The Contemporary Craft Festival 2016 - Favourites Part 2

Here is part 2 of my favourite artists and designers that I discovered at the Contemporary Craft Festival, in Bovey Tracey. In my last post I covered Ceramics and printmaking, today I have Homeware, Fashion, Art and Jewellery. You can find out more about the festival and all the artists here. 
I also visited last year and you can find that post here.
  

Jewellery 

Coyosa Design

Sayoko Kobayashi hand crafts her lovely jewellery using ethically-sourced materials, and features natural ordinary things like poppy seeds, wood and washi paper, her work's focus is on "the expression of wabi sabi, the understanding that the nature of things is transient, imperfect, and incomplete." I particularly liked her items that had seeds suspended in resin.

 

Libby Ward Contemporary Jewellery

Libby also uses a lot of natural materials within her jewellery work, combining unexpected materials to make thought provoking pieces. She uses loads of different processes like etching, coating, layering, stretching, heating and breaking. The unusual colours and textures attracted me to her work, it's very different to most of the jewellery I saw.

 

Art 

Little Burrow Designs

Claire Read uses unloved or unused objects to make her unusual mixed media artistic creations. I loved the techniques she's used to make these objects into something attractive and that you'd want to keep and display, instead of them ending up in the bin! I admire her imagination and ability to sew and assemble these tiny objects.

 

Anya Keeley

Anya's cute characters are made from wire and paper and various other vintage bits and bobs. They're so sweet and carefully made and so obviously unique they really caught my eye! It must be a lot of fun making these little beauties.

Hen's Teeth Art

Hen's Teeth Art is Viv Sliwka. Viv's work is somewhat similar to Little Burrow Designs', in that she uses lots of recycled materials and stitching to create tiny works of art and tell stories, though her pieces do look very different. I love the tiny story boxes like the one below, they are so delicate and beautiful.

 Homewares

Twool
Twool are a company that make lovely woollen bags and twine. "Twool® products are made in Devon from the ‘lustre’ long wool of the rare breed Whiteface Dartmoor sheep." Apparently these sheep are quite rare but their wool is really strong and soft which means it's great for making bags! I bought a brown one and I'm really enjoying using it. The straps are made from off-cuts of leather from a westcountry handbag company, and they smell lovely.

Tess Wakeling
Tess makes beautiful handmade lampshades from layers of paper, into which she cuts geometric patterns to create beautiful effects , both when the lights are on and when they're not. Each lampshade is hand cut and so no two will ever be the same.  

 

 Thanks for reading, definately worth a visit to the show if you're in Devon next June!

Screenprints of Volkswagen T1 Split Screen Camper Van Micro Bus

A whole load of prints on the drying rack

I've gone back to screen printing lately, and decided to this quite ambitious set of T1 Split screen Volkswagen Camper Van prints. I drew the image myself, scanned in the outline and then created the separations, deciding on a main colour, silver for all the metalwork, and a black outline. I thought it would be cool to use some coloured paper as the main areas for some of the vans, so I set about cutting out the paper for the main parts. Printing on top of these collaged areas proved to be more ardous than I thought, trying to get all of the ink out of the screen on top of the raised paper was difficult! However I am really pleased with the results. I also printed pink, lime and yellow versions, and printed onto some colourful pieces of wall paper that I had from a sample book. I think my favourite is the pink chequered collage one, I think I'll put it up on my wall. The rest of the 'Vans are available to order through my Etsy shop: welaughindoorsuk.

Victorian Sewing and Gardening Screen prints

I've been busy creating some more screen prints using images from the Victorian picture book that I used for the Victorian Keys screen print and card I printed a few weeks ago.

As I have been watching the Chelsea Flower show whilst sewing this week, I thought about doing a gardening and a sewing print, so I collected lots of little images with these themes from the book, and arranged them, adding colour, to create these prints, I hope you like them! As always they're available from my Folksy and Etsy shops, whichever you prefer!

Victorian Sewing Screen Print

Victorian Gardening Screen Print

Ampersand and Victorian Keys Screen Prints

Last week I went to Marshfield Screen Print near Bath and used their lovely facilities to print my latest batch of prints. They're all available on both my Folksy and Etsy shops.

The Victorian keys were found in a whole book of Victorian images, I arranged them in a little collection.

Victorian Keys A3 Black Screen Print

Victorian Keys A3 Black Screen Print close up

Victorian Keys A3 Silver Screen Print

Victorian Keys A4 Black Screen Print

Victorian Keys A4 Black Screen Print close up

Victorian Keys A4 Silver Screen Print

Victorian Keys A4 Silver Screen Print close up

For this "Ampersand Collection" screen print I picked out ampersands from my favourite historical typefaces and arranged them for an A3 design.

Ampersands Collection A3 Screen Print

Sewing Machine Table Refurb

Having had this lovely but rather dark sewing machine table (which I inherited from my Nana) in my sitting room for about a year, I decided it was time to take the plunge and paint it a completely different colour! Unsurprisingly the colour was green.

The paint I used was Annie Sloan Chalk Paint in Florence. I did 2 coats, then sanded the edges to give the table a distressed look. Then I waxed it using Annie Sloan soft wax, and then it was done! lovely. Now I must figure out the vintage sewing machine and do some sewing! Unfortunately I did manage to paint a bit of the curtains.