Sunday, April 29, 2007

Wales - Day 3and 4 Finally!


Saturday morning after a walk on the beach, we had breakfast and went into our next workshop. Liz Clay, paper maker and book binder, showed us how to make felt by using paper making techniques. We finger carded brown Alpaca, Black Gotland and White Shetland onto templates and slid them onto a paper making screen. She then applied a type of wallpaper paste to them and allowed it to dry. Then we did the same samples in the usual felt making process. We ended up with about 10 samples to then make into a book. The feel and finish was interesting that the same fibres had with the two different techniques.





After lunch was spent doing landscapes. We were sent to draw a few quick scetches on the University grounds. By early afternoon, a thick, dense fog had moved in, followed by heavy rain. Most of the campus was cloaked in a thick grey blanket. Not much to draw, so we used our imagination. I have to say, I didn't love doing landscapes that day. I did like her technique though. It was all made of prefelts cut into shapes and the placed end to end and felted again. Can't say what mine looks like, but I remember the initial drawing. I'll leave it up to you to decide what it is.


Sunday was the last morning and one of the workshops I was looking forward to. Needle Felting. I don't do any, other than to tack down something that doesn't stick. Our instructor was Birgitte Krag-Hansen from Denmark. I'd been looking at her hair bob since we arrived in Wales and was interested in how she got such detail in her works. She has done work with the Royal Theatre making Puppets for drama productions. They're quite amazing and large. Almost life size. I loved this workshop. We started out with the basic egg shape and worked by adding layers to achieve the nose, eyes, cheeks and so on.


Here it Harold. The children have named him. I wouldn't be into trolls or pixies myself, but he was great fun to make.





From there we gobbled down our lunch, submitted our projects, got our luggage and headed towards the airport. With several extra bags of fibre related goodies, one person very ill and another on crutches, we landed safe and sound with lots of fun behind and ahead of us.

2 comments:

Diane said...

that hair "thinga-ma-jiggy" is soooo coool!!! please give me more details how to make one...

Mary said...

This is all brilliant Holly, well done.