Bead Shops are Like Sweet Shops!

I love bead shops, they're like sweet shops for people who don't eat sweets!  We used to have a lovely little one in Long Melford but sadly it closed.  I love getting a little wooden bowl and filling it up with goodies, mentally planning necklaces and earrings as I add to it, so I was thrilled when I discovered one in Cambridge earlier this week.

When I got my treasures home I started rummaging in my seed bead boxes to find small beads to go with the larger ones I'd bought; laying them out in different arrangements.

After lots of arranging and threading and adding ends I ended up with 3 new necklaces with matching earrings:

a blue and white set (reminiscent of delftware I think),

a yellow and green set (a perfect match for my lovely work jacket)

(no I didn't make the jacket, Hobbs did),

and a lovely green set with gorgeous acrylic patterns beads.

All in all the 3 sets cost me £27, which is a darn sight less than I would have to pay if I'd bought them ready made, and I had the all the fun of stringing beads onto thread and wire :-)

A Touch of Lace

Whilst sitting around giving the needle eating cat lots of attention and cuddles I've managed to finish a knitted lace shawl/scarf.

It's a beautiful, fine, baby alpaca and silk yarn from Eden Cottage Yarns which I bought at the Knitting and Stitching show in October.

The pattern is from Ravelry (Daisy Chain Shawl)

I've never used beads in knitting before but they were surprisingly easy to do and add a nice weight and slight sparkle to it.  There's one in the centre of each flower and one at the end of each point.

And just as I was wondering what I could knit next the latest Brooklyn Tweed pattern book fell into my inbox, so that sorted that one out - new yarn ordered and pattern downloaded, oh and more knitting needles ordered as despite having a drawer full I don't have the right size ones to knit Merle (how can that be?)!

As for said cat, he's fine, 100%!  Enjoying a little snooze in amongst some fabric earlier on

No More Burnt Hands

A little while ago I was given a very cute little enamel saucepan with a metal handle - cue lots of 'ouching' as the handle gets very hot and using a tea towel to hold it is a bit risky as it tends to catch in the gas!

So at the weekend I had a lovely few hours sifting through fabric scraps to and sewing them together to make a pot holder.

A mix of vintage and new,

quilted, backed and edged.

No more burnt hands

and it looks rather nice hanging up too.

I also made this card for my Dad's birthday, from silk tops and threads worked together on the embellisher with beads and wire hand stitched on.

I hope he likes it as the beads made it too thick for a standard stamp and it cost me a fortune to post it!

How To Cure A Grump!

I'm not normally prone to grumps.  I actually have a reputation at work for being cheery and positive but this afternoon I had a bad case of the grumps.  Caused by the bad parking of a man outside my house as I arrived home from town.  By the time I had called said man back from down the road, explained the error of his ways to him and demanded asked politely that he re-park taking up the space of just one car instead of the 2 and 1/2  he was currently using, I was in grump zone.

After having tea and chocolate (Green and Blacks of course) I tackled my grump.  Here are the instructions should you have a grump that needs tackling too.

1.  Take some cheery fabric and a plain wooden bangle.

2.  Cut cheery fabric into strips and wrap round bangle.

3.  Take some variegated viscose thread and some pretty ribbon

4.  Wrap ribbon and thread over fabric

5.  Banish 'helpful' cat from the room and ignore the protests from the other side of the door (please note this step can be omitted if you don't have a similar helper!)

6.  Rummage through bead stash and stitch beads over joins on bangle (avoiding sticking blunt end of needle into your finger if at all possible - ouch).

7.  Sit back and admire the finished bangle.

Quite a productive way to cure a grump I think!  (I wonder if I could sell these and make money from a grump - now there's a thought!)

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A Holey Cuff.

A few weeks ago I was intrigued by a cuff that Iz showed on her blog that she'd made on water soluble fabric so I decided to buy the book she'd mentioned (Dissolvable Delights by Maggie Grey) and have a go myself. 

I used a thread pack from Stef Francis and randomly machine stitched velour ribbon onto the surface, wrapped pipe cleaners with a rayon ribbon and stitched them on before adding beads, lots of beads (far more than I'd intended!)

Ready to have the background fabric dissolved.

It was a nervous experience dissolving the fabric as I wasn't sure it would all hold together, I was half expecting a pile of bits in the bottom of the bowl, but all was ok.

After dissolving the background fabric.

I think it probably should have had more pipe cleaners on it going across the short way as it hasn't held its shape brilliantly, but I'm quite pleased with it as a first attempt stitching on dissolvable fabric

As well as being unique it reflects my fascination with holes and the shapes they create (I'm not sure what that says about me though!).

Who'd have thought that pipe cleaners could end up so pretty!

Beads and Quacks!

On Monday my neighbour tapped on the back door, holding a yogurt pot, an old jar and two old tins.  "I'm having a clear out," she said "can you use these?  They're left over from my college days."
"Ooh yes please," I replied, not even knowing what they contained but knowing that she did a textile degree.

And what did they contain?

All kinds of wonderfulness!  Old beads, new beads, old bits of jewellery, sequins, buttons and threads.

