Tortoise

Mr Wonderfuls and I spent Bank Holiday Monday at Earlswood Lakes, where I bought some gorgeous thick wool felt squares - red and black, which I am going to sew into a rabbit, and green and brown. I saw those two colours and knew that they would be a perfect tortoise.

Meet John:


He's hand sewed, the shell is circles and semi circles stitched into hexagons, and his legs and head were my first attempt at 3D limbs - I am rather proud of them.



I named him after my Grandad.

Pear

I've had a long standing fear of drawing. Until module 4 of my course, I'd not done any drawing for the sake of it since I was about 14, so 14 years! I did bits for that module, but fell out of it. Today I got my sketchbook out, and drew the pear on my desk:



I am happy with it, and I want to keep on drawing things!

Biscornu and other happiness

A while ago, I was having a bit of a crafting hiatus, struggling to find something to knit. Inspired by this Craftster post, I set about looking out the instructions I'd found a couple of years ago for biscornu. These quirky pincushions had always appealed, but I'd never quite got round to making them.

In a fit of madness one morning, with minutes before I needed to leave the house, I grabbed a skein of Caron watercolours thread and a piece of aida that had an unfinished piece for a long forgotten Christmas card on the other end, and started stitching the Indian Biscornu pattern. While Mr Wonderfuls and I were in Chester, I finished the Indian one, and a heart one, and started on the provincial pattern on the way back. Last weekend, I began the Happiness one on the way to spend the day with David in Liverpool. They are fabulous fun, simple patterns, but challenging enough to keep me alert, very portable and just what I needed to get me out of the crafting rut.

You might have noticed a lot of beginnings above. Well, I've now finished two of them:


I love them. The shape is gorgeous, and now my mind is full of thoughts of both more biscornu and other embroidery.

A big source of happiness at the moment is this little poppet:



My new nephew Joshua, who arrived yesterday. I can't wait till Friday when I will (hopefully, traffic permitting!) get to meet him.

I am also loving Mr Wonderfuls, for he replaced the router! The other source of consternation at the beginning of last month was that I could not upload any photos. Well, we got a very nice new router, and I uploaded 250 in one day, without having to compromise on image size. Thank you, wonderful man!

Another love for today is Florence + The Machine, check her out, the music is simply superb. I am trying to resist the urge to go and buy tickets for the gig this Sunday, as we'll have spent the weekend visiting family, so I suspect I will be very tired!

Expect more posts soon, a lot has been going on!

Toys In The Garden

I've been on a bit of a toymaking kick recently, having made 4 Kates, 7 Bobs, a Giraffe, and a Dolly, among others.

I took them round to Spinonehalf's house on a gorgeous sunny day at the end of June, and had a bit of a photo shoot. (I did try to write this blogpost last month, but my computer was not being very helpful, and I've been a bit busy since then!)

Giraffe relaxes in a tree:


Dolly thinks the flowers are beautiful:


The Kates have a huddle...


...and decide to do some skipping...


...then they relax and do some cloudwatching:


Meanwhile the Bobs decide to use the skipping rope to play tug'o'war!


HEAVE!


The purple team won!


Shaking noses:


Stripy Bobs found a flower!


Camoflage:







All the toys I knitted...


...and the yarn I had left over:


I did all of these with Cascade 220, which is absolutely lovely to knit with. Great stitch definition, doesn't split easily, very economical (all the kates, the yellow bob and the giraffe all came out of the same single ball!) and my new yarn of choice, certainly for toys.

Module 4

I posted about the collages I'd made for Module 4. The rest of the module was about stencilling, punching, piercing and spraying. Here's are the pieces I submitted:



The green piece is attached to this next page...


Which has butterfly shaped holes cut out of it so I could spray ink thorugh onto the next page:


For this page, I masked off the birds with stencil apertures, then painted the page with calligraphy ink, bleached out the sun through a stencil, and sprayed bleach to mottle the sky:


For this one, I cut a (very complex!) hinge stencil, made a sprayed background to look like door pannels, and stenciled both black and gold markal thorugh the stencil:


The next one is my favourite piece of work I've made so far. Firstly I made a watercolour wash in blues and purples on the front of the page, and applied pastels off the edge of a mask to the back of the page. I tore a strip off the side and folded the page, punching holes along both the torn and folded edges. I laced them back together, adding buttons along the fold, and edged various areas on the watercolour side with iridescent markal paintstik.
Front:

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Back:

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