Five Green Acres has suggested that we all join her Rumpelstiltskin Challenge and use up all those stash items and finish those unfinished projects.  Today I made a dent in my wool stash.

This is my new wool basket made from a really long coil of finger knitting, that was made from a ball of chunky wool, which has been taking up space in our hallway for the past two years.  Be liberated little ball of wool and know that you are now a very useful basket.  No longer will you be threatened with being thrown out or given to charity.  No more will your purpose in this world be questioned…for now, you are a basket fit to hold all the other balls of wool whose purpose has yet to be discovered!

In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m really enjoying finger knitting.

In the making.  I honestly never believed I’d have the stamina to finish this one.  All that wool takes an awful long time to sew together.

Up close, what to do with the rest of the wool stash…of which this is a mere fraction.  I’ve got bags and bags of the stuff.  Any suggestions given I get so fed up with traditional knitting patterns?

I was browsing through the photos on Alisa Burke’s site earlier (on this post) and her picture of the 3 shells reminded me of reading many months ago about a process to create a natural colour palette that can be used in any art or craft.  I grabbed a picture of the new shoots in the polytunnel to demonstrate this idea.

Open the picture in your photo editing package of choice…ours happens to be GIMP; we’re massive fans of Open Source, particularly Ubuntu which makes it so easy to install whatever type of package you need and were considering given some faceless conglomerate a few hundred pounds for the privilege of owning.  Check it out…although I digress.

Open the photo and use the colour grab tool to sample the different parts of the picture.  Create some layers and drop the sampled colour onto each layer.  From this point you can build a natural palette on which to base your sewing, knitting, painting, interior design…anything!

The first colour came from the leaf that you might be able to spot to the left of the photo.  I tried so hard to sample the brown of the soil, but it turns out it’s not brown, it’s blue-grey.  The greens are from the shoots.

Because these colours occur naturally together they are pleasing to the eye…nature will never let us down in that respect.

The idea is further demonstrated on the Colour Lovers website, where they grab colours from various images to show trends.

The Topsy Turvy doll is a doll that has a sad face at one side and a happy face at the other.  Traditionally, they had a coloured face at one side and a white face at the other but these have fallen out of favour to be replaced with sad/happy face.  Normally the sad doll was dressed in rags and the happy doll dressed in gowns.  I had one as a child that was Cinderella in rags and Cinderella at the ball.  She was beautiful.  I don’t know if she was made for me or if she had been bought but I loved her all the same.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to make one for quite some time now and never quite managed to get the arms right.  Recently though, while looking through books in a charity shop, I came across an old series of books called Stitch By Stitch (which, by the way, reminds me of the song Step By Step by Annie Lennox and now I can’t get that song out of my head).  Within the pages of this book was a pattern and instructions on how to make your very own Topsy Turvy doll.

Happy

Shortly after I also bought a copy of the stitching magazine, Inspirations, which also contained a pattern and instructions for a far more elaborate doll that I might try one day.  This doll is from the pattern in the book.

Surely this was a sign, so I have been making my very own doll this past week.  It’s a lengthy process, not least of all because I don’t have a working sewing machine and have to hand stitch it all, but I’m sure it’ll be worth it in the end.

Sad

I’ve been working from home the past two months, which has saved a couple of hours (and more) on my working day, allowing me some crafting time in the evening.  Tomorrow I go back to work in the office so I doubt this will progress any further until the weekend.

I’ve promised it to Iona when it’s finished.  She wants me to dress it in a kilt and jumper…not at all a girly girl!

I know you also need to hear Annie Lennox so you too can have that song stuck in your head.  Right now I’m alternating between this and Van Morrison’s Moondance, which Alasdair is learning to play on the trumpet.

Some more sock monsters that I’ve made of late…very friendly monsters but not to be underestimated.

Stu - with a new family in Scotland (soon to be Australia!)

Pink Froggle - can be stroppy if not fed sweets on a regular basis

Munkay - suave, sophisticated, full of his own importance - with a new family in Scotland

Froggle - just wants to be loved

Beadle - also getting ready for his new life down under

All hand sewn brand new socks and stuffed with recycled polyester stuffing and a great big dollop of love.

Those readers who know me personally or pay attention to the small details will know that I spend time away from home on a fairly regular basis.  This has seen me occupying almost every room on some floors of the Holiday Inn Express in Bridge of Don over the past year or so.  There’s clearly only so much of this I can take before I start going slightly mad, so on my most recent visit I bought a needlefelting book and the requisite tools for the job, thinking it would be an easy way to while away the evening in front of the TV.

This fellow is not the result of that night’s work, nay the result of that night’s work was an hour spent on a conference call and a few hours of frustration and sore fingers as I tried to figure out how to attach a head to a body with my needle.  This fellow is the result of me doing some proper research into the techniques.  There are many videos on You Tube for those of you who wonder how to use the tools that look so easy yet cause so much pain and frustration.