On a sadder note, her ducks (who personally wrote me notes and gave me eggs) met a very sad and brutal end on Friday night when a fox got into their run - no further details required.  We were both very upset and as she hadn't got any recent photos of them I decided to make her a little picture of them.  I had some of their feathers that I'd collected in the summer when they moulted and happily stitched away for a few hours.  But actually giving a textile picture to someone with a textile degree turned out to be harder than I'd imagined and I then spent several more hours getting colder and colder feet about it.  Eventually I plucked up some courage and gave it to her - fortunately she seemed genuinely pleased with it and quite touched that I'd spent the time making it.

Hinge (on the right) and Bracket (on the left)

Quack Quack!

A Bowl Like No Other

I thought I'd show you a bowl that I made a couple of weeks ago.  It's not like any other bowl (and it's also really hard to photograph!)

Silk Bowl - approx 21cm x 14cm

I made it by sandwiching silk fibres between water soluble fabric and then free motion stitching it - round and round at first to make the base and then out in lines towards the edges. 
Next I ran it all under a cold tap until the water soluble fabric had gone but some of the "stickiness" was left (word of warning, if you fancy doing this yourself then take your watch off first as the "stick" gets everywhere!). 
Then I squeezed most of the water out and molded it over a bowl to dry.

Silk Bowl - approx 21cm x 14cm

When it was dry I stitched a few seed beads on and painted round the top with fabric paint.  It's quite holey but is more rigid than it looks as when the stickiness dries it gives it some stability.

I love these silk fibres, I bought them last year at the Knitting and Stitching Show from Oliver Twists.  I also bought some more this year, including some undyed ones - my next challenge is to dye them using the microwave!

Then Came The Jolly Summer

Last week, while I was waiting and generally getting side tracked, I noticed a rather nice pattern had appeared on a piece of fabric I'd placed under some garden fleece I was painting (don't ask!) to catch the excess paint.  The fleece experiment wasn't a success but I fiddled around with that bit of fabric as it seemed to have flowers on.  I cut and stitched, and added some organza.  I painted some handmade paper and stitched the fabric on.  I used my new lumiere paints that I got from my recent visit to Art Van Go. 

Jolly Summer - 17cm x 21cm

  
The text is from The Fairie Queene (Edmund Spenser) because it seemed quite a jolly piece, especially when the sky was grey over the weekend.  I'm not actually sure how much I like it, but my neighbour does so I thought I'd share it anyway! (And is it a textile piece, or is it really mixed media, or doesn't it really matter? It all gets very complicated at times!)

The sun is back now - let's hope it stays awhile this time!

Spring Greens - 3rd Attempt

I've been playing with textiles again, trying to create something inspired by the greenness of spring.  I know we're nearly in summer but it's taken me a while to get something I'm vaguely pleased with!  My first attempt ended up being cut up although bits of it were embellished into number two (whose fate is still being decided).  But one evening last week I just started to fiddle with some scraps that I'd got left over from the previous attempts and produced this little piece:

Spring Greens

The background is left over silk and scrim that I'd dyed in the microwave, with a silk carrier rod stitched on using the flower stitcher.  I'd made the tyvek bead earlier in the week and stitched it on adding some beads.  It's only tiny (4" x 2.5"), and rather "random" but I prefer it to any of the previous (more planned) attempts!

Busy Doing Lots of Things

I've been rather busy of late - busy marking student teachers' assignments (a task made less tedious by finishing off the Christmas chocolate biscuits!), busy creating printable teaching resources to go with our story animations on The Treasure Tree and busy creating an embroidered seascape.
To start with I embellished (with the embellishing machine) various merino wool tops, silk bricks, ribbons and yarns onto a washed babywipe.  This is it at that stage:

The waves at the top are the microwaved dyed wensleydale fleece from here.  Then I hand embroidered more yarns and silks on (mainly using lazy daisys, fly stitches and french knots) before adding beads to all represent the fish and seaweed.  (I think I may be addicted to french knots!).  This is it finished:

It "grew" quite alot during the embellishing and is about 50cm x 20cm.  Below are some close-ups of some of the detail (if you click on any of the images they'll enlarge - the occasional cat hairs are added extras not visible except through the camera lens!)

It's been many years since I've done any embroidery so I did quite alot of unpicking along the way, but I enjoyed doing it and am quite pleased with how it's turned out especially as I had no real plan when I started - I think planning is something I need to work on!

Now I'd like spring to come so I can get busy in the garden.

Inspired by Ice

Back in October Fran and I went to the Knitting and Stitching Show at the Alexandra Palace and, amongst other things, I bought some Lutradur.  For those of you who don't know, Lutradur is a non woven material that is slightly see through and can be dyed, stitched and distressed with a heat gun.  Up until Christmas it had stayed in its bag as I wasn't really sure what to do with it, but having some free time over the holidays I decided to have a play with it.  My first attempts weren't very successful as I didn't appreciate how much the painted colour would change when I blasted it with a heat gun.  But I soldiered on and eventually created this piece, which I think must have been inspired by all the ice we've had recently.

Ice - 18cm x 13cm

It's quite hard to photograph accurately but I think you can see the gist of it (especially if you click on it to make it bigger).  It's actually 2 layers of lutradur (the smaller blue central panel and the larger white one), fused to a background of pelmet vilene with painted bondaweb.  Then there's some distressed polyester organza, some silver mesh and stitching, as well as the silver braid and beads. 

I'm sure I'll look at it in a few months time and want to hide it, but just for now I'm quite pleased with it.