New Year, New Beginnings

You may have gathered from the last post that there has been a bit of reflection, nay one might even say navel gazing, going on at here at Casa del Tales. The upshot of it is I have decided that 2015 is the time to take my life in a different direction. I left work at the end of last term and I am going back to college to do a part time HNC in Contemporary Constructed Textiles, specialising in weaving (its official title is something to do with Fashion and Textile Design, but we don't touch fashion particularly, it's all about designing and making the textiles). It is a Bradford Course, meaning it's run  by Bradford School of Art and Media, part of Bradford College. The College has grown from a number of different establishments including Bradford Technical College, which was strongly rooted in textile education. Woolly people may well have realise that Bradford wasonce  the centre of the worsted textile industry not just in the UK but in the world; Cottonopolis lay to the west of the Pennines, Worstedopolis to the east.

As the course is part time, I will come to Bradford three times in each academic year. The remainder of the time I will work at home, designing and weaving first swatches for particular projects, then moving onto fabrics with a finished use in mind.

Alongside this, I will be setting up my own handdyed yarn and fibre business. I aim to build on the positive response I've had selling at Guild meetings and to groups and grow my online shop. Currently I have a shop hosted by Etsy, but I'm looking to move over to my own shop on my website soon.

I haven't left teaching completely - my Head wants to keep me for supply and I'm quite happy for this, too, and there is always scope for developing textiles workshops for schools, right?

So there you go. Pretty big news, huh? I'm hoping to use this blog as a kind of diary of the college process. The business side will stay with the podcast, which will soon be moving over to my own website at www.yarnsfromtheplain.co.uk - it's still a bot under construction, but there is a link to the Etsy shop, if you want to take a look. Meanwhile, stay tuned for more textiles adventures (or misadventures!)