J.R. style dress and wild beanie

I wanted to get some photos of this one before it goes off to Sydney tomorrow. A late night stitching in the lining, but happy in the end. The beanie is a corespun a little overspun to get great long twisties. The final out fit has some long fingerless gloves in the same wool but they are still in concept phase. Had to get pix today as my model has a life!! and was unavailable tomorrow. I am hoping the gloves will add the elegance with the length and the grunge with the thickness of the yarn and fingers popping out.

At Last Artist in residence

So I have promised pics of the whole thing and I have included some of the process as well. There are a lot of photos but it took a week and a lot happened.

 As you can see we worked on 2 large 5x2.2m long hangings. The sheer scale of this thing blew me away every day. It was so exciting to see it coming together. The team spirit was palpable and it was such a thrill to see the excitement on the little faces as each new part of the process was revealed. This is a real community project as my parent helpers and the staff were quite instrumental in it's success. The sheer numbers meant we could move this sometimes 100kg beast around and finish it off.

And here are the shots of the finished article. It gets some words about where it is of and the year in the blank spaces at the bottom. The year 6 kids did the local wildflowers along the bottom edge. They will hang beside each other in the hall. Tomorrow they will be presented finished to the school. The local paper is even coming for such an auspicious event!!
The whole exercise has been great in thinking big and outside the square and anything is possible!!

sneak peek

Here is a photo of one of the panels before felting. The rest is felted now after a mammoth day of rolling two enormous felts with about 100 litres of water in them. You definitely need a school to produce this work. So many hands and arms needed to roll this thing. You can see why the Mongolians use horses.
I will post the pics of the whole thing when it is dry.

What has 360 legs?

A School!!
I have been conspicuously quiet here as I have been working very hard on a really interesting project with a local school here. The P&C at the school have funded an artist in residence program and I have been invited to come and felt with the children. Wow what an undertaking and so far we a going great guns. They have all made prefelts and noodles and learned a whole lot about wool, felt and living as an artist. The next step is to put it all together.
We are making a huge wall hanging depicting a local waterfall area and the total size when finished will be approx 7m x 2m !!!!!!!! Just have a think about how big that is before shrinkage!!! 
I will post some pics soon but I have to get back to the dyepots and create some more colour for the work to come.
Stay tuned!