About us
Greenweeds are craft makers based in West Wales, working with wool sourced exclusively from UK flocks. We are committed to using locally sourced products, to produce individual and contemporary felted home and fashion accessories.
What's with the Name?
Greenweeds. There's 'green' for a start, ecological, local, urrrmm, 'green'. Whilst 'Weeds' is an ancient word for clothing. We sometimes use plant dyes, including nettles, rosebay willow herb and ivy out of our very Welsh and weed ridden garden. Which have become green-weeds, now they're being put to use. 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. Hopefully it will grow on you....
We work 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.
On imported wool
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 wrong to use wool from halfway around the world - so we don't. There are consequences though. Merino is a beautifully fine wool that felts easily. We work hard to get quite the same texture for finer felted items - though Shetland and Blue Faced Leicester give merino a run for it's money, especially if combined with rabbit, alpaca or goat fibres.