Art Van Go: Review and rate

If you are in the design and textile business, be it professionally or for pleasure, you are probably looking for a reliable and regular art supply company that can cater for all your needs. If so, you might want to check out a company that was voted as the Textile Retailer of the Year at the Knitting & Stitching Show annual Textile Awards in 2006. This company is called Art Van Go and here, follows a little more about what they offer.

Overview

Art Van Go is essentially a small company, despite the vast range of supplies and services they offer. In fact, the company is almost exclusively run by Viv Arthur and her partner, Kevin Mead, while they are often joined at the big shows by various specialists, who ably carry out a variety of interesting demonstrations. Huge range of stock
The company has a huge range of stock that covers just about every area of the design and textile industry, including painting and drawing media and accessories, metal fabrics and wires, surface design and fabric art, print-making and paper-making materials, as well as a whole raft of useful books and magazines. Specialist products However, they are certainly not just another one of your average art stores. They also stock professional and rare merchandise that will be sure to cover all your needs, whether you are a fine artist, embroiderer, calligrapher, patch-worker or into textiles art.

Workshops

As well as offering art and textile supplies, Art Van Go also runs numerous workshops and courses that are held in their specially designed studies, conveniently located at the back of the shop.
These workshops cover just about every aspect of art and design including, among others, water-colour, mosaic, pastels, screen-printing, drawing, book-binding and textile construction. Unusual workshops Other examples of more unusual, yet very popular workshops include one that focuses on techniques which use recycled bags carefully machined to make a new fabric. While, if jewelry making is your thing, then the workshop that demonstrates how to make bead jewelery by using a coloured and silver wire, felt, beads and found objects could be just up your street.

Opinion

Overall, the range of supplies is great especially on the textile side of things, although the lack of canvas on offer is a little disappointing. All these supplies can be found in their art catalogue. The workshops also appear to be both interesting and instructive and not to say pretty unusual, and the prices on offer are of pretty good value for money.