Our Next Event is MADE IN HR6

 We shall be at MADE IN HR6

Hope to see you there!

h.Art herefordshire art week approaches

 

We are making preparations, looking forward to welcoming folk, hoping for good weather so as we can use the garden for displays and demos.

We are thrilled to be chosen from over 400 artists to have a photo of my weaving on the official flyers this year!

We will be opening our studios here at Hillside Cottage

from 10.30am to 5pm each day

 from Saturday 6th September to Sunday 14th September.

Sue Wright | Herefordshire Art Week

Hope you can pop along.

On Our Woollen Tree You Tube Channel- Castlemilk Moorit Project

My latest video on Woollen Tree channnel,

Watch From fleece to scarf

From fleece to scarf | Making a rare breed Castlemilk Moorit sheep scarf

Valais Black Nose Sheep- A Special Spin

Photo by kind permission Hazel Bows

Are these the cutest lambs you ever did see?

They are Valais Black Nose Breed, a very rare breed and highly sought after.

The breed is renowned for their friendly nature and with their beautiful faces and wonderfully thick curly fleeces they are an absolute delight.

These little cuddly ones have had their very first shearing. 

And I was given a boxful of that first softest curly wooliness!

I love to spin local wool, it just feels so right to work with fibre that is home grown in the village. I feel 

 my work becomes more grounded in the environment, gently and rhythmically spinning the wool on my wheel and hand knitting the yarn into a simple accessory is very satisfying. Continuing an ancient essential craft to produce modern handmade items.

So to thank Hazel for her lovely supply of the wool, to my studio, I enjoyed creating for her one of my  SWH Cowl/Neck Warmer Designs.

Hand Spun and Hand Knitted SWH Cowl with handmade wooden buttons made by WrightTurned.

To all our family, friends and customers.

Thank you for all your support whether you are reading our blog, watching our YouTube, purchasing our work at Craft festivals or online.

We wish you a very Happy Christmas and a Happy Peaceful New Year.

Looking forward to bringing you more woolly and woody stories in 2025

 

Thank you to all our customers who came to visit us over H Art Festival in Sept.

We will be attending a lovely local fair next month. 

 

H ART Art Festival 2024- Woollen Tree

 Sue Wright | Herefordshire Art Week (h-art.org.uk)

                                     H Art time this year is 

                                                       Sat 7th Sept to Sun 15th Sept

                                                       Open from 11am to 5pm daily

Traditionally Hand Crafted with needles, wheel and loom.
Hand Woven Accessories and Homeware along with Hand Knitted, Hand Spun, Hand Dyed items.
Hand Turned weaving and knitting accessories.

Come and try your hand at weaving on a loom!
Enjoy the garden and be inspired by the surrounding views.
Parking at Hillside is limited so please consider parking in Aymestrey Parish Hall Car Park if needed Many Thanks.

Woollen Tree 

We are excited to be opening up our studios and garden again and we hope you will be able to pop by.

 Sue Wright | Herefordshire Art Week (h-art.org.uk)

About h.Art | Herefordshire Art Week (h-art.org.uk)

More for 2024

Weaving Cloth 

Hello, Welcome back to our blog. We are all fired up and ready to get stuck into lots of projects for 2024. 

I hope you will find items of interest and inspiration here on our blog as well as over on the

 Woollen Tree You Tube channel.

We have enjoyed the Christmas/New Year break. It has been lovely to ease up a little after such a busy 2023. Time with family and friends, time to re energize. I have spent January playing and experimenting in the studio, doing a bit of sewing and busy weaving cloth for myself and the home.

Pete has been busy building better storage in his own workshop as well as in my studio.

Sample Weave

Techniques on a Rigid Heddle Loom

We are back to it now and all set for more in 2024

Weaving, spinning, knitting, wood turning, dyeing and running workshops and open days.

Our garden is showing signs of Spring and we can't wait to get started on the growing year.

Our dear Hillside Cottage has had a fresh coat of exterior paint and looks beautiful and happy.

Heritage White.

So we do hope you will join us for 2024. We will be stocking the online shops over the coming weeks and opening up dates for workshops again.

Our  blog for 2024 will feature our country lifestyle, growing the garden and designing our home, along with sharing our love and joy of working in our chosen crafts in wood and wool.

We love our cottage life here, it isn't always rosy, things can be challenging as with everyone's lives.

Our workload is full of plumbing, fixing things up. The cottage needs attention and we are slowly doing up the place. 

We have a good garden and we are working to be as self sufficient in fruit/veg as possible. 

