21st March to 22nd March 2015
Venue: Sock Gallery
Sock Fair 2015
A Celebration of Quality Artists and Makers. An Arts and Crafts Purchase and Commission Fair.
Sock is Leicestershire's premier Arts and Crafts Fair. Every March, Loughborough Town Hall hosts the event, showcasing and selling a diverse range of work by over 35 pre-selected artists and makers. Sock Fair 2015 will be held on Saturday 21st and Sunday 22nd March 2015, 10am-4pm both days. Entry is FREE. You can take an advance look at the artists and makers who'll be at Sock Fair 2015 below.
During your visit to Sock Fair 2015, don't forget to include a detour to our Balcony Gallery, where Green's of Loughborough will be providing a welcoming café service of freshly made sandwiches, salads and a range of sweet treats, together with hot and cold drinks. www.greens.uk.com
And there's yet another reason to visit Sock Fair 2015! Free of charge drop in craft activities for 4-16 year olds will be available on the Sunday of the Fair. And this year, it's all about crochet that even the littlest person can have a go at, helped by Joy to Make of Loughborough. www.joytomake.co.uk
Why not get interactive with Sock Fair 2015? You can keep up to date with what's going on through:
Here's a look at the artists and makers for Sock Fair 2015:
You can also download our Sock Fair 2015 brochure 
Sock 2015 Booklet (PDF Document, 1 Mb)
Jade Devall Designs www.jadedevalldesigns.co.uk
Jade’s range of illustrations is quirky and imaginative and all about the simple things in life that make her happy. Her range of kitchen chinaware allows you to add pieces to your collection, each piece telling its own story.
Debbie Barber Ceramics www.debbiebarber.co.uk
Debbie specialises in smoke and Raku fired decorative ceramics. Bowls and birds are slipcast in white stoneware and her inspiration is taken from nature, with trees, flowers and leaves being particular favourites.
Lisa Slinn Ceramics and Illustrations www.lisaslinn.co.uk
Lisa’s work is inspired by an interest in 19th Century British porcelain. Each piece is illustrated with drawings made from the Victoria & Albert Museum’s collection of tableware. Pieces are highly decorative and reference our British ceramics heritage and juxtapose her hand drawn qualities and contemporary use of ceramic print.
Muggins Pottery www.muggins.com
At Muggins Pottery, Sean Keefe creates colourful stoneware which is both functional and decorative, with a touch of humour. Designed to raise a smile.
Craig Fellows www.craigfellows.co.uk
Using traditional, contemporary and digital printing techniques, Craig transforms his illustrations into beautiful fashion and interior pieces. Craig’s growing collection of work is all inspired by patterns and colours found naturally in flora and insects, making unusual gifts.
Jennifer Holsey Handwoven Textiles www.jenniferholsey.com
Jennifer creates beautifully simple and luxurious hand-woven scarves on an antique loom called Wilf. Her work divides into two ranges, wools and silks. Each scarf is woven in a honeycomb design, ensuring it keeps you beautifully warm whilst being irresistibly soft. Coming in both wide and skinny, they add a pop of colour to any outfit.
1 Off Handbags www.1offhandbags.co.uk
Irene’s aim is to design bags that stand out from the crowd. Each combines her love of colour and traditional processes into unusual shapes, which are both practical and fun. Up-cycling is a major factor in her work, transforming throw-away items and giving them a new life.
Emily Smalley www.emilysmalley.co.uk
Emily creates unique wildlife inspired textile accessories and art pieces, using machine embroidery and hand screen-printing techniques. Each starts life as a detailed illustration, which informs the way that each piece is stitched.
Alex McQuade www.alexmcquade.co.uk
Alex’s collection is designed for both fashion and the home. Her work takes inspiration from nature and the outdoors, with her interest in vintage tractors adding to her work. She also embraces the idea of never throwing anything away. Free machine embroidery allows her to add an illustrative edge to her pieces, which include purses, hanging decorations, brooches, greetings cards and pin cushions, together with a range of mixed media artwork.
Rebecca Kitching Jewellery Designer Maker www.Rebecca-Kitching.co.uk
Interaction between the wearer and the jewellery is Rebecca’s intent. She combines found objects with oxidised silver to create tactile, playful items of wearable jewellery. Pieces that emphasise and reflect your own individuality.
Kate Holdsworth Designs www.kateholdsworthdesigns.com
Kate’s jewellery collections are inspired by textiles, whether it is knitting with yarn and fusing this with glass, or taking the inspiration from knitted patterns and textures and translating this into silver. She has several collections all linked by a textile theme, but each with a different feel and look.
Beyond Bling www.beyondbling.co.uk
Beyond Bling is a contemporary designer jewellery company which uses traditional techniques to create innovative pieces combining precious metals and using more unusual materials. Hannah’s concepts are inspired by humour and the comically mundane, through to life changing and awe inspiring, with nature as a constant. Pieces evolve as they are created, ensuring no two are the same.
Anjo Designs www.anjodesigns.co.uk
Drawing their inspiration from both traditional and decorative chain maille weaves, Angela and John at Anjo create jewellery that reflects the past with a modern twist. Both traditional metals such as steel and non-traditional metals such as aluminium and sterling silver are used to create wearable jewellery for men and women.
Romayne Curzon www.romayne-curzon.webs.com
Romayne creates silver jewellery that encapsulates nature and movement through etching and distinctive designs, working mainly in silver with accents of gold and stones to create pieces for both every day wear and special occasions, some of which are multi-functional and reversible.
Louise Wright Design www.louisewrightdesign.com
Louise creates illustrated gifts, home ware, prints and cards inspired by nature and designed to bring a smile to all.
