I know I’ve mentioned it before ( maybe allot!?) but one more time can’t hurt!

The Maiwa Symposium is still on in Vancouver, it really is a big event here and runs for about a month of wonderful textile workshops, lectures and events. My latest involvement with the symposium is as a volunteer! I spent 3 days as classroom assistant for a felting workshop with the brilliant Jessica de Haas as instructor. Jessica’s Funk Shui Felting workshop was amazing and even though I was up to my elbows in wet towels and buckets of water for a good portion of the time it was amazing to watch Jessica work her magic with wet wool!

This is the “wet room” and believe me it was! The fan in the picture wasn’t because it was a warm day, getting a little air moving helped to dry things out (a bit)

The students did some wonderful work with wool and silk and over the course of the 3 days developed some exciting designs.

It was an exciting hour at the very end of the 3 days when everyone gathered  around the big table for show and tell. It’s amazing the different work each student created, their personalities came out in their color and design choices.

Jessica uses silk paper and lots of free motion machine stitching on her felted pieces, the combination is wonderful!

It was a busy 3 days but I did manage to make a bit of silk paper and experimented (well for me it was an experiment!) with wool roving mixed into the silk. I couldn’t resist adding a bit of text as well, the newsprint settled into the silk fiber nicely I think.

It won’t end up anything like the felting created in the workshop I’m sure, but I have a few ideas I want to try out….

Bye for now, Catherine