In An English Country Garden...

Creating felt flowers with a lovely group last night in a workshop to celebrate Devon Open Studios at the wonderful adult learning centre in Totnes.

Here are some pictures -

a beautiful bunch of roses

creations

Each time I am amazed by the creativity of every individual - all given the same resources but the result is all their own.

The workshop is wonderful instroduction to felt making techniques as it shows how to make flat felt, 'sausages', molding soft felt into a 3d shape, and patience!  Fabulous results by the way.

Busy Creating

Slowly getting the hang of getting photos up onto the blog.  Managed to do it all wrong earlier in the week - the technophobe-dinosaur is slowly learning new tricks.  Here are pix from felt-making workshops - this first one was from last summer but put up here for Theresa who came along on Wednesday to the workshop at Newton Abbot.

Flower Felt Corsages

We wrapped sponge shapes with fleece, and then wet felted them to make 3D felt.  Different sizes, shapes and fibres used.

Felt pots, bowls and a purse

Sheila brought along a picture of a landscape which she interpreted in felt - she made soft felt first, which she cut into strips, and wove these placing them on a white background.  This workshop was at Growers Organics in Yealmpton where they are using a specially kitted out polytunnel for crafty workshops - they've also got a composting loo, chickens, veggie garden, and organic plants.

Woven landscape

Here is a picture of silk paper made by Alison at another of the workshops in Newton Abbot, at the new Passmore Edwards Centre (its amazing - worth visiting just to admire a newly refurbished public building with a large collection of information about railways and trains.

Silk paper is so easy to make, and then it can be used in other projects - stitching, book making, felt-making.....

Alison's silk paper - hope you don't mind me using the pics, I forgot to take any!

here is a pic of silk paper.  Such fun to make and so easy!  Once made (and dried) it can be cut up and used in projects.  Here it has been used as a base for embroidery in a little brooch.

Here little snippets of silk paper have been felted into these felt flowers.

And here is a detail of the silk paper felted in to the flower.