I moved up to Sheffield carrying with me one large suitcase of general stuff, my travelling backpack, my tent, ready for Towersey Festival, and a big Ikea blue bag filled with things to make stuff from.  When thinking about what I’d need to move to a new city with, I packed clothes, a few items for the start of school, and I knew that travelling up on a train would be a pain, but I couldn’t bear to leave behind my felt, embroidery threads, needles, bits of ribbon and other odds and ends for making bits and pieces.

I know that it’s probably not a normal thing to be lugging a huge bag of felt up the country, but I knew that I’d be helping look after the boys over the summer, but for about a week I’d have the house to myself and need something to do.

 

I’m currently living with folk musicians Nancy Kerr and James Fagan and Nancy has just released her first solo album after about 20 years of being a collaborative musician.  She’s going to be launching this album, Sweet Visitor, at Towersey and this year is Towersey’s 50th festival and they’ve put a call out for people to make bunting.

 

I was looking through my bag of stuff and noticed that some of my wool tops and felt pieces were quite similar to the colour scheme used by Lizzy Doe in the album art work and decided that I’d see if I could have a go at making some Sweet Visitor bunting.  I’d hoped that this would be used for the album launch at the festival and then for the tour to make the stage a little bit more interesting and personalised to Nancy and the band, rather than just rocking up and getting on with it.

 

My initial plan was to have some sort of regular triangular bunting with a crown on one panel, then initials, SW and then NK on the others, repeated, but after talking to Nancy we agreed that if I was including a crown it couldn’t be too regular.  Also, if you are a follower of this blog, you’ll know that when making things I get bored of doing the same thing over and over again, so as I was making things it evolved into many different panels inspired by the artwork that Lizzy created. She’s got a great little overview that explains how she came up with the ideas on her facebook page.

 

I used a mixture of standard felt pieces, ribbons, embroidery thread, fabric paint, buttons, gold and silver marker pens, sequins and felt sheets that I made myself.

 

Here is some of Lizzy’s artwork (no copyright infringement meant) along with the panels inspired by them:

And these are more inspired from details in the album design:

 

And altogether it looks like this:

 

What do you think?