Workshops

I have just finished running my first felting workshops.

It is awesome to make stuff with other people. I just love it.

Here's a couple of pics from the 'beads and baubles' workshop. A bit dark but you get eh picture. Jo of 'darn it and stitch' has such a great vision for enabling people in the community to be crafting.

Hopefully we'll do some more workshops in the new year. In the meantime, I need to get on and felt some booties ... we have a running total of 14 pregnant people we know (friends and family) many babies to follow! Apologies if you are one of the pregnant ones reading this blog, I've given away what you're probably going to be getting...

T' Rug

This has been a long held scheme of mine... I have been thinking about how to make a rug for the floor of the cabin, without having to go buy one. The floor is pretty cold, and given that I spend a fair bit of time sitting on the floor making stuff, it seemed like a good plan to make it warmer.

I have a pair of enormous wooden knitting needles, and Malcolm's brother Don kindly donated a bunch of clothes he didn't need any more, including loads of T-shirts. T-shirt fabric doesn't fray when you cut it, and it's got a bit of stretch, which means that if you cut it into strips you can knit with it. So I set about knitting lots of squares, each ten stitches cast on, then knitted till I ran out of that colour or the square was squarish enough. I used moss stitch, which made the rug look more interesting than just plain knitting.





Then I stitched them all together using an enormous needle and some rope-like thread I found in a charity shop. It was a great was to use up all my scraps of wool that were not suitable for other uses. Re-cycling old clothing is great too, unfortunately lots of old clothing gets sent to African countries, impacting on local industry often (but not always) in a negative way.


The weird thing was, I knitted till I ran out of stuff to knit, and when I placed all the squares together, there was the exact amount to make the rug, nothing spare and nothing short. Canny!

And here it is, the rug of many colours....

This little light

I've been getting into collage a bit, and last time I was in London I had tea at the V'n'A (Victoria and Albert Museum) with a friend I've known since we were nine ( that's more than two decades)... anyway, in the giftshop (which is a fabulous giftshop) some flyers were advertising an exhibition just been. They immediately caught my attention:



What a combination of great words! I took a couple of the fliers, and when I found three little glasses for 20p each in a charity shop a week or to later, I just knew what I had to do....









All I needed was some glue, (PVA) some old patterns, some very pale pink tulle, and I cut out little pictures from old books, catalogs and fliers I'd collected, using as a focus some of the words off the poster.

Then once I was happy with how they looked I made a glaze from PVA and water, and applied a couple of coats to finish it off and seal it, and voila, some pretty little lights to make me feel happier about the dark evenings.