The church community worker had arranged a “felting workshop” on two consecutive Thursday afternoons during the summer when most church activities seem to stop. I decided to go, because there were spaces and because the most recent on-line course I had done – “Strategies for successful ageing” – seemed to think that it was good to do something creative! I took my camera to take photos of each stage as I did them – and the forgot to do so and had to take photos of other people on the workshop instead.
The first day we had an introduction and were shown what to do. We were making angels and we were also shown one that the community worker “had made earlier”. This took quite a long time.
We then chose our pre-felted piece of material and cut out the angel shape using a pattern provided. We set out our places by putting down a towel and on top of that a bamboo type mat and on top of that a piece of cotton material and on top of that our cut out angel shape. It was then our job to decorate our angel using wool and scraps of pre-felted material of different colours. This was the “creative ” bit, so I did it fairly randomly and with a limited range of colours and worked on the idea that it is better to do less than more!
When the creative bit was done we covered the angel with a net…..
……..and then made it very wet with quite hot water containing a little washing up liquid and rubbed it all over with soap and then rubbed the soap hard so the felt pieces would stick together.
When it was estimated that this had been done for long enough, the net was carefully removed. If felt came away, it was back to rubbing with soap and water! When the net came off, it was replaced with a piece of cotton and the materials were wrapped up loosely in the bamboo mat.
This was then rolled backwards and forwards for about a minute. It was unrolled and the material was turned through 90° and the rolling repeated. This was done again until the material had been turned through 360°.
After the rolling, the angel was removed and rinsed in water (containing something else? a bit of vinegar, maybe?)…..
……and then they were dried by patting the with another towel…..
……and left to dry on racks.
On the second week there was time to embellish the angels we had made in week one, so I sewed on some feathers I had brought from home and a bead.
My week 2 angel looked as if it had a black face and yellow hair, so I collected it a few days later and sewed on black hair and adjusted the yellow to make it obvious that it was a halo!
Naturally I forgot to take a photo of it with the new hair and halo!
So did I enjoy the workshops? They were quite fun and something different, but I can’t say that my efforts were very good or creative. They are apparently going to be displayed at an “angel festival” at the United Reformed Church later this year and then displayed on the Christmas tree Safe Haven are going to prepare for the Christmas Tree Festival at St Thomas Church in December.