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It has really been a flying start I have got on having private students at my workshop. A week after that Luigina from Australia had finished her course, then Kathy from Ausralia came and wanted a private course. It is a complete different way of teaching and I look forward to teach the next two students that already have signed.

Kathy with her little theatre doll made on the course (6½hour)

-and it was fun 

This year it has been 10 years since I introduced my first online course. The course is actually still available, but during the last 10 years much has happened. Bandwidth has increased, the picture quality of digital cameras has become much better and the technology used to create web pages has changed dramatically.

All these things make it possible to create even better online courses. Online course 2 - which was added in 2006 - was technically more advanced than online course 1 and introduced videos with instructions. But now I am finally ready to launch a new course, online course 3.

The new course shows you how to needle-felt a hand that can be used for many kinds of dolls. Instructions a provided as text, pictures, drawings and videos.

Compared to my previous online courses this is a short and very basic course. I have therefore decided to make it available for free. Because it is free the course does not include the interactive features of my other online courses where you also get access to a messageboard where you can ask me questions about the course.

As a new feature online course 3 is available both as a version you can access with a browser and as a PDF-file that you can download. This is done to prevent the compatibility issues that often occur when a complex web page with a lot of multimedia files is accessed from a number of both very old and new browsers and from different operating systems. All future online courses will be provided both as a browser-version and as a PDF-version making it easier to save the courses for future use and to print them - something that has caused problems with online course 1 and 2.

My next project will be to make a new online course that is basically a major update of the 10 year old (but still very popular) online course 1.

You can access the new online course 3 here.

My Australian private student Luigina has now left for Australia with her little theatre-figure and her dog-relief, which she learned to make at my studio. Having her as student was so much fun so it gave me appetite to offer those private courses in the future.

Luigina with her little theater-figure.

 

At the left side you see Luiginas figure made of spelsau wool she brought with her.

At the right side is the figure I made to show how needle it.

Later both figures got hands.

 

 

I have had a good start of the new year. My first order is ready to be delievered. It is a symbol of the Northern Lights made as a head with two faces in sparkling colors. It is going to be sent to the very northern part of Scandinavia as a present for a 70 years birthday.
Then I have had my first course this year and the theme was little singing birds. I worked myself with this new theme in the autumn knowing that I wanted to teach this very trained groop first. They made so many different nice little birds and it was a pleasure to see the birds "grow".
Right now I have a student from Austalia in my studio, where I teach her sculptural figures. It is such a nice and different experience to have only one person to teach.

This wonderfull Kingfisher was made by Kirsten Lund at my latest course

Friday was a very cosy day at my workshop. Together with my neighbour shop, who is selling spiritual books and special gifts, I had arranged a day, where we invited people to come and take part in different funny and surprising things. It was not just because we wanted to atract more customers but more to have a nice and different day- and it certainly was. Every half hour someone got a gift or had to read a note with fun words and there were different kind of things people could try: Needling a woolen heart, braid a braicelet with licourice wire!! , try to draw a star in an impossible way  and so on.
The whole workshop is now ready for Christmas -full of Christmas-pixies and many different Father Christmas figures together with all my felted animals and birds.

The troll has got the red Christmas hat on

Needling a heart requires deep concentration

Josephine is needling a heart

I have finished my last course this year and the theme was to make the face of Father Christmas. The students learned how to build a face and then they worked with the technique I call watercolor felting. On the pictures below you can see a very, very good example on, how we without beeing aware of it, make faces that are alike our own face. I must though emphasize that none of the other faces can be used as an example like Ulrikkes

Here you see how much Ulrikkes Christmas girl looks like herself in all details.
She was not aware of that fact untill we told her.

Lisbeth in deep contration.

The face is nearly finished.

Father Christmas ready to go home.

 

 

This last part of October has been very very busy!! mostly because an organisation had arranged a feltseminar builded on me giving a Power Point lecture followed by 3 different felt workshops.
It was very nice to meet all those interested people at the seminar and a privilege to tell about how I work with the needlefelt. 
The 3 different workshops were planned after the lecture, but all the participants had chosen my workshop, so we arranged that my good felt friend Merete Stoltze helped me with my workshop and that made it possible that all the participants could go home with each their little funny theatrefigure.
After that I today have taken things down from my latest exhibition, I will now concentrate on finishing "Doll of The Month" for November.

On the Danish version of my website I have a list with the courses I give here and I have experienced the last years that English speaking coursists find this list and sign for the courses I give here in Denmark (in Copenhagen). It is always nice to have guests from abroad and I use to manage (with good help from my Danish coursists when I don´t find time) to translate enough to make it possible to follow the course. On my last course Nazret from Ireland joined the course and two Sweedish girls too. It always adds an extra dimension to the course to have participants from abroad.

This summers two exhibitions are now ower. In June I was invited to the "Felt in Focus" exhibition. After the event one of the teachers: the American feltmaker Sharon Costello and her husband John, came to visit me and it was so nice to meet them again. I have been teaching at her place in USA several times. She is well known for her big events called "Felters Fling" in the New York State.
Here in August I exhibited together with 31 art and craft people in "Det roede Pakhus" here in Denmark. At this exhibition I sold my two big flying owls and of course I was happy, but I had started to look forward to get them back so they could fly ower me here at my workshop.... Strange!!!!
-and then the Danish felt union "Grima" has had its yearly course week-end, where we were 5 teachers and we had a fantastic week-end.

From my course with landscapes in relief.

Heidi Grebs felted bags with raw wool.

From Charlotte Buchs course. 

From Mette Oestmanns course.

From Heidi Grebs Course

From Dagmar binders course.