Evaluation of the silver arts award

The time has come for me to evaluate the silver arts award and how I think it has been. Whether I would have changed anything or improved on anything.

Overall I think the arts award has gone very well and I am pleased with the results, however it hasn't been without its mistakes and downfalls.

 Take for instance the warping disaster which resulted in me having a smaller cushion than planned, it turned out ok but something I would have done differently is I would have been more careful with pulling the warp in at the edges when weaving so the warp may have been fine. Having said that, I did end up with a cute little flower on my cushion which people have commented that they like.

There have been a few changes along the way to my projects, for example, I was going to knit a scarf but after discovering that knitting is a lot harder than it looks, and my scarf was more holes than yarn, I decided to stick with crochet. This did work out for the better as my scarf would have probably looked a lot worse had it been knitted.

Of course, my original plan was to make a crocheted bowl but I then decided that a crocheted handbag would look a lot better and would have a much better use. Going back, the one thing I would have changed about the handbag is I would have made a longer strap and sewn it all the way down the two side seams which would have made the bag bigger.

The felted picture was a bit of an impromptu decision to make but I am really glad I did as I think it completes the collection of pieces nicely. 

Overall I have thoroughly enjoyed taking part in the arts awards.  It has lead me into different areas I had not done before (felting) and now I want to take that further.  It has shown me where some of my weaknesses are, and I have to say, at this time, I am not interested in knitting!!!!  I love that it has given me a push to explore new ways of working (the weaving piece was a really steep learning curve) and consolidated my love of all things fibrey.

So, it is now official, my silver arts award is completed. Nick said he would email me as to when the moderation date is, it should be sometime in November. I will let you know when it is and how it went.

Speak soon

Meghan

Exhibitions

In the last week I have been to 2 amazing exhibitions, one at Stamford Arts Centre and one at St Nicholas Chapel in Kings Lynn.
The exhibiton at Stamford Arts Centre was a collection of work from roughly 30 local artists. The art ranged from simple oil on canvas to pottery and felting.
One particular piece combined my two favourite things in life, sheep and art so as you can guess the textured sheep was a huge hit.
We originally heard of the exhibition from a friend of ours Louise Stebbings who was displaying some of her work there. She focuses on print making and her art work is amazing.
Various artists exhibiting there were there on this particular day to talk to and ask questions about their work. Extraordinary art work and well worth a visit. If you wish to visit the address is Stamford Arts Centre, 27 St Mary's Street, Stamford, Lincolnshire.

The second exhibition I visited is a photography exhibition in Kings Lynn. The exhibition was work from Kings Lynn Camera Club which I am hoping to join in September.
Some of the photos were really amazing ranging from sites around the world to natural beauties.
My favourite was one called Gold and Silver. It was a forest in autumn with all the bare trees in silver and all the fallen leaves on the floor gold.
There were a few that I found creepy like close up of flies, I mean why would you take pleasure in having a close up photo on your wall of a fly!!!  Very skilled photography I know, just not my cup of tea.
However you can't deny the talent involved in every single one of the photos.
Speak soon
Meghan

Good news

Joy of joys, my weaving was kind to me for the rest of the warp and I have ended up with a much bigger piece of fabric than I had hoped for. This therefore means that I have enough fabric for the original plan of a cushion. However, I don't want to put the other small piece to waste so I will cut a 5cm and a 3cm radius circle out of the fabric which will be needle felted onto the top corner of the cushion. The final touch to the cushion will be a medium sized dorset button in the blue yarn used in the weft to be put in the middle of the two circles.

The finished cushion

My three completed pieces now are the crocheted bag in multicoloured merino and jacob humbug, the felted wall hanging in finnish fleece and the cushion shown above.

The only item left is the scarf which was going to be knitted. However, the knitting wasn't going well it was holey and stiches were being dropped and picked back up. I have therefore decided that the scarf will be crocheted instead.  I enjoy crochet so much more, and so far it is going very well, much neater than the knitting and progressing much quicker.  It would appear I am not a knitter!!
Thats all for now
Meghan

Fibre East

As I'm sure all you fibre artists out there know, the main fibre sales events of the year in Britian are Woolfest in Cumbria and Wonderwool in Wales plus fibre fest in Devon.  Of course as you can imagine, these are all at least 3 hours away from where I live in Norfolk.You will therefore understand my excitement at finding a fibre event a lot nearer to me. Fibre East is held in Bedfordshire and this year was its first (but I think it is destined for greatness.)

