Patchings Art Craft & Design Festival

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Work Room chat:
Out of curiousity, I got a bobbin of the famous nymo which we always read from the Mat Salleh's magazine for bead weaving. I've only ever used fireline; or in simple term fishing line, to do bead weaving ever since I started making jewellery. Will try it out for a bit before I'll tell you what I think of it and how I think one compared to the other.
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I was over at Patchings Farm last Sunday for their Art Craft & Design Festival. Wanted to blog about this much earlier but no thanks to the festival, I was taken ill for the past couple of days. I'll tell you why in a bit.

The festival actually started on Thursday (4th) but we only managed to get there on the last day of the festival. What was even more unfortunate was we only had 2 hours to spend there! Uncle Ghee need to send her sis-in-law who was here for a visit from China to the airport and needed us over at Funky Pots to help close shop.

It's quite a shame really because it would have been great to stay on a bit later to watch all the demonstrations and stuffs. Oh well, it didn't matter much anyway because most of the demonstrations in the afternoon was on paintings by various artist. Not much jewellery making stuffs there, although there were quite a handful of jewellery booths around.

The festival was held on this big open space next to Patchings Farm with a few tents up. So, yeah....it's quite big and I reckon you could literally spend the whole day there if you have the time.


The map of the festival location.

The list of artist taking part. Yeah, that's a lot of them!


Weather forecast the night before told us that it would be raining that day. Sa Kor already warned me that it might not be a very pleasant trip. Almost got the trip canceled because of that but then I thought I might as well risk it a go after having travel so far here. Even if it had not been a very pleasant experience, it was still something to look back on. :P

True indeed, as we left the house in the morning, there was already light showers.


Oh, boy.... I could only pray that the rain doesn't get any heavier than this!


It was quite a relief when we arrived that the rain was only drizzling away and also because of the rain, it wasn't too crowded and entrace ticket costs some £7.00.





As you can see, the car park is not too packed. According to Sa Kor usually, the car park would have been full already despite the fact we were early that day. The festival opened at 10:00am and we reached there about 10:10am after about approximately 20 minutes drive.

One thing I've really got to mention about the parking is how sytematic they are. You know how it is back home when you have a open space parking like this, people just park into whatever space they could squeeze their car and then all hell break loose when the show's over when everyone's trying to leave the place which causes massive traffic congestion?

Well here, people are guided very systematically into the parking lot and people park neatly. Yes, I meant literally N.E.A.T.L.Y into the spaces. It's not like there are boxes drawn on the field but they do park very neatly and leaving the was such a an ease later on. I think they probably got up to 10 people working on just guiding the vehicles to the car park. Ok, I'm not sure of the exact amount but there were many! This, you've got to really give it to the English!




As you can see from the picture here, the weather's pretty lousy on that day. Very not festival worthy, if you ask me! -_-


To be honest, I wasn't exactly being blown away or anything but it was an interesting experience nonetheless. I guess it was good from the exposure sense. I guess I wasn't really that over the moon about it was probably how it wasn't jewellery making orientated but more on arts and craft.




I didn't get to take as much pictures as I would have otherwise loved to. Thing is, the English people are quite sensitive about intellectual property rights. I couldn't just openly snap away because they might think that I wanted to copy or something.

I did ask permission to take a pic in one booth and that was also after reassurance that I'm not going to copy and was only a tourist. That kind of put me off to take anymore pictures. So, all I could do was only to snap random picture of the place when no one's looking or else people are going to stare at me with suspiciously! :P

Off topic: the other day when I helped Uncle Ghee to send off Funky Pot's newsletter to his customers, I mistakenly key in the addresses in the C.C column when I should have key them in B.C.C. As a result, all the email addresses was exposed and one customer called up to complain and asking for her email address to be removed from the mailing list, obviously not too happy about the mistake. But what was even more bewildering was how she even cited the Data Protection Act in her defence! Seriously..... did she really have to? o_O

So, here are just a few random pictures of the festival that I manage to capture.






Okay, maybe there's these two interesting booth that I would make a mention here. Interesting enough to stay in my memory, that is. :P

One was this pewter key ring demonstration where the man showed us how the pewter key ring was made. Sorry, no picture but I remembered well enough to explain them to you. :P

Basically you dust some talcum powder onto the rubber mould or cast or whatever you call it and then poured the melted pewter into the cast and it takes approximately 10 seconds or so for the pewter to harden into shape. I wonder if Malaysia's hot weather will take longer though.... After that, he just snip off the extras and smoothen the edges. A very straightforward process, and not to mention quick too. But I think you can even try them out doing it yourself with Royal Selangor Pewter in KL lor. :P But if you're interested in this UK pewter company, here's their site for you to check out.

The other one was this jewellery booth but what was even more interesting was the glass beads and pendants and stuffs were made from recycled glass! Glass which she recycled herself from bottle glass and window glass! Like, how cool is that! Especially now that everyone's going green these days.

Didn't took any close up pic of her work cuz she was the one who wanted the assurance that her work won't be copied before allowing me to take the pictures.

Therefore I only took a very random picture of me with her in front of her booth lor.


So sorry, I forgotten her name and hence, got no website about this lady to refer you to. o_O


Anyway, it was starting to rain heavily thereafter and we need to hurry back already. The rain was much of a downpour to be exact, like what we always get back home! As far as I remembered, places like England don't experiece the kind of rain that we have back in places with tropical climate! The climate has indeed gone havoc!





I was soaking wet already by the time we got into the car to head home cuz we forgotten about the umbrella thinking it was only going to be light showers. Either way, I wasn't expecting this kind of rain in England!


I was clearly not too happy about the rain lor!


By the time we started the car and heated it up, the wind screen and the rest of the windows of the car got all misty like this!


Like how to drive wor, like that?!


The weather sucked so bad that day. I was literally drenching in rain and we still need to head down to Funky Pots. The best we could do was to head back home for a quick change of dry clothes and then head down to Funky Pots.

And guess what we met along the way?

Flood! In E.N.G.L.A.N.D?!





Although it was only a short stretch, but still.....something like this was unheard of when I was here 10 years ago lor. It feels as though I was back home for a second there. :P

Seriously..... the world climate is in a really bad shape, if you ask me!

And that, ladies and gentleman, is Patchings Art & Design Festival for you and how I was taken ill for the past couple of days.