It is very special here, we have magnificent views, wonderful hills and woodlands surround us, a land steeped in history and dark skies at night filled with stars.

Hillside is home and it is magical. 

  

 

Twenty Twenty Three

 

Good Health Cheers

Well here we are already! The year is drawing to a close. Once again the year seems to have whizzed by.

All the good intentions of keeping up to date with this blog, so much I could have written, perhaps I will do better next year ;)

We hope our Woollen Tree YouTube along with other online sites have been of interest. Thank you for your continued support. 

We endeavour to bring you a little insight into our lives at Hillside Cottage, deep in the North Herefordshire countryside and love to show you our makes in our studios.  

2023 saw us

Building and fixing;  

Hillside Cottage has been having lots of renovations.

New heating system, external repairing and painting.

A brand new Creative Cabin studio in the garden.

Growing;

Garden harvest, bumper crops of fruit/veg

all pickled or made into chutney, jams and frozen.

Crafting for;

 Weaving workshops

Art Open Studios

Craft shows

Being inspired to continue; 

Weaving, wood turning

Spinning and dyeing

Handwoven cloth

Woollen Tree has found a good place to grow, its roots are deep in this beautiful place now. We are constantly inspired by the wonderful countryside around us.

I revel in all of Nature's amazing colours and try to produce handwoven cloth that reflects this. I have been growing plants and using them for natural dyeing in our garden.

Pete is enjoying sourcing local wood for his wood turnery. I will definitely be filming a bit more in his workshop so as you can see how the beautiful pieces are made.

Lots of plans for 2024 but for now, we have closed the Etsy and Folksy shops for the Christmas holidays and look forward to some family time. We will open again in January 2024

We wish you a very Happy Christmas time and a healthy and Peaceful the New Year.

 

H Art and Upcoming Events Before Christmas

 

It has been a busy time here at Hillside Cottage. We were delighted with our first h. Art event!

What a wonderful week!

We had a mini heatwave, the sun shone every day, perfect for all our lovely customers to relax in the garden, purchase our  handwoven and wood turnery work from the Cabin. Lots of them enjoyed the weaving demos in my studio and signed up for some "learn to weave workshops".

Pop over to our Woollen Tree YouTube video to view.

(13) h.Art 2023 Venue | Woollen Tree - YouTube

We will be opening again for H. Art Christmas Open Studios the weekend of  2nd to 3rd December from 10am to 4pm. There will be a different feel to this event as the Cabin will be cosy with the little stove lit. The shelves will be filled with items to buy special gifts for the festive season. The garden will be decorated with fairy lights and weather permitting the Jovi tent will be in place again to offer a hot cuppa to customers as they browse and shop.  

Home | Herefordshire Art Week (h-art.org.uk)

We are now heavily into the pre Christmas season of craft fayres and shows so ;

Before our event at Hillside Cottage, Woollen Tree will be attending two more shows.

The first is Orleton Handmade and Gift Fair

The following is Made in HR6

 If you are in the local area we do hope to see you there!

We will be stocking our online shops over the coming weeks too, so please click on our links to view our Etsy, Folksy and Ko-fi sites (right hand column on web view site of our blog)

H. ART HEREFORDSHIRE ART FESTIVAL 2023

 

We are holding our first Open Studio Event at Hillside Cottage 

as part of 

H. ART HEREFORDSHIRE ART FESTIVAL 2023

The event runs from Saturday 2nd September to Sunday 10th September.

We will be open every day from 11am to 5pm 

Sue Wright | Herefordshire Art Week (h-art.org.uk) 

We are looking forward to showcasing our work, our new "Creative Cabin"  will be full of items to purchase, the studio will be open for demos and the garden an ideal place to relax and be inspired.

We look forward to seeing you soon!

The Creative Cabin- New Studio

We have been busy at Hillside Cottage, building a new studio for Woollen Tree.

So pleased with it. Named it The Creative Cabin!

 A fantastic space and so very versatile. Great to hold my weaving workshops in, giving me more of space for teaching small groups. 

I am enjoying kitting it out with everything I need. In this photo you can see my weaving studio and the new creative cabin together. Along the wall I have laid my latest batch of organic cotton handwoven cloth which will become T towels.

The other exciting news is Woollen Tree is taking part in H Art - Herefordshire Art Festival this year! The event runs from 2nd to 10th September 

and 

we will be opening the studios and garden for folks to visit and of course our new creative cabin will be filled with lovely items for people to buy. 

I will let you know more details closer to the date, meanwhile I hope you enjoy watching our You Tube and if you are interested coming to weave in the new cabin please get in touch via my ko-fi or Etsy shop. 

