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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Hiatus

Long time no post! I've not been doing very well with crafting recently. It seems that the things I have ideas for, I don't have the materials to execute, and my stash isn't exciting me at the moment.

This has been compounded by a few failures - I tried to make a cabled calorimetry, lovely looking, in pink Cascade 220, but it barely went from the top of one ear to the other - no hope of it fastening around underneath my hair! A friend gave me a scarf pattern that she'd used to make a gorgeous scarf for me, so I cast on for it in some lovely black alpaca I have, which is plied with a thin ply of white. Got a little way in and decided to do some maths - worked out that my finished scarf would be 25cm wide by 45cm long. Not really a scarf, so back into the frogpond that one went. I've cast on for the same scarf pattern in a much thinner mystery stash yarn, which I have 3 balls of, but as it is off white, I now think it looks like a dishcloth.

To compound matters, I have a gorgeous new camera, but I am struggling to upload the images it takes to Flickr because they are too large. I am torn between slowly slowly uploading them at full size so that they are available on there, and shrinking them to speed up the uploads. It doesn't help that seemingly any uploads to Flickr kill my net connection.

I did module 4 of my course, which was very good. I'm making slow progress on Module 5 now, it just feels like I've made no progress at all, and that there is no time for me at the moment.

It'll get better in time.

Here's a picture of me at Big Session back in June, when the weather was sunny: