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