Sneak Peek, earrings and necklace

Here's your sneak peek at the new items.  They probably won't go up on Etsy until later tonight as I'm grabbing time whilst cooking a roast lunch, mediating a teddy bears party and getting ready to teach this afternoon.

Feathers!

Today saw the arrival of many new feathers to stash and I will confess that fly-tying feathers are officially my new objects of joy.  I've not been able to buy as many colours as I would have liked but I have lots of plans for the ones I've got, especially the beautiful strong and flexible generic hackles that enable me to thread things onto them without damage to the filaments.  The dust-buster will come in very handy in getting rid of the excess fluff that needs to come off of them in order to make sleek and sexy earrings and other accessories.

And now I'm working my way through a huge list of *things to do* so that I can free my mind of clutter and get on with designing and making as I can find the mundane things in life can get in the way of creativity (although I'm pretty good at not doing the ironing, that one never bothers me.)

I've paid for my Deb Rubin workshop that will be happening at a weekend event in Southampton in April (details can be found here) and I'm very much looking forward to that.  As well as doing a workshop I shall be dancing with Covert Bling in the evening Hafla and vending as Blackwillow Tribal on the Saturday.  Make sure to come along and say hi if you're there.

I now have to go and pay for my WOMAD ticket as I plan to take the kids there this summer, reply to a couple of emails, and have decided that I need to take a trip to Fabricland this week in order to see a couple of fabrics in the flesh before putting in an order for some fabrics for Covert Bling.

Once that's all done I'm going to sit back and play with feathers for a bit!

Earrings

If you've worked out my process yet then you will have worked out that my earlier post about fly fishing feathers
was going to lead to a blog about how I've made something from feathers like those I mentioned earlier.

I've made a few pairs tonight and once the glue has dried I can get them finished and get some pics up to show you what I've done.  I've yet to decide whether they go onto the Blackwillow Tribal site or the Etsy shop.

Fly Fishing Materials

My new favourite search term on the Net is "fly fishing shops".  They contain a whole new world of feathers that I never knew existed and had never considered until recently.

It came as something of a mild shock to discover that I can also buy dyed squirrel tails, bird wings and sometimes even complete bodies.  I don't want to though, I'm too squeamish for that. 

To take a look at what I'm talking about (feathers, not the squeamish stuff) then just take a look here.  Prices are a little breath-taking, but ooooh, aren't they pretty?  And, yes, I've looked at shops in the UK too but there's no-one in the UK that has a range like this.