Author Archives: Teri Berry

It’s Official!

My City and Guilds certificate arrived yesterday, I heard that I would pass in October but did not want to tempt fate by telling people until the certificate had safely arrived. Silly I know, but I am strangely superstitious like that. It has finally arrived, and to my surprise is actually 2 certificates…

To celebrate I started making myself a nunofelt dress, it’s not quite going to plan but I think it is still salvageable with a bit of dressmaking. My biggest learning so far is that the “holes” (i.e. around the neck line and arm holes) in the template should not be increased by 50% along with the rest of the garment…. more on that next time.

Here are couple of other pieces I have been working on this week:

It may not be that easy to see from this photo but I have used resists to create flower patterns peeking through the green, I plan to add some embroidery to the centres of each flower.

This piece has been sat on my table for a few weeks now and I still can’t decide where to go with it, should I just leave it as it is? The yellow and pink patterns are rather nice but not as striking all the way round as they are in the photo below. I could add some embroidery but am concerned it might just detract from the dye pattern. Another idea I had was to cut holes about a 1/4 of the way down and add a drawstring to make into a bag rather than a pot. It stands about 30 cm (12″) tall. What do think? What would you do?

I also made a couple of coin / key purses to match the 2 bags I made recently, both will have a zipper on the back and the loop at the top allows for a key hoop to be attached.

This is another coin purse, but using the flower resist technique again, the zip will sit across the top where you see the line of orange. I plan to add some embroidery to the centre of the flower on this one too.

Hope you are have a creative week too… 🙂

Felting Exhibiton

Last Sunday saw the second International Feltmakers Association (Region 5) exhibition in Sonning Common. It was a good day with lots of chat, very nice cakes and some felting demonstrations from yours truly. The visitor numbers were rather low due to incorrect dates being advertised in various papers and magazines. I’m not at all happy about the poor organisation but I won’t keep harping on about that, I still managed to have fun and met some really lovely people.

The exhibition as you walk in
My display area
The view from the far end of the hall

I also had an interesting experience with some wool I was demonstrating with. I was making pods and used a coarse red wool (afraid I don’t know the breed) on the inside and variegated purple merino on the outside. The coarse wool almost refused to the felt. Even when the merino was firmly felted there were still unfelted tufts of the coarse wool but it did give a very interesting texture that several people likened to a brain.

I also made a couple of more conventional pods and think I might have even inspired one of our feltmaking group to have a go at making pods too 🙂