Learning Needlefelting.......

Needlefelting it's something I've wanted to add to my skills but the idea of letting myself loose with a barded needle was a little scary. But yesterday I embarked on my journey of needlefelting by taking a beginners course at the fabulous Sheep Shop in Cambridge. the course was run by Cathy Olgivie who was just lovely, and there was lots of laughing and chatting which to me is always a good sign.

We started off by being introduced to the tools of needlefelting, with lots of words of caution around the use of the needle (Cathy brought lots of plasters, and secretly I was hoping for a small injury so that I could have the 'Mr Bump' plaster). After this we then got to choose our lovely wool tops, there was so many beautiful colours on offer but I went for the pinks and reds (no surprises there). Then off we went......

First of all we started off making a hanging heart. This was done using a cookie cutter as a template, and this was a great exercise to start with as it helped to understand the principles of needlefelting, I loved the constant stabbing and especially watching the tops turn into a beautiful felted heart, I even embellished it with budding flowers (get me).

Then we moved on to some free-form work which I was a little nervous about but I loved it and how creative it allows you to be I made a flower brooch, but I will definitely do some more practice on this at home.

I really enjoyed learning to needlefelt, and would thoroughly recommend it, next I shall be doing the 3D needlefelting class.

Back with a Bang!

So after quiet some time of being away from blogging I'm back (yippee)!

Whilst I've been away from blogging I've not been away from my lovely sewing machine and have lots of projects underway - yes more projects that will take forever to finish. But I have finished one project (still suffering from shock of actually finishing a project).

Last weekend I spent it with my Grandparents and the majority of it I spent with my Gran crafting, which I loved. But excitingly I made a dress for my friends wedding/party thing which I completely love.

I used the Vogue Very Easy V8725 pattern - its a pattern I've had in my stash for ages so it was nice to finally get to use it. For the material I used a generic medium weight spotted cotton with a non static lining. It took me about 2 days of solid work (most of the time was spent hand sewing in the lining - that added serious stress lines to me). Here it is......

I love it and am so proud of what I've done. What lovely things have you all been making?

Experimenting with Screenprinting

So last Saturday I ventured into screenprinting for the first time, and if nothing else I learnt how to cover myself in paint as did claireabellemakes who came on the course with me.

The course was run by Clive Riggs who was probably the most patient teacher in the world (having to put up with my thousands of questions) and extremely talented. We started the morning by being introduced to the kit needed to print, and then we got straight in to it. So to start with Clive got us to print without template to get use to using the screen. So as you would of guessed I grab the brightest pink paint available and got stuck in and luckily it worked (I loved the pink but it did like to dye everything around it no matter how much I washed it).

We then went on to do our first template print and I decided to make a cupcake (yes 1 hour in and all I could think about was when could I eat - I did sneak a kit kat in though), which printed up lovely. Then we use the cut outs of the template to create another image and I turned my cupcake into a cup of tea - I really liked this exercise as it made me think about transitioning one image into another and  I am thinking about this a lot at the moment.

Then came to the final picture of the day where I started to get ever so slightly carried away and decided to print a sperm whale (I then obsessed with sperm whales for quiet a while). With this I decided to do a multi layered whale using different techniques (it did look slightly like a child had done it but I loved it (I don't have a picture of it as i gave it to Mr CG - but here is my dodgy whale I did first time around).

If you haven't tried screenprinting you definitely should its fun, bring the child out in you and is a brilliant technique to use. Next week is lino printing - get me!