The past month has flown by. I’ve been busy printing fabrics for both wholesale and retail as well as printing for one of my print services clients, in total over 100 metres of fabric has left my poor little 8 metre printing table. I’ve also run two printing workshops, bought a ‘new’ printing table (which meant a round trip to Edinburgh for my husband and his brother) and I travelled down to the south of the country twice in one week.
My busiest week was last week when I went to Plymouth and back and then Farnham and back within a matter of days. First on the list was Plymouth College of Art where I was teaching as part of the Crysalis Skills Tour. I was invited to be the programme’s eco-friendly printing tutor, my role was to teach and share some of my knowledge of printing using environmentally friendly inks and fabrics. The session was a full morning of printing, both with exposed and stencilled screens, and the group of students (which included international students as well as UK-based practitioners) were a delight to teach.
After a quick two days back in Sheffield where more frantic printing continued, I was ready to set off down south again for Thread, the festival of Textiles at Farnham Maltings. I knew of course about Unravel, the famous knitting festival held at the same location, this was a chance to show my work at a specific textiles event so I couldn’t turn it down when invited to take part.
It’s been a couple of years since I’ve sold at a fair as when I started specialising specifically in fabrics I knew my time at ordinary craft fairs was up. This was something different though, a textiles fair with an emphasis on hand crafted textiles. I had a great day and met so many lovely people. The visitors to the event were all wonderful and said so many lovely things about my fabrics. My fellow stall holders were fabulous too, I was in the great hall downstairs and the group of lovely ladies I was surrounded with were all such a lovely bunch.
My next door neighbour on one side was the fantastic Floss & Mischief. Genevieve was a pleasure to chat to all day and her work was amazing.
I was also lucky to be situated so close to Helen Foot whose talent as a weaver was blatantly obvious from the glance at the wonderful textiles that were flowing past me during set up. I went away with a couple of her scrap packs, I would have happily walked away with one of these beautiful scarves though.
Here are just a few more of wonderful artists (and lovely people) exhibiting who I was lucky enough to have a chin wag with:
Craig Fellows
Duck and Duffel
Guthrie and Ghani
Jen Moules Textile Design
Namolio
The Little Grey Sheep
Warren and Gamble
Please take a look at their lovely work, I hope to see some of them again at next years event.
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