Florcita brightens up your life!

[deb & wendy]

Florcita brightens up your life!

by Sara Millis of Sara's Texture Crafts - www.sarastexturecrafts.com

I wanted to introduce you to one of my inspirations… Mariana of Florcita.


Sara: Please tell me a bit about you and your background?
Mariana: My name is Mariana Ciliberto, aka Florcita. I live in The Netherlands in a little town in the south of the country with my husband, 3yr old son and a loud black lab. I originally come from Argentina, in South America. On a vacation trip to Europe, almost 10 years ago, in Firenze, Italy, I met a Dutch man whom today is my husband. That is how I got here.


Sara: How did you get into arts and crafts?
Mariana: I've been taking workshops and classes on arts and crafts since I was a little girl: painting, ceramics, weaving, vitreaux, photography and felting among other things. In our family it was always encouraged to -at least- learn one foreign language, play one sport, and do one arty thing.... I did many of each. I think it just has to do with an innate curiosity to learn whatever comes around... Arts and crafts have always been there in my life in different forms. In the past few years, as we as a family turned more into the self-sufficient path, we've been teaching ourselves a lot of crafts which were a bit forgotten and can be useful for making objects for daily life, such as hand felting. Wool and water are part of my daily life now as I strive to reproduce ideas with this medium which is incredible versatile and strong.


Sara: Did you train at college?
Mariana: Not in arts. For almost 6 years I studied Psychology at the University of La Plata, in Argentina. I should have gone to art School instead, I see that now!


Sara: Where can we find your beautiful work?
Mariana: I started last year selling my hand felted work after great encouragement from my husband and friends. I use DaWanda (http://en.dawanda.com/shop/florcita) and my own online shop hosted on my website: www.florcita.eu and I also sell to people that get in contact with me and want something specific ([e-mail]). It's always a challenge to try and reproduce the colour combination and ideas people have into a hand felted piece. And challenges I do like!


Sara: Where do you find your inspiration?
Mariana: Inspiration comes from reading, walking in nature, talking to other artists and mostly, experimenting. I find that the more I work, the more ideas I get. I also like learning other crafts and picking up bits and pieces which later I include in my felting, like spinning, weaving, dyeing wool, etc. It just enriches the whole process and final product.



Sara: Tell me a bit about your latest collection of works.
Mariana: At the moment I'm working on a line of handbags called "Tierra" -"Earth" - which combines the use of wool, leather, metal and wood. All nice, strong natural materials. At the same time, after experimenting with different processes of felting, I've come up with a line of wraps and scarves called “Retazos” which means something like “Scraps” in Spanish. Big wraps and scarves made up of a sort of patchwork of individual hand felted pieces which are then felted together. I use very soft wool, linen fibers, hand dyed silk, bamboo, tencel, hand spun and dyed yarn... and then some more!

There are wall hangings and carpets in the works following the method of working and controlling fibres created by Karoliin Arvilomi, from whom I just had the pleasure to learn in a workshop. I'm always working in different things. I like the process to be spontaneous and natural. It shows later in the work how much I enjoyed making it.