Thanks for your interest.

OUR NEXT CRAFT SHOW IS AT AYMESTREY FETE 15TH JULY

 

 

A Visiting Loom - At Woollen Tree Weaving Workshops.

A visiting loom

It's been an exciting time at Hillside, there's plenty going on to keep us busy. Renovations continue on the outside of the cottage with the chimney repointed, rendering repaired and new guttering and facias fitted.

But most exciting of all is that I have been able to start my weaving workshops.

The two workshops this month have been working on 4 shaft looms. It has been great to welcome fellow weavers to my little studio and get stuck into making warps and weaving patterns together.

This dear vintage Dryad loom was warped up with 8/2 organic cotton to weave a set of T towels.

I love to see a loom dressed and ready to weave, it always looks so much happier, its character awakes, I feel it just wants to be used, to be creative and do what it has been designed for- in the same way a yacht looks so happy when it is all rigged ready to sail, waiting for you to take it on the next adventure! 

The next adventure happening here at Hillside is the building of a new studio to use for

Woollen Tree Workshops

I will blog more about this soon 

And of course must just round up this little post to show you the lambs which have arrived in the field next to our orchard. So cute! We love to watch them, very entertaining as they get up to mischief.

Spring is here!

 

Work at Hillside Cottage

Shadow Weave Project On the Loom

Lots of work going on at Hillside Cottage.

For January, work started on our cottage renovations. A new heating and hot water system has been  installed powered by a air source heat pump to run along with our solar panels. 

As you can imagine it has been a major upheaval to get this all fitted, every room needed new radiators. New piping and water cylinder fitted, all the floor boards up and dust and mess a plenty.

However this in itself has been so interesting, to see the "bones" of our cottage, beautiful solid oak beams and floorboards, they certainly knew how to build solid long lasting houses in the early 1800's

While all the cottage was full of workmen busy fitting the system I retreated to my studio and got stuck into some shadow weave projects. I put an extra long warp on my David loom and played with colour, pattern and texture.

The first scarf off the loom I used a muted colour palette it feels very vintage. I'm so pleased with it!

Shadow Weave Loom State

(Fresh off the Loom

unfulled or unfinished)

Old to New Radiators

It was so good to be weaving every day. for one thing it kept me warm! January is not an ideal time to manage without heating and hot water for a couple of weeks. My little studio is snug and warm, a little haven of peace and order while our cottage was in such a muddle. We do have a wood burner so that was wonderful source of heat and warmth in the evenings in the cottage, but in the day we were busy so we were fine.

Shadow Weave Twills 

 Now we are all cosy and snug. 

Having done an early Spring clean, tidied and put furniture back in place we are planning our next big renovation. (will tell you more in a later post). First we will be decorating the shower room (doing a little project) as we know very soon we will be out in the garden getting things ready for the Spring growing season.

Look already the snowdrops and daffodils are peeking through.

  

 

Blog on

 Well, here we are nearing the end of 2022 already. As you may have noticed our blog is a little less full with chit chat this year. You know when "stuff happens" things not in your plans and you just have to get on with it and make it up as you go along- well we have been having some of those times.

Also now we are up and running on You Tube and Ko-Fi along with our online shops time at the computer tends to be spread over all these platforms. 

However we really want to keep this blog going for the projects and activities we would like to share with you all in more depth, whether it be on weaving, spinning and dyeing or wood turning, garden and home renovation. There really is plenty to talk about and get stuck into next year.

Meanwhile we just want say All Good Wishes for the Festive Season and Peace, Health and Happiness for the New Year. 

Thank you for reading our little blog, watching our YouTube, supporting us on ko-fi and purchasing our work. It really inspires us to create, develop and keep our "Woollen Tree" growing

The photo above is of a beautiful old Oak Tree in the field on our way to the woods opposite Hillside Cottage. It offers strength, wisdom, stability and endurance in the storms.

 I say hello and hug it as I pass by, I love to be near it and look up into its mighty canopy. 

Harvest at Hillside

Elderberries

So we near the end of September, our first year at our lovely Hillside Cottage. We have been enjoying a bumper harvest from our garden, despite the "heatwave summer" the UK has been experiencing, we really have had an abundance of fruit and vegetables to keep us well stocked. I have been making jams and chutneys.

 The joy of walking down to the veg garden to select something for our lunch has been immense. We are fortunate to have a variety of fruits- cherries, apples, plums, damsons, raspberries, blue berries, black currants and blackberries. all giving us their treasure each in turn. We have been growing all our veg and salad crops. As we take care of our garden it takes care of us. Organically, no-dig, permaculture system.

The result is tasty food, lots of flowers, insects, bees, butterflies, birds and wildlife. The only battle we seem to be having is with all the wild rabbits! they, given a chance nibble everything- even things they are not suppose to like! luckily our vegetable beds are well fenced so as they can't get in but the terrace up near the cottage and the flower pots are all easy pickings. The baby rabbits are so sweet though hopping around the clover on our lawn. Next year we will build a few more fences to protect our specimen plants on the terrace. 

I made some elderberry cordial this year, perhaps next year I will see if I can make some wine?

Damson Jam

Damson jam is so delicious, shhhh I think a few jars will make perfect Christmas presents for the family  

Craft Fair

We also attended a lovely craft fair at the nearby village of Orleton. It's great to showcase our work and sell locally.

Hand Woven Throws

 It's been a very busy year at Hillside Cottage, so much so that our blog here hasn't been able to keep up with all we would like to share with you.

 Please remember that our Woollen Tree on You Tube is available for you to view along with our

 Ko-Fi site where we plan to chat more and open a little shop on the site too. Thank you for your support.

We are looking forward to producing more work in our Woollen Tree workshops/studio once all the harvest is "safely gathered in"

Meanwhile check our Etsy and Folksy shops to purchase new stock for the new Season.

Aymestrey Village Fete

We have been living at Hillside Cottage for ten months and we feel so at home here. The village has an annual Fete and this year we have loved taking part in a wonderful day.

For such a small village it was a really well attended event, with people travelling near and far to be with us all on a beautiful sunny day.

All the usual  entertainments were set up to enjoy for kids and grown ups alike!

Classic car clubs paraded their vehicles and the farmers proudly drove their Vintage tractors around the arena. 

Competition a plenty of course, from dog shows, throw a welly, tug a war and duck races.

And of course there was a big marquee for the garden produce, home cooking and craft competitions 

Yeap! my handwoven throw won First Prize!

Woollen Tree also had a stall in the small craft marquee where we were able to sell our work. So pleased we made a roaring trade. 

We actually won three prizes in total 1st 2nd and 3rd.

Thank you for visiting our blog, 

We have been so busy lately with the house, garden and our crafts so if you would like to see and hear more about what we do please visit our other online sites.

You can click on the links from the right hand column or below.

Sue Wright Handknits- SWH and WT at Woollen Tree on Folksy

Wood and Wool Naturally Hand Crafted by WoollenTree on Etsy

 

Woollen Tree - YouTube

(3) Ko-fi.com - Your Ko-fi

 

Natural Dye - Dandelion

 

In the Orchard area at the bottom of our Hillside Cottage garden we have an abundance of dandelions! So I decided to brew a little dye pot and capture a little of Nature's colour  growing there.

I wanted to use the flowerheads only for this dye bath. I placed them in a pot of water and boiled them up on our little camping stove. It was good to sit in the orchard, enjoying the spring sunshine and watching the wild life around me, baby rabbits squeezing under the hedge nibbling the long grass, kites circling above and the garden birds singing their many songs.

 

After about an hour of extracting the dye from the dandelion heads, I strained the liquid from them and added a couple of iron nails to the pot to help lift the colour a little.

My pre mordanted wool skein, 

 Shetland fleece handspun-alum mordant 

Then I added the wool to the dye bath and gently simmered the pot for another hour until the wool had absorbed all the colour 

Hanging the skein up to dry in the tree.

The pale yellow colour achieved is gentle and almost a soft lemon.

This wool will be used in my Saori weaving, when woven with other naturally dyed yarns it will give me a way to highlight, lift and lighten a piece of cloth.

This is my first natural dyeing at our new home - Hillside cottage.

It is thrilling to be able to source my colours from my garden. 

We have been busy creating a Weaver's Garden. A place to brew my colours on the firepit surrounded by home grown dye plants.

We will show you more over on our  You tube channel

shortly.

(63) Woollen Tree - YouTube  

A Day at Wonderwool Wales

 Now we live less than one hour's drive away from this venue it was great to visit Wonderwool Wales.

So much to see and buy! 

 I really enjoyed seeing the weaving that the students from the Carmarthen School of Art had been working on.

Jacob sheep and lambs were so friendly and seemed to be loving their day out too!

I came home with my little stash of goodies. Three extra large skeins of variegated dyed wools, a very big bag of coloured tops for blending and spinning. A soft lilac organic cotton spool to add to my weaving stock colours and a collection of paper patterns as I intend to start making my handwoven cloth into garments. 

That should keep me busy for a little while.