January |
Felted Landscapes
with Helen Melvin.
During the month we will be exploring the variety of techniques I have developed
for painting with fibres. Beginning with the design source and art work we will look
at ways to assemble a palette with wools, silk fabrics, raw silks, yarns and threads
before exploring ways of creating complex colour and texture in felt as well as different
ways to define areas of the landscape. Finally we will look different methods of creating
a whole picture and end with a felted landscape.
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February | Natural Dye Extracts
with Alison Daykin.
We will discover a range of methods of dyeing with extracts from random dyeing fleece
and fibre to painting fabric and warps and beyond. Any natural extract dyes can be used
so start collecting them now, all the colours from all the ranges are inter mixable with
each other so we should be in for a feast of colour by the end of the month!
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March | Knitweave
with Rosemary Darrah. This workshop is designed to get you started
knitweaving on a knitting machine. What is knitweaving? In a nutshell, it is the weaving
in of a secondary yarn though a row of knitted stitches. During the workshop, I hope you
will be able to complete at least two projects, and also experiment with various types of
yarns, to give different fabrics for various applications.
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April | Alpaca
with Val Walker. I would like to conduct the workshop along the lines of -
preparing your fleece, good parts of the animal and how to use the parts that are not
useable for spinning, but you cannot throw away, spinning if clean and spinning if dirty,
tension for spinning and plying, washing and knitting.
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May | Eat or Dyewith Judy Sheppard. Let's look in our kitchen cupboards and see what we can
dye with - jelly, food dye, spices... Let's see where this will lead us. This will be an
easy and "laid back" workshop using what is in our food cupboards, it is also a reasonably
safe dye one as I won't be using any nasty chemicals. This is a dye method I often use with
school children.
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June |
Double weavewith Paul O'Connor / Neil Stevenson. Paul O'Connor's double weave workshop
will have three elements - double weave with a 4-shaft loom, taking the mystery out of
double weave tieups, and double weave with an 8-shaft loom. Paul is a very experienced
tutor and has been teaching these workshops at various guilds and conferences for over 15
years. The workshops have been well refined and are readily approachable; so don't be
intimidated.
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July | Annual Guild Discussion WeekA time of evaluation for the Online Guild. This week features an open discussion in
which all members are encouraged to participate.
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August | Holiday A free month with no scheduled workshop or programme offers time to catch up on
Guild projects and just chat.
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September | Knitting Lacewith Liz Lovick. The workshop
will take you from your first 'yarn over' to designing your own shawls! For lace virgins
and old pros alike. Work with any thickness of yarn - either hand spun or commercial
yarns.
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October | Shetland and Falkland fibre challengeWe shall explore the properties of both fibres: how they compare with each other
when spinning, dyeing, felting or anything else you can come up with. You may use either
raw fibres or tops for the Shetland (or both) but only tops for the Falkland as no raw
Falkland is available.
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November | Backstrap/Baltic Weaving
with Sue Foulkes.Baltic style pick ups using a rigid heddle and back
strap. Patterned warp faced bands are a tradition in many cultures. Around the Baltic
region, the designs are colourful expressions of a delight in beauty in small things.
This workshop will progress through the skills in weaving from simple to more complex
patterns. I will start with instructions for making a rigid heddle( from coffee
stirrers!) and a back strap. The introduction will include a short history of the rigid
heddle and then we will explore the wealth of patterned bands. In this type of weaving,
the bands are warped with two background threads for each pattern thread. The pattern
threads are usually double the thickness of the background threads. We will start with
narrow bands using 5 pattern threads, then move on to 7, 9 and 11. For the very adventurous
and those with multi-shaft looms, the final week will explore wider bands with many
pattern threads. Bands have many decorative uses as we will discover.
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December | Exchangewith Rachel Hardy.
&
Gadget Discussionwith Judy Sheppard. Gadget Discussion - have you got an interesting gadget?
Something not usually used for what you are using it for? What is that interesting
suggestion for winding warps you use? Care to pass them along? This month we are having a
discussion on useful, essential items used in our crafts. |
