JoAnne Huntley with some of the necklaces she makes from her handmade glass beads (34480-1)
THE third Cloth Road Arts Week takes place next month, celebrating the work of artists in Trowbridge, Bradford on Avon, Melksham and the surrounding villages.
In the weeks running up to the event, beginning May 3, the Wiltshire Times is running a series of features on some of the artists taking part. This week we meet lace and bead maker JoAnne Huntley.
THE tradition of making lace and is still thriving, albeit in a smaller circle of craft workers, nowhere more so than in Bradford on Avon.
There, a talented craft worker called JoAnne Huntley has been honing the skills of bobbin lace, darned net and needle lace making and passing on those skills to students whom she teaches on a regular basis.
Mrs Huntley is one of the artists taking part in the 2008 Cloth Road Arts Week, from May 3-11.
The 57-year-old mother of two has been teaching since 1981 and has spent many years refining her technique.
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She shares her home with her husband and several ferrets and works in a studio in her garden under her trade name JoAnne Huntley with a deliberate capital A.
This will be her third appearance at Cloth Road Arts Week and she plans to showcase not only her lace work but also her glass beads that she has been making recently.
She said: "Lace making is a very mechanical craft. It looks artistic and it is to some degree but it is also mathematical. My interest is in how things fit together and lace making satisfies that.
"You work on a hard pad or stone like the top of a mushroom. It's not like weaving where the warp threads are fixed. With lace making the individual threads are on the ends of bobbins and all hang free. The lace takes shape and holds its structure as you develop it."
Mrs Huntley was inspired by her mother to take up all forms of craft work but took the study much further, completing an A-level in art in 1995, going on to teach an art techniques course at Trowbridge College and finishing with a four-year visual arts BA Honours degree at Winchester.
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