PERFECT  PREFELT!!

Today's flowers on prefelt

What a great morning everyone had under Elaine's watchful eye as she introduced the concept of prefelt, how to make it and even better how to use it!  She had brought along lots of sample pieces of the different prefelt weights and finished articles using prefelt which of course made it all much easier to grasp.  She'd even brought along some commercial prefelt in different weights and it was great to see the difference amongst them all.

Elaine's chess board and other pieces made from prefelt

 

a constellation by Elaine

There was a great crowd this morning and even some new faces for our first session of 2018 and the girls had lots to show with a super cuddly old sheep who I have named Eric made by Margaret (alas no photo but keep watching this space!)   We saw some felted vessels from the Improving Skills workshop last Saturday made from Shetland wools and the sample pieces with various wools and embellishments were testament to the work everyone put in then.

Elaine demonstrated how to make the prefelt and gave everyone a very useful tip of placing fine plastic between the two different colours and rolling together to speed up the process. 

 

Girls get busy and down to action

Everyone got busy making their two pieces of prefelt using some lovely colour combinations and some got very sophisticated (Bronwyn!) and decided to use the carder -  with Dympna's help, to create a beautiful field of green.  

We then moved on to using a piece of prefelt to make a felted flower with some inspirational results.

We will be using the prefelt at next month's Felt-in when Helen will be demonstrating how to weave with our prefelt.

It was a lovely start to the new year and hopefully everyone will be busy now thinking about their exhibition pieces for the 'Felt Alive' exhibition in Portaferry during July.  And also preparing for our next workshop with Gabriella Kovacs in March - busy time!!

I'm going to share a few other photos of today for you to see what a good day we all had and that was only the morning.  About 12 girls stayed on for the free felting session in the afternoon and I'm looking forward to seeing what they did.

So long for now, Helen will be back soon, cheers from Gail

IMPROVING SKILLS WORKSHOP  

Saturday 13 January

'Great workshop. . . . Trainers well prepared and helpful. . . . . .Brilliant. . . . .Loved the opportunity to experiment'

Just some of the really positive comments from the girls who attended our workshop at the Village Centre.  It was great to see lots of new faces and some old hands revisiting their felting skills under the excellent tutelage of Ann McCullough and Jayne Burgess.

Norma concentrating

Pleasaunce experimenting

The girls were introduced to different sheep breeds and qualities of wool and were encouraged to try out the wools for themselves.   'Loved the opportunity to experiment with different breeds of wool and learning what each type of wool is best suited to'.   This comment sums up the earlier part of the workshop before moving on to spend a little time learning about incorporating wool with fine fabrics.

Samples of nuno felt

Jayne explained the process and demonstrated the various edges which could be achieved simply by laying the wool in different directions.

 When it came to making a vessel Ann had lots of samples to demonstrate shape and form and how different shades of wool can be used to create combinations of depth and hue.  She also included a couple of deliberate mistakes to highlight  the pitfalls of working with a resist and not concentrating!

Karen and Ann

Ann's samples

The time flew by and while the girls took home a lot of samples they also took home some homework!  We are looking forward to seeing lots of lovely vessels in the coming weeks as everyone finds time to complete their project!

'Very enjoyable and informative, Ann and Jayne extremely helpful. . . . trainers well prepared and helpful. . . . . could have done with extra time for last project. . . . .probably would have liked a little more time. . . really enjoyed learning new skills especially making of vessel. . . . great refresher course. . . ..it was great, packed so much in'.

Thank you to everyone who took part in the course for all your positive comments.  It's lovely to get such great feedback for the tutors and also for the committee and helps us plan for even better workshops.

Thanks to Ann and Jayne again and also to Tina for being a great helper and photographer!  Here are a few more shots of the day.

Don't forget this Saturday, 20 January is the first Felt-in of 2018 and Elaine will be telling us all about prefelts and how to use them.

We are beginning at 10.00am to give us lots of time for Show n Tell etc before the felting fun begins!!

Take care and happy felting from Gail  (standing in for Helen as she's off enjoying a big holiday!)