The following is a post I made a while ago on my Woolwench.com blog, and I am cross posting it here (with some extra details) because it is a subject that is important to me, and something i would also love to share a discussion of, either here or on our Fiberygoodness group page. What makes a yarn creation ‘art’ rather than ‘craft’? Is craft art? Is art crafted? I could go in circles over this for quite a while! But
This week I thought I would post about two things I think we all need as fiber artists; ‘creativity‘ and ‘skill‘. By skill I mean the ability to execute different techniques for spinning different yarns. When we start spinning the focus is very much on developing our skills, and this is exactly the focus required! We learn the techniques for spinning singles of varying thicknesses, and develop skills for judging the amount of twist in our yarns and the different
This week we are sharing in the process of fiber creation with our current Artist In Residence: Christiane Knight. These insights into how Chris works are both inspiring and motivational, and it is exciting to see the way she has approached what could be quite a daunting task, with flair and creativity! The rest of this post is provided by Christiane, I know you will enjoy it as much as I have! 🙂 When I decided that my Artist in
This week we have something a bit different for you, we decided to do a video blog to share what we are currently working on: WIPs and projects 🙂 Please grab a cuppa, your own WIP, and join us for a little while as we talk fiberygoodness 🙂
A Brief History of Merino Wool Way back in the depths of time, not hidden but certainly unclear, are the origins of the sheep breed we know as Merino. We can easily find information on its recent history, but delving back before the Spanish developed and refined the breed into the one we are familiar with today, reveals that there can be conflicts in information and shows a potentially broad origin indicated in the development of this prized sheep. What
Arlene’s Notes: One of the great blessings of the partnership between Suzy and myself is the synergy of taking a germ of an idea, watering it with collaboration, and then watching it grow into something exciting. Our new book, “The Big Book of Fibery Rainbows” is a thrilling manifestation of this process. And, so with tremendous pride, with this blog post, we launch our first printed book!!! Read on to find out more… It has arrived, the BIG Book of
I have a dear friend here in New Zealand, and she happens to be involved in a subgroup of our National Spinners and Weavers Guild (Creative Fibre NZ). Now Angela is one of those people who is always coming up with awesome ideas, and she loves to offer challenges, the lastest one is ‘we’ (as in everyone she can catch for 2 seconds) must spin a single to contribute to the collection of samples that Angela is building, and she
I am sure many of us art yarn spinners have heard the same thing.. its beautiful, but what do you do with it? Sometimes is not even so complimentary, statements such as ‘its unusable’ and ‘theres nothing you can make with that’, directed at a lovely lockspun yarn simply because its bulky, and theres 30 meters of it.. So here is my post today, some examples of a few things that you CAN do with art yarns, and these are
Last week Arlene posted about being stuck and working through some of the creative slumps we all get into sometimes. So this week we thought I should follow this up with a little look at something else that happens with all of us during our creative lives, and that is change. I think this is something that can help cause those many WIPs to come about, you know, you start a project, and for whatever reason it gets put aside.
This week we have another ‘tool tip’ for you, and just for fun have included a simple little project you might like to make too!
