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