Wide Eyed Wonderfuls

Tortoise

2009-09-09T12:43:00.002+01:00

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

2009-09-08T22:05:00.002+01:00

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

2009-09-07T12:54:00.005+01:00

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

2009-08-27T12:17:00.004+01:00

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

2009-08-05T08:51:00.003+01:00

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

2009-08-05T08:01:00.004+01:00

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:

Collages

2009-05-30T22:04:00.003+01:00

Today I've been doing some more coursework, namely making collages from geometric shapes using complementary colours:

I chose the papers for the background of this one, then realised that they are fire and water!

This one was great fun to create, I loved choosing the papers for the square.

This one is inspired by this image from a collection I made last module. It was great fun to tear all the pieces of various papers and colour them.

Creative Sketchbooks Module 3

2009-05-29T23:43:00.000+01:00

I handed in Module 3 of my course last week.

It was an enjoyable module, I had to collect inspirational collections of images.

I then used one of these to paint a range of papers using colours drawn from an image of a bird, and further worked into the papers with oil pastels and PVA glue.

The biggest challenge for me was the drawing part of the module, where I had to sketch various plants. Having not done any drawing for about 13 years, I was rather scared of that part of the module. Hannah gave me some good suggestions, the most helpful of which was to set a timer and just sketch for 5 minutes, getting down whatever you can in that time. I did these 3 sketches of plants int he conservatory on holiday:

I need to get into a habit of drawing more things, so that I can keep on working at the fear of doing it, and hopefully get better!

The next module looks fun, lots of work with collage and stencilling.

DJ DJ!

2009-05-28T19:52:00.000+01:00

On Tuesday Night, Helen & I DJed at Stitches'n'Hos, a local knitting night at the Hare & Hounds pub in Kings Heath.

We'd volunteered to do it a couple of weeks earlier, armed only with our impeccable taste in music! We'd never DJed before, and had no idea how such strange equipment as decks and mixing desks worked.

We spent a couple of our Tuesday evening get togethers planning the kind of things we'd like to play, and picking the first hour of music, to give us time to get used to the decks and make sure the crowd weren't throwing knitting at us because they didn't like the tunes!

We had a fabulous time, got some knitting done, and played lots of songs we love. Some of the tracks are available on Spotify, so here's a Spotify playlist of those I could find.

There are so many good songs we didn't get to play, so we're looking forward to the next time we can get the CDs out!

Tiny Robot Love!

2009-05-14T08:53:00.002+01:00

I can't quite remember how, but David discovered these fabulous little robots:

Their creator makes them and sets them off into the world, with a destination on the flag, but they can only travel in straight lines, so they need help from passers by to make it to their goal.

Check out Tweenbots, the video is wonderful!

BARG#4

2009-05-10T09:23:00.007+01:00

Yesterday, Mr Wonderfuls and I went off to join the BARG peeps for a day of fun at w i d e o p e n s p a c e, a day of games based round the bullring and Curzon Street.

The first game we played was Hat Snap, which involved wearing a rather fetching newspaper bonnet with a number on the back:

There were about 10 of us, and the object of the game was to take as many photos as possible of other people's numbers, while trying to stop your one getting snapped. It was great fun, with all these people who had moments before been strangers running round after each other, sliding along walls, sneaking out from behind pillars and generally bemusing people who were having a quiet afternoon shopping in town.

I won! I got 22 points, partly I think due to my camera having quite a good zoom in comparison to some of the camera phones in use. It was great fun, and I caused many giggles walking through Smiths looking for batteries with my hat on, though when I told people what I was doing, they wished me luck.

We headed over to Curzon Street next and set up a chalk labyrinth for a few goes at The Lost Sport, where a blindfolded runner needs to work their way out of a labyrinth guided by the rest of the team who are walls and cannot give any guidance other than humming.