It was held on a private farm which the owners had kindly let them use. It consisted of 2 main marquees full of stallholders and many smaller marquees holding various things like individual stallholders, cushion stuffing service and catering venues. 

The two main marquees held the main seller stalls.  The range of products being sold varied from looms, to carding equipment, felting equipment (I bought a hand felting tool) and spinning wheels and spindles.  Then there were wool products of every sort, and yarns.  There were quite a lot of blended batts, but I make those myself, so there was nothing I wanted there.  (sometimes I use a picture I like, with interesting colours and try to re-create it in a fleece batt - but I digress!)  It did have a bit of a knitting/spinning theme, but was brilliant nonetheless).

Overall I believe that it will continue to grow but next time please sort out better toilet facilities as they were a bit gross.

Meghan

The process continues

I have now finished spinning the fleece and have two skeins of gorgeous hand spun yarn ready to dye in stunning colours. I have decided to dye the whole skein in one colour leaving a strip in the middle of the skein undyed so when warping and weaving there will be bits of white in there.

One of the skeins will be blue and one pink.

Washing out the excess dye on the blue skein

The finished dyed skeins drying out.
To the left of the skeins is some dyed fleece which I decided to do in the same session.

Now the yarn is ready to warp the loom up.

Warping the rigid heddle loom

The loom all warped with a shuttle of blue yarn ready.

I will let you know how the weaving is going
Meghan

Report on work experience at Kings Lynn Arts Centre

As part of my silver arts award I needed to research training and job opportunities to help me decide what I want to do in the future. I went to Kings Lynn arts centre.

On the day I went they were really busy making preparations for a fair they were having later in the day called fair in the square. Quite a few of the jobs I was asked to do during the morning were either to do with the fair or an exhibition opening the next day displaying watercolours by a local artist.

Most of the morning I went round with one of the girls who worked there full time and helped her with any job she was asked to do. This included things like stuffing envelopes with the arts centre's summer brochure, buying flowers for the fair in the square and making signs for the watercolour exhibition.

Obviously this was only a morning of helping out, but I really enjoyed it, and it gave me an insight of the amount of work it takes to put on an exhibition (much greater than I had imagined).  However, although the work is hard and the staff work long and unusual hours, it was a really positive place to work, and left me with the feeling that working in a gallery or exhibition space is a real option - not 9 to 5, but not desk bound either.

Meghan

Disaster struck

As all my fellow weavers out there know, something we all dread when weaving, is one of the warp threads snapping in the middle of the piece. This exact thing happened to me today so as you can imagine I was very disappointed as I didn't have enough fabric for my intended cushion cover.

The warp thread at near destruction

However, what I did have enough fabric for was an ipod cover which is what I have decided I will use the fabric for as it is perfectly good fabric and the warp thread has snapped above it (I was unable to mend the tread because the handspun yarn is so loosely spun, it has become fibre again with the reed rubbing the thread).

After cutting the warp off leaving it in the reed, I decided to carry on weaving and see if I can get enough fabric woven for a phone cover to match the ipod cover. So far it is going well and I may have enough fabric for a small lavender pillow but lets keep our fingers crossed and hope all the warp threads stay intacted.  I have learned to weave much nearer the reed, so that the treads are put under much less stress.

The amount of weaving I have managed so far on the second try.

I will let you know if and when the piece is finished.
Meghan

Wonderwool Wales

I have just come back off a week long holiday in Wales, finishing off with Wonderwool Wales, a fibre fest for those crazy about wool and fibre related crafts - I was in seventh heaven. I went on the Saturday and it was absolutely amazing, in fact I really wanted to spend another day there. At wonderwool I bought some Finn fleece to make a felted wall hanging. Finn fleece is amazing to felt as it felts very easily, and produces an amazing piece of fabric. To make it you take four layers of the fleece and soak it in hot water. You then rub your hands with olive soap and work the fleece until starting to felt. Then you fold in the edges and felt them into the fabric to create an even edge. Once that's done you place a thin piece of bubble wrap about two inches from the top and fold the fabric over the bubble wrap to create a gap to hang the picture from. When the original piece is made you can then turn it over and felt in strips of linen fibre and other pieces of fleece to create a design on the front and felt it all in with the bubble wrap and voila, you have yourself a finished wall hanging. A picture of my wall hanging is below.

