This weekend the weather here was dreadful – high winds and driving rain, a typical British summer. But was I downhearted? No I was not, because I spent two days felting. I went to Aberystwyth Arts Centre to attend  course by the fabulous Ruth Packham, learning to combine wet and dry felting. It was a lovely informal course, with everyone choosing a plant or flower to make and Ruth helping us to work out how to achieve our goal. All the wool we used was British and some came from the Cambrian Mountains, making it very local.

Arranged, to coincide with an art exhibition entitled Flora, the course focused on making plants and flowers in felt. In fact, we didn’t exactly stick to the remit, so as well plants, between us we also made a caterpillar, a dragonfly and some coral. I really didn’t want to make a flower, so I chose to focus on something smaller, taking my inspiration from the capsules produced by mosses:

and look at all this that the other participants did…

We also each took home a porcelain flower from the Flora exhibition. For one of the exhibits, visitors are asked to record their first flower memory on a small card, and then to exchange the memory for a ceramic flower. The idea is that this particular exhibit changes over time from a collection of flowers to to a collection of memories… isn’t that lovely? The artist responsible is Clare Twomey: