I love teaching!!! Although I would like to have time to felt samples to bring on my upcoming US trip currently I have to concentrate on finishing the wall hanging at the Gaelscoil, help my mother prepare for moving house this Friday and facilitate my ongoing four session felting course with the Goleir group in Carlow. Once the wall hanging is finished I can really knuckle down and get some more pieces felted to bring with me on my travels, in fact I find it hard to believe I’ll be heading off for the first leg of my journey on 7th May. Plainwell MI, Lexington KY and Loomis CA, you’ve been warned!!!!! More about my MI and KY workshops further down this post, to start with I’ll share some news and pics from last week and this morning.

The wall hanging is starting to shrink at last!

Firstly, it’s been so rewarding to work with the pupils at the Gaelscoil, their faces were a picture last week as they all returned into the art room to have another felting session with me, this time everyone was really working hard to start the fulling process and get this large baby shrinking! No matter how clear their understanding of the process we are engaged in is, seeing the fully laid out and partially felted wall hanging for the first time was amazing for them. Faces lit up as they could identify their own prefelt pieces in the overall landscape, the younger junior and senior infants (4 to 6 year olds approx) did wonder where their pink, red and purple felt had disappeared to but were soon delighted to discover that they would be adding silk and shaping it into three dimensional flowers!

Beautifully decorated flowers ready to wet out and felt

These will be stitched on to the bottom portion of the piece later this week, I really hope to be able to show you completed pictures before too long, tomorrow we start to roll in a widthways direction. I also want to check with the principal tomorrow to see if I can put some pictures of the children online, I have some great action shots of them all working together as a team.

Now on to my US trip, it’s a hard life for a busy Irish felter!!! I’ll be delivering my new workshop ‘Wrapped in Nature’ in Plainwell MI on Friday 10th and Saturday 11th May and Lexington KY on Friday 24th and Saturday 25th May. I’ll follow this on with three individual days teaching at the Felt Fest in Loomis CA on Friday 31st May and Saturday 1st and Sunday 2nd June, it’s all SO EXCITING!!!!! In the middle of all this I’ll be facilitating a nuno felt workshop and a felt flower workshop at the Kentucky Sheep and Fiber Festival on Saturday 18th and Sunday 19th May respectively, full details of all these events and links to book your place are over on the workshop page. I’m going to post the shortened version of the MI and KY workshop info here again for you to look over in case you haven’t already seen it, I hope to see you soon at one of these fabulous venues!!!

‘Wrapped in Nature’ – beautiful felt inspired by the natural landscape

During this two day workshop participants will design and create their own unique and beautiful wearable, functional or decorative piece of felt using the natural landscape as a starting point. Some participants may choose to felt a purely decorative art piece such as a large vessel, sculpture or wall hanging while others may take the opportunity to work on a nuno felt wrap, vest, complex bag or jewellery. Over the course of the two days there will be time to explore and discover techniques or materials that you may have never considered using in your felting before and we will also have the facilities to make some small experiments naturally printing/dyeing on silk and felt.