I also made a cord to hang the wall hanging, using a different naturally coloured humbug fleece.  The fleece was spun into yarn, and then I made a twisted cord (braid) to hang it.

Making the braid

The finished braid

Hanging now from the braid

Now thats one of my four projects for the silver arts award done. Next is the crocheted handbag which I have just finished sewing up. For that I have used multicoloured 2ply merino  and jacob humbug to make. A picture of me sewing it up is below.  The crochet stitch is simple single stitches, as I wanted a close knit fabric, so that the handbag is strong.  The handle was crocheted separately and here I am below, sewing it all together.

The two remaining projects now are the knitted cravet with dorset buttons to accessorise and the hand woven and hand dyed cushion cover.

Me spinning the white blue face leicester for the hand woven cushion.

The finished skein of blue face leicester yarn.  It needs to be washed to set the twist in the yarn, so here it is drying outside.

Me completing one of the dorset buttons.  One done, 3 left to finish.  In another post I will let you know how I make these.  Simple enough but fairly time consuming, especially with single ply thin yarn!!!!

Thats all for now.  I will give you some more updates when I have completed some more of the work.  Now that the yarn is ready for weaving, I am going to warp up the loom.  You may have noticed that the scarf is now called a cravat, as I realised that there is not enough of the silk and merino yarn to make a long scarf.  However, it will still be a fashion scarf with the dorset buttons as accompaniment.
Meghan

Basketry Exhibition

I wanted to tell you all about a basketry exhibition I went to recently at the Sainsbury's Centre at the University of East Anglia. It was spread over two floors with a mixture of old and new pieces made by various artists. The gallery on the ground floor was entered via a steel basket wavy "wall".  This was part of a larger piece and was very impressive.  Another imposing piece, was a large work spilling over the wall separating the exhibition from the cafe area.  This felt almost threatening as it seemed to be growing as a large lump of basketry on the wall.

However downstairs was the best thing of all. There was a small cabinet holding five of Peter Collingwood's pieces of weaving.  Peter was an incredible weaver who was highly thought of in the weaving world, and died a couple of years ago, so it is sad that I shall never be able to meet him.  It was amazing to see some of his actual work in person.

To be honest I found the rest of the exhibition very average. The downstairs was definitely the best, with a wicker boat and international pieces.

It was good to visit the one time but it certainly isn't worth going a second time.
Unfortunately I wasn't allowed to take any photos in the exhibition so I can't show you.
Thats all for now
Meghan

The Hub

I wanted to tell you all about an art and craft exhibition centre I visited recently. It is called The Hub and is located in Sleaford in Lincolnshire. If you are close enough you must visit it. The exhibitions change but at the moment they have a big selection of Vivenne Westwood shoes to celebrate her 70th birthday. It includes collections like the animal toe shoes/boots, pirate boots and prostitute shoes!

One particular favourite of mine are the bag boots which are big pieces of fabric taken round the sole of the boot and brought in at the top of the boot which creates a baggy middle that look like literally a bag with a sole attached.

The pair that remind me of a bag - notice the animal toes!

The exhibition also includes a bright green pair of electric blue high heeled shoes that are the same as the pair that toppled Naomi Campbell on the catwalk.

The pair the same of those that toppled Naomi Campbell

 Another pair I partiularly like, and would love to own, is a pair of boots that are part of the pirate boot collection. They are an average height made of a sort of canvas fabric with a gorgeous pattern on. They are sewn about a centimentre from the edge so the edge is left to fray. It is all held together with real leather buckled straps, amazing.

My absolute favourites 

The only pair of shoes that I didn't like were the snake shoes.

 I believe these shoes were intended for men and are made leather to look like snake skin which to be honest I find a bit disgusting.

Apart from a couple of pairs of shoes the overall exhibition was brilliantly staged and set out. There was also an amazing short film on replay in one corner performed by a theatre group. All of the actresses in the film were wearing a pair of Vivenne Westwood which you zoomed in on every so often. However, it was difficult to understand what it was all about - very arty!!!  The whole exhibiton was fantastic and well worth a visit if you are near by.

 In the hub there are two galleries, the main one where the shoes were held and the roof gallery which is smaller than the main gallery. At the time the roof gallery was exhibiting masculine fashion photographs. The whole room was filled with photographs of celebrities in different styles of clothing. This included various periods of clothing like the 80's  90's and so on. It was a good exhibition but could have been improved by having actual clothes on show as apposed to just photographs. Obviously I was unable to take photographs of photographs, so don't have anything to show you for this.