This is what the game looks like from the outside:

Here's a little Wall's Eye Point of View:

After a few people had worked their way out of it, I decided to have a go. It was a thoroughly bizarre experience - you're trying to balance going as fast as you can with not falling over, crashing into people, or treading on too many toes. There were several moments where, apart from the humming, it felt as if I was all alone in a wide open space, and plenty where I was walking into the walls. The turns were particularly difficult - you're heading along fine, and suddenly you crash into someone and need to work out what way to go next.

duncautumnstore recorded a couple of audioboos of my run, which are here and here, complete with many apologies and giggles.

We also played the 'Waving At Trains' game, as lots of the train lines out of the city run past the car park where we were playing:

Quite a few people waved back (more on local services than cross country ones) and a few train drivers even honked at us!

There were more games later on, but Mr Wonderfuls & I decided to head home. All in all, a fabulous day, thank you to Nikki for organising it, we'll be looking out for BARG#5!

Very Crafty Weekend

2009-05-04T22:01:00.004+01:00

This weekend I've made rather a lot of things. As well as the finished quilt top for Thomas, I made two skirts.

I ordered a couple of Clothkits in January, and hadn't made time to sew them till this weekend. First, I sewed up the Trellick Tower skirt:

I love it. It's ever so slightly crackers as a skirt, but is really rather fabulous.

Here, thanks to the wonders of Zemanta, is a pic of the actual Trellick tower, in London:

Image via Wikipedia

The second skirt I sewed was their 'Hold Me' skirt, which is an absolutely beautiful design from a papercut by Rob Ryan, an artist whose work I recognise, but never knew, and am now utterly in love with.

The way that the Clothkits work is that they send you a piece of preprinted fabric with all the pattern pieces marked on. You chalk the side lines onto the skirt pieces, cut them out, and use them to cut the lining.

The fabric as it arrives

You then follow the nice clear instructions (as much as I ever follow instructions) and make it up into a skirt.

I'm really pleased with the Hold Me skirt, the colours are gorgeous:

I also carded 5 merino-silk-wensleydale batts in beautiful sea blue-greens, and sewed all the ends into my Treat scarf. All in all a good weekend!

Finished Top

2009-05-03T12:34:00.002+01:00

I've been working on Thomas's quilt, and yesterday I pieced all the squares into 6 strips to form the central panel. Today, I've sewed it into this:

The observant among you might notice that it differs slightly from the plan. When I was assembling the strips, I seem not to have managed to put the squares together to make a railfence. I'm calling it Crocodile Whirlpool.

Now to do more crafting before going to Wrapped In Wool's birthday crafty shenanigans, and more sewing is planned for tomorrow, including teaching Mr Wonderfuls how to sew cravats.

Happy Bank Holiday Weekend!

Sunlight Through Bracken

2009-04-28T12:29:00.002+01:00

On Sunday, Rikk, David, Anna & I went for a walk on the Lickey Hills. We started off at the visitor centre, and all the area round there is new to me, as I've only walked round the side near the viewpoint when doing a geocache

This is my favourite picture from Sunday:

More photos here

For David...

2009-04-26T20:49:00.005+01:00

My friend David celebrated his birthday recently, so I made him this little guy:

The pattern is Grumpasaurus from Kat Knits, though he rapidly got renamed 'Davidasaurus'

I love this picture of Davidasaurus roaming across Blanketscape:

Last week, David had to go into hospital overnight, so to keep him company I made him Little Nurse:

I based her on the pattern for the Black Apple Doll, at the size as printed (not enlarged) with a few additions, namely her belt, collar, nurse's hat and shoes.

I made the shoes by cutting two pairs of foot shapes out of red felt (slightly larger than the doll's feet), folding one from each pair in half and cutting the dip out of the top. I blanket stitched them round the edges and joined them to the feet by threading a needle with six strands of embroidery thread, making a tiny stitch on the back of the shoe, through the leg and back out through the shoe again, then drawing the thread through till the tails were of equal length. I knotted this, rethreaded my needle and made one stitch on each side through the foot with the tails, coming out at the front level with where I wanted the ties to start. I tied these off in a bow and trimmed the tails to a nice length.