Once you master the technique it’s really easy and creating the shape is just a matter of folding and stabbing the felt so it sticks together, adding bits to make more defined shapes or to hide the bits where I stabbed too much!

The book I bought that night, Little Felted Animals: Create 16 Irresistible Creatures with Simple Needle-felting Techniques, doesn’t go into a great deal of detail about how to make the shapes but once you’ve done some reading it’s fairly self explanatory.  What this book does allow you to do is match up your shapes with those on the page so you have a shape that is similar to the one you’re aiming for.  The rest really is open to your imagination.

So, next time I set off for the night I’ll certainly be packing my felting needles and felt.  It pleases me that I need such few materials for a productive evening, because the worst bit about those nights spent away from home is the feeling I’ve wasted another evening in another nondescript hotel room…sorry Holiday Inn.

If you fancy a go yourself, you could do worse than to follow the instructions on this video to make an owl.  I did make the owl but because it’s red, it’s not photographing well.  My top tip would be to keep stabbing even if you think nothing is happening…it takes ages.

I sewed a small hoop to the top of mine for the Christmas Tree…I know too much Christmas round here these days but it won’t be long you know.

Regular readers may remember a post I made a few weeks ago, Trial by Clay, in which I featured a rough attempt at a clay bird, I’ve since refined the notion and have been merrily creating a range of slightly smaller free standing birds with a simplified design in red and white, the scheme works well with the copper legs and necks that I’ve been giving them, recycled from our on-going rewiring project.

Available from Etsy and Coriandr

As well as the free-standing birds I’ve also been busy making hanging birds for use as Christmas decor, their not quite finished yet since I need to source some nice ribbon for the hangers and I just haven’t seen any that I think is suitable yet, bit of a WIP in that respect, although I’ll hopefully have them in the shops soon.

Recently we’ve been giving a lot of thought to our packaging.  It’s not something that comes naturally I’m afraid.  Occasionally, it works out just fine like with my button pendants; however that’s a very rare occasion indeed.

Last week I had a crazy notion to make some Christmas gift tags for sale.  Having deliberated for some time about the best way to present these, I settled on a good old baggie with fold over label and spent Saturday morning bagging them up.  I hope you’ll agree they could compete with any mass produced packaging.

There are four designs in each packet, the reindeer shown above with it’s bright red nose, the Christmas tree, the mistletoe and the Christmas roundel.

As with the dolls, birds and copper ornaments, these will be on sale at our upcoming Christmas Craft Fairs.  We’d love to see you there and we’ve just added another date for Penicuik High School on November 27th.  Time permitting there should be more sock monkeys and felt owls for sale too.  Keep an eagle eye on this space for an update.

I know, another Christmas post, but really it’s not that long until the big red cheery chap comes again!  I’ve made quite a few of these hanging birds but they don’t photograph well.  I think they’re shy!

They’re a simpler take on the fabric finches regular readers will be familiar with, which makes them quicker to make and therefore more likely to hold my interest…did I mention I have a very short attention span?

As with the Matryoshka dolls, these will be adorning our tables at our upcoming craft fairs.  If you fancy making your own birds (not exactly like this one, but very pretty nonetheless) check out the free stuff where you’ll find a couple of variations on the hanging bird.

The idea of printing on fabric has been something I’ve been wanting to try for some time now.  I’ve neither had the time nor the inclination until this weekend, when the urge suddenly took me to get my finger out and make something for a change.

In my head this was going to be a quick craft that would satisfy the need to have some cheap Christmas ornaments for sale at our upcoming craft fairs.  In reality it took me all day to find a suitable image and even longer messing around with different techniques of colouring the image and transferring it to the fabric.  As they say patience is a virtue and in the end I was rewarded with some pretty special hanging dolls.  The most recent ones such as the one second from the left have a watercolour appearance.

Here they are all printed up and waiting to be sewn.  I think I’m in love – is that a bit narcissistic?

Paper fabric is fabric made with layers of paper and other bits and pieces, in this case glitter and threads, covered with a whole layer of tissue paper.  I used an old sewing pattern instead of plain tissue paper.  All of this is glued in sequence on top of a piece of muslin with watered down PVA glue.  The effects are interesting and the resulting ‘fabric’ is very easy to sew.

When I first started to make my piece of paper fabric I worried that it was too haphazard and it would look too messy but as you can see, once sewn into a finch the effect is quite striking.

The legs are made from some of the recycled copper electrical wire from the rewiring of our house and the whole bird has since been varnished with clear lacquer for a very shiny finish.

I’m now in the process of making a blue one to keep this one company.  Colour is added simply with acrylic paint sprayed with water.

Available in the shop