Finally, there were cut flowers from paper hanging from the staircase.  The paper was laser cut and then the artist put them together in a garden!

This is an example of the laser cut paper "garden"

This was shown very creatively, and was something I had not seen before, so was really interesting and inventive.
Meghan

Worstead Spinning

In my last post I talked about how I am going to worstead spin my fleece for the four projects mentioned above. I just wanted to clarify to anyone who doesn't already know what worstead spinning is. You can spin in two different ways; worstead spinning and woolen spinning. Woolen spinning means to let the twist go into the fleece a bit before teasing the fleece out. This method doesn't produce quite as stronger yarn as the worstead method but it is ideal for most projects and especially for a knitted project that requires warmth.  As the fibres are "haphazard" when they are spun, more air is included which therefore increases the warmth of the finished yarn.

I prefer to use the worstead method especially when I am using it to weave with, as it makes a stronger yarn which will be ideal for warping a loom as the yarn needs to withstand a lot of tension.  With worstead spinning, the fibres are teased out before any twist is allowed to move into the fibres.  This way, the fibres are all "in line", so that the twisted yarn is strong.
Speak soon
Meghan

Silver Arts Award

I have recently become involved in doing the arts award for young people. It is a very broad term of the word art and you can choose a particular field to achieve your arts award in. I am choosing textile design. I met with Nick Neal today at Kings Lynn Arts Centre who suggested to go straight in at the silver award as it isn't much more to do than the bronze.  I have to say that this morning was a very positive experience and enjoyable, and I am thoroughly excited about getting going.

The Challenge


Within part 1 of the silver arts award  you must set yourself a challenge, which I have decided should be to use fleece in various ways to produce four finished pieces of fibre arts. I will felt  the fleece to make a wall hanging; spin the fleece into yarn, which I will then weave into a cushion, knit into a fashion scarf and crochet into a 3d bowl.  I also intend to use the resultant yarn, to make a braid to hang the wall hanging, and make dorset buttons to embellish the scarf and make earrings to match.  Finally I would like to make a woven flower, to sew onto the cushion.  I will spin different fleece and for the woven piece, will be white blue faced leicester fleece which is worstead spun for strength, then dyed once it is woven to make an individual piece.

My Action Plan

I have come up with an action plan of when it is all going to be completed and it the whole thing will be completed by the end of April to be moderated in May. My action plan is displayed below.

February- Spin and ply the red merino and silk blend (this will be used for knitting).  Make 1 large dorset button with the red merino and silk blend.  Start spinning white blue faced leicester fleece (get as much done as possible).

March- Finish spinning white fleece and spin "tutti fruiti" merino blend fleece. Make another large and 2 small dorset buttons from the red merino and silk blend. Use the small dorset buttons to make earrings. Crochet a bowl out of tutti frutti merino blend. Knit a thin fashion scarf out of red merino and silk blend. Sew on the 2 large dorset buttons to either end of the scarf.

April- Put the white warp on the loom. Weave a cushion, "Spot" dye the fabric. Make up the cushion and finish off. Make a felted wall hanging ( this will be done after wonderwool wales in April as there is some Finnish fleece I wish to purchase at the event). Make a braid to hang the felted wall hanging.

I then have 4 finished products:
A crocheted bowl out of tutti frutti merino blend handspun yarn
A woven cushion out of whiteblue faced leicester fleece that is then dyed
A felted Finnish fleece wall hanging with handmade braid
A knitted scarf with large dorset buttons on either end to match with dorset button earrings in the same yarn

Arts Events


I am attending a basketry exhibition at Sainsburys Centre of Visual Arts in Norwich next week. I shall do a review of the event after I have been. Watch this space!!!

Meghan

Introduction

Hello everyone.
My name is Meghan. I have several hobbies which include weaving/inkle weaving, spinning, dyeing and felting/needle felting. I also enjoy making dorset buttons and wire jewellery. I have a sewing machine which I enjoy playing with from time to time and I am thinking of looking more into making clothes. I love designing anything I can think of in note books and have designed a couple of items of clothing to make on a sewing machine. This blog will be all about the hobbies mentioned above and any ideas I have along the way I shall let you know of.
Nice talking to you
Meghan