knitting and stitching

on friday the 25th of november (the day after i went to see 'we will rock you'. yeah, i was tired) my textiles class went down to harrogate to go to a textiles exhibition which is called the 'knitting and stitching show'. it's run by a company called 'twisted thread' and is very similar to the clothes show, but they sell products like fabric, ribbon, wool, printing equipment, etc. instead of clothes. they also have a lot of textile artwork on display and hold textile craft workshops, where you can learn things such as how to knit.

me and lauren :) this was in a stall that sold things made from alpaca wool.

if you're into pandora, then you would have loved it. they had several stalls selling very good fake pandora beads and bracelets for about 50p each.

have you ever wanted an alpaca stuffed toy, made of alpaca fur? i want one. they're the softest things i have ever touched in my whole life.

i believe this piece was made of felt. the artist 'felted' this design and then brought all the sides together to make a building. 'felting' is basically where you take a load of wool and pull it apart so it's just wispy strands of fluff, then pile lots of strands on top of each other, make a pattern if you want your felt to have a design, cover it in warm soapy water and rub the life out of it. when i made felt, i tried to make a heart design, but it went so wonky and distorted when i rubbed it, because you seriously have to go at this wool for hours. how she managed to keep all that detail is beyond me.

we were told that it would be really beneficial for our textiles course, but it was, in all honesty, quite boring. my whole class is saving up for clothes show right now so we had no money to spend, so the shopping side of the event was basically just teasing us and we couldn't buy anything. we were given a checklist of things to do (like pick up a prospectus from an university, talk to a textile artist, take photos, etc.) but we quickly realised that it only took around an hour to do all of those things, and then we had nothing to do. we ended up sitting in the 'theatre' section of harrogate exhibition centre, in the theatre seats, watching other people have dinner in the little cafe section that we couldn't afford to go to.

we sat and watched our little 'show' for around 2 hours, and then explored the building a bit more, then went and sat by the meeting point to wait to go home. the most exciting part was getting the train there.

for us, at the time, the event was a bit... rubbish. i think that was mostly due to the circumstances, though. since the only creative stuff i do nowadays is for school, i don't really have a need for crafty things. also, we were tired (it was a friday, we were knackered from the week at school. plus me and lauren had sore throats and hands from singing and clapping all night at the grand theatre) and we didn't really have the patience to be sorting through huge piles of fabric and ribbon to find something nice to buy.

it really does take dedication and commitment to find something good at a craft fair, and we were running seriously low on energy that day. x