...!  As I mentioned before I've been invited to hold a series of workshops at the West Wight Alpaca farm in Wellow starting after Easter and I'm able to confirm the dates here. West Wight Alpacas is home to both a herd of rare coloured Suri Alpacas and the more common Huacaya Alpacas (pronounced Wacaya) and makes a perfect location to hold felt making classes in their brand new workshop facility, surrounded by all these amazing animals!

As you can see I've been experimenting with the alpaca fibres and they do felt very differently to the wools I'm most familiar with. The Suri fibres are beautifully soft and silky to handle, which makes them quite difficult (but not impossible) to felt as the fibres do take quite a bit of working. I did use them to make some of the examples here like the black lattice scarf and the bowls (click on the photos to enlarge). However these fibres are better suited to hand spinning and produce a luxurious knitting yarn.

The Huacaya has the more normal 'Teddy Bear' fleece that is closer to wool and is much easier to felt. The alpaca natural colour range is amazing! They come in twenty two different shades, from white to black with every other natural colour of fawn, brown & grey in between, which makes them perfect for these felting projects. The finished felt also retains a wonderful 'alpaca' quality, the bowls & bags have a lovely soft hairy-ness which is quite unique!

With the forthcoming feltmaking workshops we plan to use a 50/50 mix of alpaca and wool. All the natural coloured fibres for the workshops will be available to buy at the farm shop and we will be using large drum carders during the workshops to blend these fibres into individual colour combinations for the felting projects. 

 

Huacaya Alpacas (above) and Suri Alpacas (below) at Wellow



It's been an exciting time for WWA as they have just returned from their first major UK Alpaca Futurity show at the Birmingham NEC with lots of rosettes and two of their brown Suris winning Champion (Kaiser) & Reserve Champion (Kimi).

There's more alpaca information at : http://www.westwightalpacas.co.uk/ 

And there's more workshop information and booking details here...

SPRING GALLERY...

Spring has certainly arrived here on the island and Sally's felt daffodils say it all…

Today I'm posting up a 'Felt Gallery' of work produced at this weekend's workshops. The pictures below were made at the "Painting with Fibres" workshop on Saturday here in Freshwater. Everyone bought along photos, sketches & ideas to work from, building up their designs with pre-felts and textures. They will continue to stitch and needle felt into their pictures,
adding textures and embellishments and I'll hopefully be able to show some more completed work soon...

On Sunday the workshop at Brading Roman Villa was a shorter session, producing much more spontaneous work…

This was my first workshop at the Roman Villa. It's a wonderful venue, with a great group who all responded so enthusiastically to the felt making and ALL want to continue - so I'm really looking forward to returning in July to hold a
'Felt Bowls & Bags' workshop! Please get in touch with Joy at Brading if you would like more details.

I just want to quickly mention another exciting new venue…

I've been invited to hold a series of workshops at the West Wight Alpaca Farm in Wellow starting after Easter. I am finalising all the details at the moment and will be posting the dates up very soon...

SCARVES & HATS and more workshop news...

February has been another very busy month of workshops and this has been the first opportunity I've had to catch up for weeks! Even with the extra day I missed my regular 'first day of the month' posting but we made good use of the Leap Day with a Scarf workshop on the 29th and here are some of the results...

I've mentioned before that this Scarf workshop is for all abilities, so beginners have a chance to make something really substantial whilst learning to work with the fibres and textures.

There's also been several workshops this month for those wanting to improve their skills which has resulted in some amazing hats & slippers, bags with pockets and shoulder straps, lots of soft pots & bowls and some fantastic tea cosies!

Sometimes it's tricky to photograph the felt at the end of a workshop when it's still wet and need finishing. Gradually work comes back to me and I'm able to photograph it at it's best, complete with decoration and embellishment.

We had great fun this Saturday making felt Tea Cosies in Freshwater and the week before I spent a lovely day showing my friends at the Weavers, Spinners & Dyers Guild in Rookley how to make felt bowls… But I'm going to wait to post up all those photos in a week or so.

I'm coming to the end of this current programme of workshops with three more dates in Freshwater over the next few Saturdays. There will be more workshops planned after Easter and I'll be posting these as soon as they are finalised.

There's still places available on the "Hats & Slippers" day next Saturday 10th March and also on the "Felt Kindle/I-Pad Case" workshop on March 24th in Freshwater.

If you haven't been able to make any of the previous dates and would like to come along to either of these workshops and make any 3-D project such as a bag, bowl or even a tea cosy then please get in touch ....

HATS UPDATE : "Keeping up with my students..."

I'm not a hat wearing person BUT I just had to have a go at another one after seeing all the fantastic creations my students were making...

Totally unwearable (for me) but great fun to make, with matching scarf..!