I am not going to bore you with details of all my technical problems at the moment but suffice to say I am off to try and buy a new laptop immediately I upload this post otherwise I am going to need serious counselling for computer rage and anger managment!  Yesterday I managed to finish my arts grant submission thanks in no small part to the fabulous printer (cheers for the simplicity of Epson ) I invested in on Wednesday afternoon.  You may well ask yourself how I am going to fund all these new technical products but the way I feel today if I have to spend another 50 minutes starting a computer, half an hour trying to access gmail, over an hour writing and uploading a blog post and if 20 images of my felt cost E98 in hard copies (I nearly passed out!!!) new equipment will save me both time and money so I have to find the money somehow.  I know that Carlow Co. Council may not have many funds to grant the arts this year but fingers crossed they will send a little my way and hopefully this will help fund my intended trip to the international felt symposium ‘Felt, Naturally’ in Silkeborg, Denmark from 28th July to 1st August 2010.  This symposium sounds fabulous and I really would like to attend to further my studies in various aspects of sculptural felting.  The Danish felting group Grima are organising the event to celebrate their twentieth anniversary and if you are interested in finding out more click the word Engelsk Brochure when you link through to their excellent website.

As promised here is  a photo from my felting students at last Sunday’s ‘Pick up your Needles’ workshop in the Courthouse Arts Centre, Tinahely. 

Fun fingerless mittens

Our first project in the morning was a piece of flat felt so that participants could see how the felting process actually occurs (most participants had never felted before) and then in the afternoon everyone made themselves a gorgeous pair of warm and comfortable fingerless mittens.  Unfortunately I really was not feeling 100% on Sunday (cold was in full flow) and think that I needed to make the resists for the mittens a little bit wider.  We only discovered this when everyone got to the stage of putting the mittens on for the final felting and working to size.  Some of the mittens were extremely tight but luckily heating them up in the microwave helped stretch them a little and everyone was very understanding and delighted with their work so all in all a good day was had by everyone!