Janice Speck of Port Townsend is a venturesome artist, prone to trying new things.

"I move on. That's the key to my thing. I run out of inspiration," said Speck of her tendency to switch to making different kinds of art.

"It took me a while to know that I was not a painter," she said. "I'm crazy about clothes, and I'm crazy about textiles. I'm a textile artist."

Speck sells wall hangings, felted-bead necklaces and even a do-it-yourself felting kit at the Port Townsend Farmers Market.

In early June, she was preparing to teach a felting class at the Port Townsend School of the Arts at Fort Worden. She demonstrates how to split a wool batt into sections, pulling off small pieces and shingling them into crosswise layers to make a panel, using bubble wrap as a base. The panel is squirted with dish soap, covered with more plastic and rolled repeatedly on a table around a foam pool noodle, slowly and gently coaxing the fibers together.

Speck has been felting for 20 years. "You can do shape, you can do flat, you can weave it." For a while, she made hats and other objects, such as vases; she felted designs onto berets and gloves, but has since cut those "low-dollar items" from her repertoire. "It's not very inspiring to make things that fit on gloves," she said. "When I run out of inspiration, I really can't do it anymore."

With Paula Lalish, Speck made some "Art You Can Really Wear" for the 2015 Port Townsend Wearable Art Show, and she made capes for a time, too. With four capes remaining unsold, she had a ‘totally run out of inspiration’ sale, and I sold them off cheap,” selling for $50 the capes originally priced around $180.

She's currently into beads. "I'm really having a lot of fun," she said, standing at her studio table, which is filled with organized trays of beads of all shapes, sizes, colors and materials. There's Fimo, blown glass, shell and wood, and huge, spherical recycled-glass beads from Ghana. Necklaces of beads and felt balls sell for $55-$120 at the farmers market, and wall hangings run $100-$400. "It comes and goes," she said of her sales.

"At the farmers market, the thing that really makes money is the prepared food."

CRUMMY JOBS

Speck is one of those refreshing people who says exactly what she thinks, and says her English accent makes that possible.

"Americans love English accents," she said. "It helps me to engage with people. It opens the door, my husband [Ray] said. I can say stuff to people that he wouldn't dare to."

Speck, 74, is originally from London, England. She started attending the Harrow School of Art at age 13, which required an entrance test – "150 people in a room doing a [still life] drawing, and they took 30."

She met her husband, Ray, while hitchhiking in Spain in the 1960s, and they traveled awhile to Morocco and the Canary Islands, "and then we ran out of money and went back to London and had kind of crappy jobs."

She got a visa to come to the U.S., and the couple flew to New York. "When we came out of the airport, we had $30. So we hitchhiked across the states" to Ray's family's home in Walnut Creek, California. Coming to the U.S., Speck said, "was just a huge adjustment. I couldn't work the plumbing, and I didn't know how to mail a letter, either."

In California, "we had some crummy jobs" in San Francisco, she said. She worked half-days and made art. "The cool thing was, Ray got it. He does get it. I'm not really happy if I don't get to create stuff." Ray Speck likes to make stuff, too – he's a master boatbuilder and instructor at the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding in Port Hadlock.

ABOUT TIME

The Specks moved to Port Townsend in the early 1980s, and Janice started a clothing shop in 1983.

"I moved it up and down Water Street four times, each time getting a bigger space in a better location." She owned About Time until 2003.

"I was a discriminating buyer. I had natural fibers. That was a real focus. I had no polyester. People in Port Townsend got that," she said.

"One of the things that really got me going here was my customers. They're wonderful. They recognized and appreciated what I was doing."

Of natural-fiber clothing, she said, "It's all about sweat. If you're wearing plastic clothes, you're going to sweat. And polyester retains odor." For outerwear, it's OK, she said. "I'm also crazy about linen."

People also appreciated that she had bigger sizes, and "I was honest with people. If they would say, 'How does this look?' I would say, 'Do you want the truth?' You're not doing them any favors telling them a lie."

As a buyer for the shop, she trusted her gut. "I could tell, when I was looking at a piece of clothing. There was a little blip, like a little butterfly wing in my stomach, right there under my belly button" when it was time to buy. "I followed my instincts, and I'm crazy about clothes. Felting is kind of related to that."

Now, look for Speck at the PT Farmers Market, where she also sells, for $5, some self-published books of drawings she made in the ’60s. The drawings are "anything goes," she said. "I was just letting my imagination do anything.... Oh look, here's this piece of paper. I can do anything I want on it. I don't have to be censored."

She also volunteers at the PT Food Bank every Wednesday. "I deal with the desserts," she said.

She likes the farmers market for the people, too. "The locals really understand it. They get it," she said. "You're having fun, or just a visit with people. I like retail. I like people. It connects me."