This is always an exciting time for me, opening enrolments on one of our FiberyGoodness Spin courses! We run enrolments on the S3 Sketch Spin Scribe course every few months, and each time its wonderful to welcome new FiberyGoodness spinners into our community of like-minded fiber nuts 🙂 I especially like being able to offer the S3 course, because it is entirely self paced, people can pick it up and purely and simply enjoy being part of it, can take their time to immerse themselves in the spinning, and the inspirational stories, places, and times in each module. I like the structure that allows students to feel free to get as in-depth as they want to, with no deadline pressure or ‘getting behind’. We are all busy, but it is wonderful to have a treat waiting for us during those moments we have saved to indulge in our beloved fiber arts. If you are wondering if the S3 course might be for you, here is a bit more about it! We started off with the idea of creating a step by step ‘technique’ based spinning course, because our original (and continuing) Mothership course ‘Journey to the Golden Fleece’ is a very open, flowing, creativity driven program,  we felt it important to also offer an alternative direction for those who prefer a more straightforward and classical tuition style. However, Arlene and I do struggle to create anything that doesn’t also totally capture our imaginations! So we gave our S3 course its own personality 🙂 This course is story driven, based on my ideas about connections and continuity, ties that bind. Each module progresses the student towards more complex and creative yarn designs and techniques, backed by an ongoing series of short stories and encased in an historic time period or artistic movement. We are exploring the legacy of spinners and creatives that have come before us, and through this creating our own heirloom for future generations! The final project in the...

It is probably most fitting and serendipitous and really just a nice convening of time and place, but it has certainly worked out that both my transition back to New Zealand and the opening of enrolments for the next intake of participants in the Journey for the Golden Fleece course are taking place together. I think thats very cool 🙂 So here is something about the course first, and then I will share some sunshine and blue skies from home town NZ too 🙂 The course is running through our FiberyGoodness.com website (thats myself and Arlene of SpinArtiste). We both had a dream to create a fiberygoodness hub for a global community, learning, sharing, building cool stuff together… Our first and biggest offering so far is the Journey to the Golden Fleece Creativity Certificate Course. To date we have over 200 students participating in this journey, and as they are working through the 8 course modules they are creating the most amazing yarns! Take a browse through the Fiberygoodness Galleries to see the kind of incredible variations, combinations, and imaginative yarns that are being produced! The course itself is an 8 part, ten month course, in which participants will receive 8 module workbooks, each with a theme designed to enhance creativity through reflection, experimentation, and yarn design around concepts and experiences. We have had some truly wonderful feedback from participants who are finding it a great way to get out of their current creative rut, finding new ways of doing things and new ways of looking at their spinning. Some spinners have grabbed the chance to try out new techniques and materials, others have found that the coursework has helped them really find their own unique style and given them the chance to focus on what they really love about their art. We have a wonderful facebook group that is open to everyone, lots of inspiration and sharing there! We also have some participant only forums, and we send out weekly...

If you caught our Fiberygoodness live broadcast last night you will have seen this already, the Overdrive, the bigass bobbin and spinning head that is now (probably permanently) afixed to my One Wheel, (my Aura). This is my baby come home! Over the last year of being let into sharing this process with Majacraft, I can tell you, it was like christmas at my house when this finally arrived. It took almost exactly a year from ‘first contact’, and discussing what features and systems a giant Majacraft bobbin would need, to make it something super special.It needed to work well as a ‘production’ wheel as well as keep the Aura characteristics that make it ideal for constructing the architectural yarns I am currently working on and the art yarns that I know many people enjoy spinning. Good things take time, no, I mean.. amazing things! It was so worth the wait. This has the features I already loved about my Aura, large scale. Bypassable orifice and guides, amazing tensioning system, easy treadling, and great visual presence too. And it spins so well, there is almost no transition to make between spinning on the Aura and spinning on the Overdrive, the same tension, the same fine responsiveness, no big difference in weight as the bobbin fills, it treadles the same way throughout. Having spun on ‘other’ large capacity wheels I can say for certain that the difference is the same as if you were to compare say, driving a tractor and then hopping in a Rolls Royce and taking it for a spin, it almost drives itself. But unlike the Rolls, this is no elitist item, if you are used to the Aura you will find this works exactly the same way, but  this is not exclusive to the Aura, for Rose and Suzie owners, Andy has designed it so it will fit these wheels too, effectively turning them into Aura style production spinners with a simple (2 minutes max) head exchange....

Well here it is! I just updated the Workshops page with the 2013 schedule! Whoot! I am most excited about the Themed Yarns workshop, I love this! and I can’t wait to see what inspirations people will bring for their themes, and I also can’t wait for the dyeing day! Its probably one of my favourite things about playing with fiber, and I might just have one or two tricks you don’t yet know, which I will be sharing, and a goal is that for the day we all get out of our usual colour go-to’s and try something new. I would also love to do a totally experimental workshop that would be like a big brainstorming session to see what new techniques and yarns we can create together! Some planning still required for that, but I think it could be really exciting to have a major yarn design session and make some trial yarns together, who knows, maybe we can come up with something completely new! A must for this will be the attitude that there is no ‘wasted’ fiber because each yarn is a learning experience and of value. I have also found that Saori weaving is a great way to use up bits and pieces of yarns that might not have succeeded as knitting yarns but work brilliantly between a warp! So those are just a few of my ideas, I have a lot more of them! But for now I am working on being realistic 😛 If there is fiber related activity you don’t see mentioned but  you would love to do, let me know, maybe we can work something out! I hope you will take a good look through the workshops list for this year, and that something in it will be calling your name.  Just contact me via the Contact form on this website, or message me on Facebook  if you would like to register your interest in a workshop, I hope to...