Maggie Osinga

"An eye for colour is the most important thing in designing  textiles" according to Maggie. She attributes this gift to her mother back in Scotland who made all their childhood clothes and upon reflection, developed her awareness of colour in textiles.
 
Spontaneous in her design, Maggie  has to "start before I can get there".   Her work is always a very organic evolution.

Maggie is producing visually stunning  hand felted garments using Fibre Fusion Felbi prefelts as her base. 

She has applied Japanese Shibori techniques of  stitching  and dyeing to  Felbi Prefelts  to create finely pleated and dyed wool felt in vibrant colours . These have then been transformed into garments.

Maggie's  affair with felting started back in 2002 after completing a year long textile course with Lis Bisset at the Victorian Embroiderers' Guild in Australia. The felting component of this course inspired her  to enrol in a Diploma of Art Studio Stitch/Design at Box Hill College of TAFE in Victoria .
 
She was part of the `Colourful Women”,  a group of graduates from the Box Hill TAFE who staged exhibitions of their work at galleries including the Australian Wool Museum in Geelong and  the Antipodes Gallery in Sorrento. 

The Lee & Park Gallery in Korea  recently invited Maggie to participate in the exhibition “Wearables by 5 Australian Artists” in 2011.

It is thanks to textile artists like Maggie who keep pushing the boundaries of fibre that we have such a thriving textile art community in Australia.