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About Us
Greenweeds are craft makers based in West Wales, working with wool sourced exclusively from UK flocks and particularly from fleeces purchased directly from farmers local to us whenever we can. We are committed to using locally sourced products, to produce individual and contemporary felted home and fashion accessories, working with wool in its natural undyed state, or prepared and dyed using plants or specialist commercial woollen dyes. For texture and colour, silk and other fibres including homespun yarn and UK alpaca are incorporated into the felt. We marry our handmade felt with leather, driftwood, beads and found objects to produce one-off items for the home and for you. Many feltmakers work with wool imported from Australia and New Zealand (merino) or from Scandinavia. That's fine, but being based here in Wales it seems crazy to be going halfway around the world for by-products of sheep farming. So we don't. There are consequences though. Merino is a beautifully fine wool and we struggle to get quite the same texture for finer felted items - though Shetland and Blue Faced Leicester give it a run for it's money, especially if combined with UK based rabbit, alpaca or goat fibres. Frankly most of the wool we use is much harder to work with than Merino. But it's worth it, we feel, to stick to our guns. Greenweeds is the trading name of Lorraine and John Pocklington. It is a new venture for us, and a more or less full time commitment starting February 2008. We have found a beautiful location in the hills of West Wales (11 miles from Aberystwyth, 9 miles from Aberaeron) and could not hope to find a better place for our wool based craft business. In addition to our items for sale, Lorraine offers 1:1 tuition in feltmaking - an ideal way to while away a day of your holiday whilst enjoying an introduction to the craft. Please contact us at the email address below for availability (over 16's only, sorry, and maximum of 2 guests). Further information on this will be made available on this site soon. We are members of Ceredigion Craft Makers , a co-operative of artists, designer makers and craftspeople who live and work in Ceredigion. Lorraine is a member of the International Feltmakers Association and holds City and Guilds level 3 qualification in Design for Craft (Feltmaking), a two year course on design and technique. What's in a name ... naming your business is most difficult. Well, Greenweeds has a number of threads to it. There's 'green' for a start, ecological, organic, local produce blah blah blah, and yes, all those things that we set out to have a commitment to wherever we can. 'Weeds' is an ancient word for clothing (particularly widow's weeds describing mourning clothes), and yes part of our range is clothing and accessories. We use plant dyes, including nettles, daffodil flowers, rosebay willow herb and ivy out of our very Welsh and weed ridden garden. Green weeds, since they're being used. And the Welsh Fairy Book by W. Jenkyn Thomas tells the tale of the Man with the Green Weeds, a somewhat eerie tale of a spirit bringing a sticky end to an English man on the Dolgellau to Llanegryn road at Llyn Gwernen. So there is some reasoning to our choice of name, but hey, it's just a name and hopefully it will grow on you.... |