I'd not had a chance to take photos of either of these two before I gave them to David, but he & Anna visited this weekend, so I took these then. While they were both in the same place, Davidasaurus and the Little Nurse got quite friendly!

I had a great time making both of these, and I'm very proud of how Little Nurse turned out. I'm planning on making a couple of these for the girls for their birthdays, so it's nice to know that the pattern does what I want it to do!

Musical Raindrops

2009-04-25T08:13:00.000+01:00

this is a fabulously beautiful little toy.

Thanks to Keri Smith for the link.

The Wrong Season

2009-04-24T13:28:00.005+01:00

I'm making good progress on the Treat scarf to go with the mittens I mentioned in this post.

(The yarn is actually cornflower blue & jades, same as the mittens,I took the pic with my cameraphone)

It amuses me that the weather is, on the whole, beautifully warm here. I reckon I'll finish it, wear it once 'just because', then pack it away with the mittens (which I'm still wearing) as something to look forward to in October.

I'm also really proud of this photo of a seagull I took at Beaumaris on holiday:

It was a long way up, I was zoomed as far in as my camera will go, and I got lucky!

First Toy Society Drop - Pickle

2009-03-30T12:59:00.005+01:00

Having discovered The Toy Society last week, at the weekend I made this little chap:

While he was being made, I named him Pickle. He sat on the bookcase for a couple of days, and I knew that if he was going to be dropped somewhere, I had to do it soon, before I got too attached.

This morning, I packed him into a bag, with a note and a tag inviting people to take him. I left for work a bit early, and hung him outside a local school, waiting for a small person to find him on their way in:

Although the pavement was empty and the roads quite quiet at 8:10 when I was hanging him there, I felt quite nervous, but excited. I hope he makes someone's Monday.

If you want to be part of it, just check out The Toy Society blog, and join to get all the info :)

Edit: My drop is now up on the blog here

Little Giraffe

2009-03-23T12:51:00.002Z

I knitted this Little Giraffe for my new niece/nephew, who isn't due till September.

Little giraffe likes flowers, the nice warm lamp on my desk, bananas and yellow bowls, though he's not too sure about pea and pesto soup, even if it is home made!

The pattern was great, a quick little knit. I made a couple of modifications:

Worked it on two circs instead of DPNs

Knitted an extra row of yellow before starting the body chart to secure all the legs together

Rearranged the stitches so the ear flap was on one needle, and worked an extra row there so the yarn was in the right place for redividing the stitches to work the face.

Also, I made sure to catch the yellow yarn in on the middle stitch of each spot, when I didn't do this, the legs got very tight. Next time I'd leave an even longer tail for sewing the ears and making the horns, and I'd embroider the eyes before stuffing the head.

Now I just need to pack it away till September & not forget where I've put it!

Ahead of the game

2009-03-18T13:38:00.004Z

I'm in a funny place here. I think they call it Organised. I've finished a good friend's birthday present, with over 3 weeks to go till their birthday, and cast on for my new niece/nephew's knitted giraffe I'm making for when they are born in September.

I've got a list with all the people I want to get gifts for this year, and while it contains lots of gaps where I don't have ideas for specific people yet, the next things I am going to make are a couple of Christmas presents. Christmas. An event which is 282 days away!

And I'm not the only one. Spinonehalf has started her Christmas knitting too.

Maybe it took a few years of last minute December cramming to get us to learn that we really should start early. I'm just not sure March was when we'd planned to!

Maker Faire

2009-03-17T13:10:00.003Z

I'm still editing my way through the photos* I took at Maker Faire this weekend, so in the meantime, here's some video footage to give you a taster of what went on:

* though my camera appears to have lost 100 of my photos!

