Travel Time

The annual Professional Weavers' Network seminar was held this year at Coopers Beach in Northland. What a picturesque place!

Our friend Agnes had organised it as well as masterminding an exhibition that she and UK weaver Stacey Harvey-Brown have been working on for some time and now have ready to take to Europe. Stacey was our key speaker and she was to take a workshop after the seminar before travelling through NZ taking workshops and ending up at the CF festival in Dunedin. The highlight of our seminar was attending the opening of Agnes and Stacey's exhibition based on land forms, 'Nature in the Making' at The Earth House' at Peria, a great privilege for us as there is only one other showing of it in NZ, at Oxford North Canterbury 12 April - 7 May. Here are just a few of my favourite photos from the opening, starting with Agnes's stalactites hanging from a tree in the courtyard.

 And these indoors are Stacey's. She's a collapse weave expert and thinks on a grand scale!

Agnes excelled herself with her gorgeous silk network drafting and beautifully executed jacquard weaving. Below is part of a large tryptich of fossilised sand dunes in North America.

And here are the two of them who produced it all while half a world away from each other.

And just a few pics of the quirky venue.

Some catching up to do

There has been a bit of water under the bridge since my last post . . . and a lot of miles travelled.  Weaving-wise I finished a number of linen table runners and took those with me on my next road trip and did almost all of the hemstitching while I was away. 

Part of the trip was to the PWN annual seminar, held this year at a youth camp site at Raincliff, not far from Geraldine.  Here I am at show and tell time with one of my linen runners.  One of the seminar sessions was about photographing our work. I didn't spend nearly enough time or attention on it but did manage to get a clear close-up of my linen.

One of the highlights of the weekend was a visit to the home of Maggie Sewell of Adobe Alpacas. It was neat to meet some of her animals . . . all individually named.

But even better to be allowed into her yarn store!

Almost everyone queued up to buy and we all left clutching bags of beautiful loot.

The best part of these seminars is meeting up with friends and colleagues who all talk the same language . . . plus having our meals provided. In this case the quality and quantity were delicious and generous.

Wil looks as though he is giving thanks on behalf of all of us.