Coming home from the Isles of Scilly after my exhibition opening night, I received a commission to do a felt painting of something much more local – the Langdale Pikes in Cumbria. It was strange to be working with greens and browns instead of blues and turquoises and to be ‘painting’ trees instead of boats!
I have just received the online brochure for my exhibition at Gallery Tresco and I’m so excited! This time last year, an exhibition in my favourite gallery was just a dream and now it’s only a few days to the opening night party.
I’m exhibiting with John Bampfield and Maggie O’Brien and you can see our work in the first few pages of the brochure, along with the rest of the artists exhibiting during July. My work starts on Page 24.
Hope you like it!
I have just returned from Tresco after a week on the island gathering more reference material and just soaking up the wonderful atmosphere. It is such a blissful and inspiring place to be and so hard to tear oneself away when it is time to come home that I always get an attack of the Scilly Blues when I think about leaving. In fact, I sometimes get really choked up at the airport. And arriving back on the mainland and having to get into a car and drive on a road with traffic is temporarily soul-destroying (Tresco, in common with each of the islands apart from St Marys, has none of these things).
At least, I shall be back again soon for my exhibition at Gallery Tresco!
These are my most recent felt paintings for the exhibition and I’m really looking forward to getting back into the studio to create some more now that I am home again.
I don’t know why I’ve been so nervous about sharing my Very Exciting News – maybe I was secretly afraid it was all a dream and if I shared it, I’d wake up and find it wasn’t true… Anyway, I have been offered an exhibition of ten felt paintings at Gallery Tresco in the Isles of Scilly in July. This is THE gallery that it was my ambition to exhibit at and I am so thrilled!
These are my first three felt paintings for the exhibition and I am going out to Tresco in just over a week so that I can work with my inspiration all around me.
I will post the rest of the paintings as I finish them. Hope you like them ☺️
This is an article about me in ‘Felt Matters’ – the Journal of the International Feltmakers Association:
Today, I was demonstrating how to make felt flowers at a fundraising event for Farlam Church. People could also ‘have a go’ and I had some lovely ladies and children trying their hand at making felt for the very first time. These are the results!
I am in my favourite place in all the world – and the source of a lot of my inspiration. I am standing right at the water’s edge on a warm, calm sunny evening on Tresco in the Isles of Scilly. The water is crystal clear and every shade of turquoise. The sand is almost white and, because it is composed of tiny pieces of shell, it literally glitters in the sunlight.
Here are some photographs from where I am standing right now…
And here is the beautiful pot that I bought in Gallery Tresco this afternoon. It is almost two pots in one as it has different sides. I love it!
We also found this gorgeous new shop on Tresco which sells stunning clothes and soft furnishings – such a lovely place!
Here is a very pretty jellyfish which may well be the inspiration for a felt and silk scarf when I get home (and no, I wasn’t in the water when I took the picture!)…
And now I have to go because my lovely husband has just brought me a Pimm’s :-)))
Robbin Firth is touring the UK, teaching feltmakers how to use her brilliant Palm Washboard tools. These make feltmaking so fast! I wouldn’t be without one now. I wanted to learn the technique for my felt pictures as they can become a bit distorted during rolling, but I have also made some lovely things on the workshops – especially this shawl made from loose Wensleydale locks.
You can buy Palm Wasboards from http://www.adelaidewalker.co.uk/equipment
Robbins’s website is https://www.heartfeltsilks.com and I can highly recommend her workshops. She is a lovely person and very generous tutor.
I always try to get to Muncaster Castle at bluebell time as the area in the woods above the castle are simply stunning. In fact they call the area ‘Bluebell Heaven’.
I decided to use this photograph from a few years back as the basis of my latest felt painting.
The following photos show the progression of the ‘painting’ from the initial fluffy layout of the background through to the finished picture.
Now I just have to get it framed 🙂
Fluff 'n' Nonsense 