Needle felter shows work in hobby exhibition

Woollen animals and figures will go on show as part of a special hobbies exhibition this summer.

Mandy Smith, from Tipton, enjoys needle felting, or sculpting with wool, and is taking part in Come As You Really Are, an exhibition with celebrates crafts and hobbies from across the country.

Ms Smith said she had always enjoyed creative pastimes, but got back into crafts, and particularly needle felting, during Covid lockdown. Her work has been shown in Croydon and Swansea.

Organisers of the Wolverhampton exhibition said the show had made them realise how incredible people were.

"I've tried knitting, I've tried crochet but there's too much counting and following a pattern," Ms Smith said.

"Whereas this, it's very tactile, you're feeling, you've not got to concentrate and it just takes your focus away from everything else."

She described needle felting as taking unspun wool and then using special needles to poke the wool and mesh it together into models.

"It's sculpting with wool, basically," she said.

Recent projects have included a dog sitting on a chair, a tree with a lady sitting underneath, a Jack Skellington movie character and an anime figure – characters with large, expressive eyes, colourful hair and stylized features found in Japanese animation – for her son.

Hetain Patel, one of the organisers, said hundreds of different hobbies had been entered.

Less well-known pastimes submitted include crafting banjos, creating firelighters out of citrus peels, collecting all kinds of vintage toys and folding paper into origami hanging lamps.

"You start to realise just how incredible we are as a nation, as a people and all of the different ways that we think and all of the different ways that we make and that's what this exhibition is about," he said. "It's about celebrating that."

People can still get involved and exhibition organisers are taking submissions until Sunday.

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