A wonderful weekend

First, an apology: this is a long post but there’s so much to tell you…so bear with me!

Steady Hands and I arrived back in Edinburgh late last night after a wonderful weekend at FibreFest in Devon. I’ve done a little montage of photos for you here. The top left image shows the brushes that Steady Hands and I were helping people to make. The next image down on the left shows our stall with one of the booklets about brushmaking in the fore ground. The image below that shows all the different fibres we were using to make brushes, ranging from sheep’s fleece through to goat hair. The goat hair was generously donated to us by a brilliant lady called Lesley Prior who runs Devon Fine Fibres. Check out her blog about us here. Below that is my homemade banner for the stall. Letters are so hard to sew! The final image at the bottom on the left shows the beautiful grounds of Bicton College, where FibreFest was held. At close of business on Saturday Steady Hands and I were able to sit and enjoy this very view in the evening sunshine after a hard day’s work.

At the top, on the right, you can see our brush handles strung up. Visitors could chose their handle and their fibre for their brush. Each handle was carefully crafted by Steady Hands from a variety of woods so each one was unique. What a clever boy! The brush making seemed to go really well. We had a large canvas for people to try their brushes out on (as you can see in the bottom right image) and we were so pleased that people engaged with it and appeared to enjoy themselves.

In the middle of the montage is a picture of a lovely felt bee, which will be winging its way to Big Dreamer’s mum as she’s just started keeping bees. It was made by the very talented Jamie Lewis. Jamie’s stuff is really clever and I particularly loved the animals. It was like looking at an illustration come alive. They had so much character and expression. Ever thought of doing animation Jamie?

And finally, the best thing about FibreFest was all the wonderful people we met. We were neighbours with the friendliest bunch of embroiderers who we had great fun with. I was hooked on hand spinning by a group of spinners a bit further along from us. We had some great chats with the folks who came to our stall…and people actually bought things! It was brilliant to get feedback about my drawings direct from the public. In some ways it isn’t about what people say as much as the look in their eyes. I can tell when some one picks up one of my drawings whether I’ve communicated with them. It’s that sparkley crackle of magic between my drawing and a viewer that has me well and truly addicted to illustrating.