You might have noticed we have an extra category on our menu bar: Shop. Recently we started to get very low on storage space for the blog, but we know from the stats showing which pages are looked at that it’s a valuable resource and we know that old posts are still looked at regularly so we didn’t want to remove any content, so our only option was to pay for an upgrade. One thing we got for all the extra money was ‘e-commerce’, the option to sell directly from the site securely, so that’s where the ‘Shop’ section comes in.

We’re still working it out because there aren’t many options (and we’ve just found out WordPress will be changing it soon anyway) but after a couple of weeks, I think I’ve finally managed to sort my page out. Under the Shop drop down menu is my ‘Felt by Zed’ page, when you click it you see images of my e-book and tutorial covers and a ‘Buy Now’ button underneath them. Or at least, you should do, I’m not sure it looks the same on phones or tablets:

When the ‘Buy Now’ button is clicked, you get an ‘overlay’ pop up with all the info. If I knew how, I’d change the text to say ‘More Info’:

All the products are hosted on gumroad, and if you prefer you can go directly to my ‘shop‘ on their site by clicking on my name:

It has quite a nice layout design:

As most of you know, last year I got involved with a well being centre doing wet felting (I’m still very grateful for all the wonderful donations I received!). The organisers started to get another well being centre up and running in the New Year, and a couple of weeks ago we started the wet felting classes there. We’re planning to alternate between each centre for 6 week courses and have them more structured and with themes like nuno or resists etc. For now we have a loose plan for 6 weeks of taster sessions, depending on whether we get the same people each week or new. Last week we made nuno flowers, and this week we made soft, layered, decorative felt. We had an extra table this week which was good.

If you look near the top left of the photo above you can just see the bowl Jo (one of the organisers) made at the other centre a few weeks ago when we used resists. We were making these pieces as an exercise in laying the wool out thinly, building up layers, and using yarns and embellishments to create soft decorative felt. I’ve noticed in recent years that a lot of people learn to make one specific thing when they start felting and have fixed ideas about how it should be or what ‘works’, so I wanted to avoid that and encourage more experimenting and discovery about why things turn out the way they do. Here are some of the pieces being made:

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And this is my finished piece:

I know I always say I hate pink, and that’s usually why my demo pieces are pink, I don’t want to waste the nicer colours, but it seems hard to make anything really horrible with felt, even in pink 🙂 Some tassley commercial yarn with trilobal nylon:

Close up of commercial loop yarn pulled apart, what I think is mohair yarn from Lyn, some different nylons and silk throwster’s waste:

And finally, how it looks when light comes through it:

Apart from being told quite often that the whole wet felting process is ‘therapeutic’ or ‘soothing’, I learnt this week that just watching my layout being done is relaxing and mesmerising. Maybe there’s a gap in the relaxation market we can tap into? 🙂