Jemma Banks Designs www.jemmabanksdesign.com
Jemma’s work primarily starts as pen drawings or simple gouache paintings and is then edited digitally to create a finished design for prints, greetings cards, gift tags and notebooks.
Oliver Marc Thomas Leger www.olivierleger.co.uk
Olivier’s drawings are of fantastic creatures and animals fabricated into worlds that contain their own ecosystems and habitats. His aim is to make drawings of such intense details that they give the impression of an unlimited degree of visual exploration and discovery.
Jo Sheppard www.josheppard.co.uk
Jo creates paintings and drawings inspired by the Leicestershire countryside and her foreign travels.
Iain Hodgkinson www.iainhodgkinson.co.uk
Iain is a printmaker who specialises in collagraph, drypoint etching and linocut. He interprets landscapes and seascapes through printmaking and experimenting with the process and unpredictable nature of printmaking.
Vivienne Cawson www.viviennecawsonart.co.uk
Vivienne’s passion lies in painting flowers and portraits in watercolour. Pattern, colour and natural form are the focus for her floral watercolour paintings. The contrast of natural form with geometric pattern is often a strong element in her work. Her aim is to produce a response in her painting that is fresh and contemporary, not merely a faithful reproduction.
Jacqueline May Designs www.JacquelineMayDesigns.com
Jackie creates individually handcrafted digital prints of her own pen and ink art work, with hand applied detail using Indian ink. Influenced by principles of the arts and crafts movement, she uses inspiration from nature and use of line and colour to create pieces that aim to capture the essence of nature and bring joy to the viewer.
Helen Rhodes www.helenrhodes.com
Helen’s work has a unique style. It combines intensely rich colours, textures and patterns with naïve compositions. Most of her original paintings have torn edges hinting that each image is a fragment of a larger painting giving an element of preciousness to each piece. The richness of her mixed media work is achieved through a lengthy process involving different techniques and paints. The extra depth of colour is given by a final layer of varnish.
Sally's Sheds www.sallysshed.co.uk
Sally makes hand painted images of houses and streets on reclaimed wood or driftwood. Using a muted New England pallet, her pieces evoke childhood memories of the seaside. These are happy places and make people smile.
Jillian Riley Designs www.facebook.com/JillianRileyDesigns
Jillian draws inspiration from nature, particularly Britain’s coastlines and hedgerows and her love of members of the corvidae family of birds and dodos! She works primarily with porcelain using slip casting and sculpting methods. She likes to create storytelling elements in her work, and aims to evoke emotion through the dialogue between characters.
NJW House www.nikijwalters.co.uk
Niki creates kiln formed glass dishes and platters, each with a unique, organic and almost stone like finish, recently launching two new ranges entitled “Love” and “Birds”. Each piece is handmade by Niki on her farm in Derbyshire.
Natasha Braithwaite www.facebook.com/TashBraithwaite
Natasha is a black and white photographer and darkroom printer. She works using only black and white film and an analogue camera, taking photographs that are mainly landscape based, with her inspiration coming from the tones, textures and fall of light on the wider and smaller landscape. Natasha handprints the photographs using traditional darkroom technique and also produces hand printed photograms, images made without a camera and created entirely in the darkroom.
Terry Davies www.lens-scape.co.uk
Terry is a fine art British landscape photographer. He has developed techniques which result in the creation of images with a painterly feel.
David Salsbury www.salsburyceramics.co.uk
David’s earthenware pottery and framed tile panels are decorated with themes from the natural worlds of the countryside and the seashore.
Debby Marsh www.debbymarshjewellery.co.uk
Debby lives and works in Herefordshire, which strongly influences her practice. She loves patterns, and takes pleasure in repetition with subtle differences. Working in silver, each piece is unique. She likes to play these surfaces against each other, with some highly polished and some etched or rolled elements, adding to the visual interest.
Busy Budgie Jewellery www.busybudgiejewellery.com
At Busy Budgie Jewellery, Jo works primarily in silver and gold and experiments with different combinations of these materials to create pieces of work that complement traditional techniques perfected by hand. She prefers to avoid straight lines in her work, and likes to bring a little humour into each collection.
OddSox www.thesockgarden.wordpress.com
At OddSox, Sharon makes cute and crazy creatures, often from socks. She has also branched out into jumper creatures, along with Japanese crochet style Amigurumi, and dabbles with needle felting, enjoying free motion sewing when making her creatures.
As well as taking part in Sock Fair 2015, the following artists will also be part of our Sock 2015 Preview Exhibition in Sock Gallery at Loughborough Town Hall, which you can see from 4th to 22nd March 2015.
Ruth Gray www.ruthgrayimages.net
Ruth works mainly in acrylics and mixed media on canvas to produce unique depictions of urban and rural landscapes in an impressionistic style. Her work often surprises the viewer when they recognise a familiar place, mistaking it at first for foreign climes.
Clare Pentlow www.cjpdesigns.co.uk
The transformation of a flat sheet of paper through cutting and folding is one that Clare finds to be a constant source of inspiration, exploring the many possibilities that paper presents, challenging people’s perception of such an everyday material.
Nicola Taylor www.nicolataylorphotographer.com
Nicola creates fine art photography, which is inspired by folklore and fairy tales.
Helen Hallows www.helenhallows.com
With joyful colour, Helen creates artwork in ink, paint, collage and stitch to capture the flow of nature. Inspired by the changes of night to day and through the seasons, Helen tries to capture movement to communicate the story of time and place with the viewer.
Sue Bulmer www.suebulmer.co.uk
Sue creates original ink illustrations and uses her designs to produce limited edition prints, cards and a range of home wares. Her inspiration comes from nature as well as recurring themes of love, celebrating friends and family and the connections and relationships we have with others in our lives.
Thank you to everyone who applied to exhibit at Sock Fair 2015, and we look forward to another wonderful Fair.
