It's been a busy few months, with a talk on silkworms for the London Guild, a Natural Dye Workshop for Tawe Guild and a week teaching Designer Spinning at the Association Summer School, held this year in Carmarthen.

 My students and I spent a wonderful week designing yarns from inspirational pictures that each one had brought with them and we also managed two group projects. Students chose either to select fibres that related to a blue picture, or fibres that related to an orange picture, made a giant batt of the fibre selections then divided the batt between them and spun the yarns.


The Blue Yarns



The Orange Yarns









In addition, the students all produced wonderful work from their own inspirational material and we explored many spinning techniques to produce the huge range of yarns produced. Among the techniques we tried were:
hand carding and long woollen draw refresher; core yarns; coil yarns; cable yarns; wraps; boucle; entrapment yarns using fibres and fabric; bead yarns; snarl yarns; blended  batts; Navajo ply; all sorts of insertions, including washers and press studs.......


I am extremely proud of Ineke, Jane W, Joanna, Carolyn, Sue, Jane S, Helen, Carol, Christine and Hilary and I hope they are proud of themselves!

Below are images of their work: