Needlefelting workshop at Cinderhill Farm with Gretel Parker

As some of you may remember I was left a small inheritance by my late Aunt Betty and I decided I would use the money to do a couple of craft courses 

I have had a try at needle felting before but with only limited success, so when I saw professional children's illustrator, toy maker and needle felter Gretel Parker was going to run a one day workshop at a venue  not that far down the Wye Valley from me, I booked immediately. You may be familiar with Gretel as she has featured in several Mollie Makes magazines and is on the cover of this month's magazine with some very lovely felted cats. I have also followed her blog for some time so I was delighted to get a place on her course.

So, on Saturday morning we ventured down the Wye Valley to Cinderhill Farm where Gretel was holding the Moon Gazing Hare workshop.

Compostman dropped me at the Farm in brilliant sunshine and I was greeted warmly by Deborah (the owner) and then it was into the house to meet Gretel and be offered hot drinks and the first of many slices of delicious cake. Cinderhill Farm sell amazing home made food from their on site shop The Pie House and all the food I ate there was utterly delicious.

Gretel introduced us to the art of needle felting and the tools we would use and then showed us the moon gazing hare she had made. She demonstrated how to get started on the body and we then started making our own version by choosing the colour roving we wanted to use.

There were five of us attending the workshop so we got lots of help and personalised attention throughout the entire day.

 I chose this lovely soft mid brown colour

 Having made the body and added the head

 we were shown how to make the legs and tail...

 and then how to attach them to the main body

We had lots of breaks for drinks and the most delicious lunch with lamb from Cinderhill Farm. You can buy this lamb stew as a filling for a pie :)

Delicious blackcurrant mouse to follow.

After lunch we started making ears - I went for ears lying down as in the more traditional moon gazing hare.

We were all very quiet as we concentrated on our needles. We did chat during the day, though and I really enjoyed the other participant's company.

Gretel brought along some of her shop supplies - as well as advance copies ( hot off the press!) of her new book on needle felted models.

My Hare looks up at the ceiling - she is called Serena.

We were shown how to add eyes and embroider a nose and how to finish off our hares with a final very thin layer of roving which we then spent a VERY LONG TIME needling down to get it as smooth as possible - this is a very time consuming bit and I carried on at home later.

 

Five very different Hares :) Serena is on the far right hand side.


At the end I purchased a copy of Gretel's new book, which she was kind enough to sign for me, and also some more of the lovely roving.

We finished at about 5 pm and Compostman collected me to go home - but before we left we purchased some sausages and sausage rolls from The Pie Shop and said hello to the lambs, goats, chickens and cats of Cinderhill Farm. The sausage rolls were eaten for lunch the next day and were really yummy!

I can recommend Gretel as a teacher -  she was lovely and kind and very very good at instructing a group with a mix of complete beginners as well as slightly more experienced people. I am now much more confident that I could actually make a recognisable needle felted sculpture and I really enjoyed my day out at Cinderhill Farm.

Joining the local WI

Yesterday I had an evening out which is rare for me and which I really enjoyed. I went ( just up the lane/in summer across the field via a footpath) to my local WI and really enjoyed myself, so much so that I have joined up :)

We listened to an interesting talk about the WI Denman college and the wonderful courses they offer - I can now see what I will spend a bit of my inheritance from Aunty Betty on - some residential course involving textiles I suspect :)

She would have liked that :) She liked nice feeling/looking fabrics and was always very interested in my latest craft efforts :)And then I can look at what I made and every time I make something else I can remember her :)

A quiet weekend in the garden

This weekend has been a peaceful, if busy time. Time spent tending my garden, weeding , harvesting and talking to visitors about my work in the Wood and the various renewable energy systems we use to reduce our carbon footprint.

Yesterday afternoon and this morning I have; cleaned out the eglu, cleaned the two large wooden hen houses, the walk in run and all the feeders and drinkers, filled 8 compost bins with assorted stuff, moved 8 wheel barrowloads of an old bonfire pile to somewhere else ( lots of digging involved), hand mowed around the potato patch ( the raised bed ones), tidied the barn and swept the paved areas, watered and fed the polytunnel and picked lots of produce from the garden. I did lots of other stuff as well, but I can't remember the details!

I also did lots of inside, housework...and washed, hung out , dried and put away 3 loads of washing. I love the smell of freshly line dried washing!

Compostgirl went to play at her best friend's house today, and I gave a talk to a group of crop sharers from a local CSA scheme just up the road. They walked across the fields to us, and we had a pleasant hour or so in the wood, where I gave my talk, they asked questions, drank tea and generally had a look around at how we keep chickens, grow veg, make compost and generate our own electricity and hot water and wood products. They were a lovely group of people and it was a pleasure to talk to them.

Then it was time to collect a tired but happy Compostgirl and have our evening meal, which was entirely home grown or home reared.

A good weekend.

Some Monday photographs

A very messy front garden

and a very untidy north borderSome help in the garden!

Tidy now.

I have feathery help in the compost area......





Lots of lovely crafting students and their creations.....

A smiley sun!

A very messy Polytunnel, but THIS is a "before" shot"......the "after shot will come later this week....!

A day training as a Fire Marshal.....

Off on a Fire Marshall course today.....

Somehow I bet the weather changes and these were the two lovely gardening days, and then, when I am around again, the weather turns bad?
CM doing things in the loft and garden, CG last day at school before half term ( gulp)

Later on....at 5.30 pm

Am back from Fire course, now a certified Fire Marshal, so have a silver star on my chest and am armed and ready to rock and roll with an extinguisher....if this blog catches fire, I will sort it out!

Course was held at Anubis at Eaton Bishop, they are really good and excellent trainers who make all this stuff memorable, in a fun way.

Spent some time putting out pretend fires ( a large stone obelisk obliged by pretending to be the fire...) with all sorts of different types of extinguisher...Simon the Firefighter was brilliant and very kind and patient with those who were a bit concerned........he also took us in small groups into a smoke filled ( synthetic, safe to breathe...) room and we had to find our way out...glad I didn't have to do it for real as it was very unpleasant...

I am even more admiring of Firefighters, tbh...the idea of deliberately going into a building/situation, where you can't see for smoke and burning bits of stuff fall on you...to rescue total strangers...hmmm.......I might be brave enough to do something like that for my loved ones ..but I sure as hell don't think I am made of the sort of stuff to do that as a job....

Priority now is to shower and put ALL the clothes I was wearing in the wash....All my SMOKEY clothes from today smells disgusting, synthetic smoke is much worse than nice woodsmoke....yuck not an alluring smell..... .

Mastercrafts on TVtonight at 9 pm BBC2 Monty Don and heritage Crafts........lovely!

Sunshine and twiggery

Its been a lovely day here today,

My day started well, with a meeting in my "office" ...a walk around the wood with a prospective client (grin)

I then spent a pleasant hour walking around Ledbury taking photos and thinking up clues for a trail I have been commisioned to write.....so got to have a wander around a historic market town, in the sunshine and get paid for it...my kind of work...!

Then had lunch out in pub with Cm.

This afternoon I have been making twig hearts and stars and writing a lesson plan and tutorial sheet on how to make them, for a class I am teaching next week.

Also let the hens out to have a wander in the sunshine, I stayed close by and kept an eye open for the Fox. The feathery ladies seemed very pleased to be out of the runs!

Paper crafting workshop for grown ups....

Monday night, car loaded up with paper craft stuff, card blanks, stuff to make envelopes, the paper and paper fabric and papercasts the participants all made last week...

Had to iron some of their paper as it was a bit thick and had dried crinkly, but have sorted it all out now!

and the stuff to make up tonights project, which are A5 notebook covers, which are then filled with A5 paper to make a note book...

I got some wonderful wallpaper sample books ( 3 very expensive books!) from the scrapstore and have spent a very nice afternoon making up cards and notepads and books, some as examples, some as future stock.

The envelopes look amazing, though I say so myself...I have used various nature magazines and some wallpaper as well, picking out wonderful pictures, and made beautiful lined envelopes which I will use for my cards, and they look ...wow...

Even CM thought they were good, and he is usually unimpressed by such stuff....

Must have shower before I go though, and get changed into clean, paint-y clothes, rather than clean, gardening clothes....

Couldn't get onto the RSPB site to upload my BGBW results...it was too busy

Update at 11 pm.....Late in from paper crafting workshop ( 10 pm...!) so sat on sofa, drank wine, watched Kirsty Young on social history of UK and went to bed. Slept well, but not long enough..

Catch up post about work in November....

It has been manic here dear friends, simply manic!

I am curently doing an adult teaching qualification and it is great fun but hard work and very time consuming! I have also been very busy with getting lots of paying work to do...which is wonderful BUT all this takes me away from doing other stuff...like blogging!

I have managed to find time to post about really important stuff (the loss of poor Sid puss, for example) but the everyday stuff you all seem to like so much, about hens, cats, garden, work...I have had no time..

AND I have ( sigh) been ill or incapacitited AGAIN..yes, my rubbish immune system has let me down and I have been poorly for weeks after getting swine flu...it is a nasty flu tis true, but no worse than other flu....which means it leaves you feeling terrible for several weeks...I basically "lost" most of October as I was too ill to do more than the minimum chores around Compost Mansions and I had to cancel a number of things I really wanted to do!

ANYWAY...here are a few pictures of some things I got up to in November...

I had several trips to what I am rapidly thinking of as my spiritual home..the Worcester Scrapstore...

This time I got lots of ribbon and assorted stuff to use in my recycled Seasonal craft workshop....which I ran during Novemeber.




10 adults attended and made some lovely wreaths from both recycled and natural materials ,

as well as twig wands and stars and music scroll tree decorations.





I really enjoyed teaching them stuff and they all seemed to really enjoy themselves, which was nice for me! The next 2 courses I am running are already fully booked, anyway, so I must be doing something right.

Back in the land of the living....

Well, I am back in the land of the blog, anyway....

Where do I start? I am still rather weak and poorly but am feeling a little more like my pre July self, and have been able to get on with a few of the million and one things which need doing around here.

So here are some lovely fruit and veg from the garden and polytunnel.



I took the opportunity of my enforced rest to get on with preparation for various workshops I an giving in the autumn and next spring, one is recycled paper making and paper crafts so I have been busy pressing and drying leaves and flowers to add to the paper we will be making.

I have also been collecting and drying Lavender and other flowers to use in dried flower arrangements.



The cats as always watch everything I do. This time they got up on the scaffolding and were peering in through the study window!



When they are not sleeping, that is!

No email and I really needed it for work, today!

If anyone was needing to email me ( either on my compostbin email OR any personal emails you have for me)...you can't, as my ISP is down and has been all day....both client and web mail!

so I have had no emails at all, and I can't send any out either, which has been a bit of a business blow as I had all sorts of stuff scheduled to do today...and I have only just realised I have comments awaiting moderation, too! ( oops sorry folks)

I am off to meet a batch of new in-training Master Composters tomorrow at their training course, to chat to them about being an MC and working with children etc...

So I have been sorting through my expenses claim today as I have been a bit remiss in putting them in and I suddenly realised I am owed a fair bit of money...which I could do with :-) and can drop off the claim tomorrow :-)so that will be a nice payment soon.

Some eggciting news, I am going to be offering chicken keeping courses via Omlet soon:-)))

I have been working out slots in my diary, sorting out course dates and writing up my profile and course details etc. I have also talked to the chickens concerned and explained they all need to be really really nice to the two legs who will be coming to see them...and not do anything too wacky...

So, all in all a good day here, and the weather has been lovely and sunny, the crocus are all out and the snowdrops are amazing now, I must take some photos for you all to see the ones in the wood.

I may well lose my broadband connection, next...so if I disappear for a bit, don't fret!