Summer comes to Cletwr Café in the form of delicately felted hangings made by Andrea Smith.

Andrea trained as a silversmith and jewellery designer, but her real love is making textiles using a variety of wools, using a technique called Nuno Felting. This interest initially developed when she worked for Wingham Wool Work, one of the major suppliers of wools and equipment for textile artists.

Andrea said: “As a textile artist, maker, and silversmith, I work alone in the isolated hills in the Dyfi Valley, sharing my life with a feral cat who tamed me.”

A compulsive creator, Andrea makes something almost every day, experimenting with different materials and dyes in a way she describes as total flow. Her inspiration comes from the natural world, foraged materials, discarded litter, stones, leaves, seeds, and fungal systems, the “complexities of which build our world and work as a community of beings” that “have a lot to teach us about our own conduct in our communities and on this planet”.

Andrea works mostly with fine organic merino and silk waste. Nuno felting is a process of making a new fabric by combining a loose weave fabric such as silk gauze or silk fibres with fine Merino.

She uses ‘locks' - washed but un-carded fleece from sheep -, including Teeswater, which have a long ‘staple' and so create texture and colour in the felted material. Andrea uses both eco dyeing and acid dyes to create the colours for her materials. She also collects garden leaves, such as those of the rose, to provide pigments for her dyes. The textiles shown at Cletwr are printed woven raw silk and Nuno felted fabrics.

Total Flow is at Cletwr until 5 August.