by Bonnie Alter, London


Origin: the Contemporary Craft Fair brings together 200 of the most innovative UK and international crafts people in one really big show.
Textiles are always a big part of the fair and this year they came in many different forms. Such as these cheery, good enough to eat creations made out of felt.


This artist, living in Italy, is creating necklaces, hats, and brooches out of felt which is hand cut or assembled. It’s an age-old fabric that is produced by matting, condensing and pressing woollen fibres. She started as a jeweller but wanted to get away from the dangerous materials involved in metal work and discovered and began working exclusively in felt. She loves to create “pieces that make people smile” and these surely will on the gloomiest day.


It’s the Canadian connection: these wonderful vivid cobalt blue scarves and shawls are made by String Theory. The two textile designers from Ontario and Quebec machine weave the fabrics which are made of un-dyed, free range Peruvian alpacas. They have bamboo woven into the fabric as well. The designers are on a roll, having been picked up by top New York, Toronto and London stores.


These glass pieces are made out of recycled glass bottles which are melted down and crocheted. The artist invented the technique herself. She has combined traditional textile skills with glass, and created pieces which are strong but delicate in feel—each individual stitch can be seen.


Her work is a living legacy to the knitting tradition in her family and traditional skills shared by women over the centuries. She crochets using 70 year old hooks which she inherited from her grandmother. The dainty and exquisite patterns come from turn-of-the-century patterns learned from her grandmother and passed down.


This artist creates her embroidered plants with machine stitching. She uses the intricate shapes of the natural world as inspiration, weaving and winding hand-dyed natural fabrics into organic forms. It’s all done by freehand machine embroidery. Living on the edge of a forest, she is fascinated by the native plants and rural landscapes. A common weed becomes a beautiful handbag, and a familiar flower turns into an intricate and delicate teacup.


Not quite textile, but certainly tactile, these pieces of driftwood and jetsam and flotsam are from the beaches near Brighton. The artist drills pieces of wood that she finds along the south coast and stitches them with coloured thread. Other works have bits of ribbon and brightly coloured fabric woven through them.
(Source: www.treehugger.com )