Shibori with Dorothy

What a lovely morning we all had on Saturday sampling shibori techniques with the inimitable Dorothy. However before we could get stuck in we had a really brilliant session chatting about the many and very beautiful pieces which members have been working on over the last while.

The Improving Skills workshop led by Ann and Jayne was a great success and there was very positive feedback from participants who brought some of the pieces they'd created from sampling different wools and learning about them through nuno felting and finally little 3D vessels.

The two one day workshops with Jeanette Sendler produced some beautiful work which included a child's jacket and a wall hanging. In both workshops participants had incorporated some very fine machine knitted one ply wool which was then distorted into wonderful shapes and used to embellish the pieces.

During Show n Tell members also shared their own individual projects from Elaine's tower inspired by Yeats' poem 'The Cloths of Heaven' and Dympna's lovely wrap and jewellery all created from a 'lucky dip' bag at the Christmas Bring n Buy. We were also treated to the results of an afternoon free felting when Elaine kindly demonstrated the technique taught by Gabi McGrath of making a felted lampshade.

Finished work from the Jeanette Sendler workshop

Dorothy had brought a huge number of delightful samples and talked us through many of the techniques she'd used including natural dying using onion skins.

Everyone made a piece of prefelt and then got to grips with working on the shapes they had chosen to sample. There were lots of marbles and small pebbles employed and in some cases various shapes of felt were incorporated into the prefelt giving some soft very appealing finishes. 

Dorothy had enhanced many of her samples with stitching using various colours and she encouraged participants to experiment with shape and colour and embellishment.

The morning passed very quickly and by lunchtime we had an amazing array of small samples to talk through together. Next month's Felt-in will be a very interesting one to see what everyone has made of their initial sample piece so watch this space!

Many thanks to Dorothy for a great morning and congratulations to everyone for creating such beautiful work.

Here's a link to some videos on simple Shibori folds to inspire you all.

Thank you to Gail for our February blog post. Keep a look out for information on the March lattice scarf workshop coming soon.