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Wood Fest 2016

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Ipsden, Oxfordshire
We’re  back again at our lovely local festival: WOOD Festival!

The plant fibres workshop was very popular, preparing flax, nettle and other fibres ready for spinning, into thread and weaving into cloth. Many people made their own nettle string to take home.

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We were also spinning yarn(s), weaving all kinds of magic (including 2:1 twill on the warp weighted loom) and dyeing socks every colour of the rainbow. New dyes from the festival field were used, including nettles and burdock, and bracken collected from welsh hills. These dyes make beautifully soft greens, yellows, greys and browns.

Highlights of the festival were the harmony singing workshop led by Katy Rose Bennett, food from Taste Tibet and music from the Owiny Sigoma Band, and Sam Lee & Friends. We don’t get out of our workshop tents much during the day but really enjoyed everything we heard drifing over from the main WOOD stage!

See you again next year, WOOD Fest!

Wood Festival

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This year we ran drop-in workshops on weaving, spinning and grinding wheat in the morning, and in the afternoon, we ran natural dyeing demonstrations. The workshops were as popular as ever. Some people stayed for hours peacefully weaving, we really enjoyed seeing them progress. The dyeing intrigued passers-by all day, we got lots of questions! It was gloriously sunny, Wood Festival always means that summer is on its way.

The dyeing was very successful, especially the cochineal, and we even tried ochre as an experimental dye. This year was a little windy and one of our newly dyed green and yellow scarves blew into a tree. It was so well disguised that we nearly left it behind!

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Wood Festival

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Wood is a wonderful first festival of the season. Small, family-friendly and very varied, they’re always very kind to us.

With spinning and weaving in the mornings and dyeing in the afternoons, we had a busy time. A lot of interested spinners and many children who mastered weaving on both the modern and Iron Age looms in a suprisingly short length of time! Weaving seems to have the power to transfix many children, and some returned to our workshops both days to get as much weaving done as they could!

The dyeing demonstrations and workshops were especially popular this year, many people got an opportunity to be on the our side of the rope and dye some wool themselves. We also dyed the new range of silk scarves, which will be on sale soon!

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Wood Festival 2013

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An incredibly relaxed family festival in the sunny grounds of Braziers Park. There was music and workshops galore. Our morning spinning and weaving drop-in sessions were popular, but the highlight was the afternoon natural dyeing demonstation – including the Woad Show!

We spent Saturday evening dancing to beautiful music by La Mort Subite, and watched everyones names in Futhark (the Runic alphabet) gather on our board.

We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves at Wood, though we slept for a very long time when we got home! It was brilliant to meet so many fantastic people, everyone was so kind and interested in what we were doing. We felt very inspired by the relaxed atmosphere of the festival and how everyone was taking the time to learn something new at a workshop or just relax in the sunshine.

We hope that everyone who came to learn spinning, weaving or hear about natural dyes enjoyed themselves and learnt something new. We’d love to hear if anyone has continued at home anything they learnt!