Morning Elegance

2009-03-12T19:39:00.001Z

This is just wonderful:

Eye Spy... Makes Me Laugh

2009-03-12T13:28:00.005Z

I'm a bit late for this week's date, as this week I've been a bit busy. Drobtinice set us the theme of 'Something that makes me laugh', and it has got to be my family.

People who meet my parents say that all my eccentricities suddenly make sense. Yesterday my dad called me, almost crying tears of laughter to tell me about an incident at his work resulting in the destruction of a modelling straw tower with a bit of lighting equipment. It's impossible not to laugh when my dad is!

From my mum's endlessly optimistic belief that she needn't do a gauge swatch when knitting hats:

To my dad having the sense of fun to still let us put his hair into bunches and ponytails, even when his girls are in their twenties:

Yes, some of those are held up with freezer clips

And my sister and I being on the same wacky wavelength:

I know whenever I feel a bit blue my family will cheer me up.

Eye Spy... Something that makes me Happy

2009-03-01T21:25:00.005Z

I'm playing along with Eye Spy Sunday hosted by Cindy of Bug and Pop, and this week's theme, courtesy of Iris and Lily is 'Something that Makes Me Happy'

I spent part of this morning folding my tiny quilting fat quarter collection using Kootoyoo's instructions, and the little happy pile looked so beautiful:

I've got some colour family groups, with possible quilts/projects in mind for these:

1. Amy Butler Midwest Modern (IIRC) - all these are long quarter yards so I'll probably pick up a few more co-ordinating prints and do something like the stacked coins with them.

2. Moon & coordinating prints - no idea what I want to do with these, I think I need a few more coordinating blues first.

3. Pink & Greens - I want to pick up some more co-ordinating small scale prints with these and do a star block or two with them. The one at the back is a long quarter, the other 3 are FQs.

4. Kaffe Fasset Floral - Got this one free on my last Cotton Patch shopping spree, no plan as yet!

5. Liberty print - I was given this print in a Craftster swap about 4 years ago, and I've been hoarding it until I can learn to sew clothes to fit my figure and then I'm going to sew it into a blouse. I've got a metre of it, so I think I'm going to have to find a lightweight black cotton to pair it with to make up the yardage. Kootoyoo's folding method also works with lightweight fabric (lighter than quilters cotton) up to a metre, and with quilters cotton up to half a metre.

6. Lovely flowery pink FQ - my sister bought this FQ about 4 years ago, wanting to make something for her (now eldest) daughter Chloë. She realised that she was unlikely to be able to, and gave it to me, so I am waiting until I find the perfect project for her to use it.

I love the pure, happy potential of a stack of beautiful fabric, and I've really enjoyed neatly folding it all. I've also been using the folding round a quilters ruler method for the yardage that I bought.

Does anyone have any suggestions of good ways to fold the long quarters?

Another thing making me happy this week is the mittens I finished knitting:

They are knitted from the beautifully soft and warm Mirasol Miski, baby llama fibre. They have a gap across the palm for sticking your fingers out of to get out your train pass or press the Pelican crossing buttons. The end of the thumb is open to help with that, but you can tuck it into the palm if it gets cold. I've called them 'Treat' because they were such a happy, easy knit - more pics here.

They're knit on 2 4mm circs, and are a quick easy knit. A friend will be testing the pattern for me, and then I'll have it available for download.

I'm off to have some home made lemon and ginger ice cream.

A Change of Plan

2009-03-01T17:52:00.004Z

After a visit to Cotton Patch, I appear to have totally changed the fabrics for the quilt. Mr Wonderfuls came with me, because he has a good eye for colour, and helped me choose the fabrics. We've gone for a subtle crocodile theme, hopefully something that is still little boy friendly but will grow older with him.

This is the final plan:

The backing will be turquoise, and I'm going to stitch the centre in the ditch, and probably do a wave pattern on the bubble borders, if I can get that looking good.

The fabric on the left is the backing.

What do you think?