Drenched in Texture - and Textiles

Excitement abounds!  Textiles in Focus starts tomorrow just outside Cambridge.  It’s a fabulous show, full of every kind of texture and textile you can imagine – the kind of place where my purse and I can easily start arguing!  It’s one of the places I go prospecting each year for energising effects to include in my yarns, and indeed to stock up my weaving stash.  It’s even more exciting this year since three friends are exhibiting, two of them having their first solo outing as yarn designers. 

The show is organised by immensely experienced and creative textile artist and teacher  Pauline Verrinder, who in her spare time generously dispenses knowledge, advice, kindness and support to many budding texture-holics.  Her own creative output is the stuff of textile legend.  Exhibiting at Textiles in Focus for the first time are friends Clare of Boo’s Attic, a painter of yarns whose colour sense rivals Van Gough’s, and Lesley at Fibre Tastic, who has put heart and soul into mastering techniques that create yarns more akin to jewellery than something to knit or stitch with. 

Also exhibiting is Alison of Yarnscape, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing for the most recent issue of Knit! magazine.  Alison’s yarns in subtle colours add a new dimension to my weaving, so a quick raid on the stalls of all three will no doubt be on the cards!  Alison and Clare are also launching out on their own at Fibre-East in July this year  - alongside yours truly.  Shows are such fun as you get to meet in person the folk you’ve met on Ravelry, and it re-kindles one's own fascination to talk spinning and weaving with interested members of the public.  The more people we get interested in making their own sustainable clothing with wool and natural fibres, the better it will be for the planet. 

At the other end of the textile spectrum, London Fashion Week also starts tomorrow, showcasing collections for autumn/winter 2012.  I’m not able to get there this weekend but you may want to join me watching online some of the live streaming of the catwalk shows and events.  Fashion Weeks are catching on all over the country it seems, especially here in the east of England.  Next up will be Norwich Fashion Week in March followed by Essex Fashion Week in April. 

All of these explosions of textile creativity are inspiration-food for those of us who start with just the basic fibres in our hands. Whether you’re creating fashion fusion or fibre fusion this weekend, may your imagination be infused with a goodly dose of life’s tangible, tactile textures.