Go away snow...

The December snow-mania prevented us from meeting for another gathering before Christmas. The footpaths were too lethal to navigate with a trolley in tow. We will meet again in January 2011, how a year has flown by. 


So while the snow lasts, happy snow-person making!

Beads, beads and more beads

We were making jewellery today in time for some Christmas gifts. We had tons of beads to choose from and that was the hardest thing, too much choice! I had beads from years back that I had saved, so did others in the group. We even had seed beads from Brazil and Ecuador, which added lots of color to the mix.

These are the beautiful seed beads, no two of them the same which makes the necklace even more unique.

We also used ribbon to make other necklaces, and we even got to make some earrings too. The toy animals were not used in the jewelry making but they had great fun amongst all the beads we were using.  

It's cold outside!

Nothing like a candle to change the atmosphere in a room. After hunting down some charity shop cups and saucers and any other suitable receptacles, we made them all into container candles!

First you have to stick the wick in the center of the cup. then you pour in the hot wax.

We were using soya wax which is nicer to the environment and it's not as messy. It also throws the scent very well. We were adding seasonal spiced apple and cedar to our melted wax. 

Making sure the wick is centered after the wax is poured is important too, so the candle burns properly. That's where chopsticks come in handy.

All the leaves are turning...

Were we back at the marbling today but we ventured onto fabric and surprisingly the paint seemed to like sticking to the fabric much better than the paper. 

Four hands needed in the fabric marbling operation to get a nice even coating of paint. We are using acrylic liquitex, which has the right consistency for floating and keeps its vibrancy. 

With some pretty amazing results all round, it's really pot luck to see what will happen to each bit of fabric or piece of paper, as what you see floating in the mixture is often not what ends up on the page. A bit of magic...

Autumn - a return to making

We started back the crafty Autumn 'term' with something completely different - paper marbling. 

Paper treated with a special substance called alum is placed on top of a liquid mixture that has paint floating in it. The paper picks up whatever pattern the paint makes. You can make all sorts of patterns when the paint is floating and the results are, well, psychedelic!

Summer holiday

Our crafty gatherings have been on a wee holiday for the summer as a lot of us are travelling from here to yonder over the next few months.


I did however attend a horse-hair weaving workshop that the Chile Makers ran, facilitated by Varignia. The workshop happened on the last day of the pop up shop - Micro Techniques in Carnaby Street. 

This is my first attempt at horse-hair weaving and you need super concentration. This small disc is about the size of a two pence piece. A magnifying glass would be useful! The Chilean women who have been doing this for years put me to shame, they are so fast at weaving very elaborate creations.  

This picture is the start of a wing for a butterfly, I'll have to continue making this as the time seemed to fly during the workshop, very stimulating. We will have to get Varignia to run another one for the Frizzle Circle group. 

World cup fever

We continued with the rag rugs today amid the world cup frenzy. Especially for the Brazilian today, I think the rag rugging became quite therapeutic amid anxiety about the game later on. We were back in the garden amongst mounds of fabric. I recycled some t-shirts and brought these along today as this is a lovely fabric to rag rug with. The coarser fabric can be tricky to get through the hessian sometimes. 

We do seem to create a mess, but a colorful one no less...

This was the almost finished result of a bag I was working on, using both the proddy tool on the flowers and the hooky tool on the stems. A great way to jazz up an old hessian bag.

Rag-Rug mania

We decided to take a break from felting and start doing some rag rugging. This is an addictive craft, once you start it's hard to stop. I was re-introduced to the wonders of rag rugging by Megan Dowsett via the Urban Craft Club which is run by Rowan Arts. 


So on a sunny June day I descended with my trolley full of fabric, scraps that I have collected over the last six years, and we started. Everyone else brought along some other fabric to share around. You will never want to give away or throw out any clothes ever again. 

The tools we used are called a hooky - pictured above and a proddy in the picture below.

It took no-time at all before everyone got the hang of how to make a rag rug, now every bit of fabric has the potential to be turned into something else!

Summer is here!

We continue another crafty get-together with felting and welcome another new member Cecilia who is one of the founders of the Chile Makers.  We were in the garden for this workshop on a beautiful sunny day, perfect for sloshing around lots of water. And hard to believe that the summer is here? Let's see if the sun sticks around. 

The pictures above shows Pepa's fleece before it is felted, we use the white fleece as a base. And below sort of half way through the process, we are fixing on some of the yellow dots. These little details can move around when you are rolling it in the bamboo and bubble wrap, but you can always needle felt in fine details afterwards. 

Some more beautiful felted beads...quite a production we have here.

And here is the whole process in situ. I'm doing some carding with those strange wooden things that I am holding.  

Wet felting continues...

Combined needle felting and wet felting going on today... and more members both little and big. The wet 2-D stuff can get messy with lots of water all over the place, but the results are worth it. This is the start of so many things you can do with this fantastic material. 

And also lots of friction needed. This is a bamboo blind that you can pick up very cheaply and it's the best thing for rolling the felt so that it shrinks. 

And voila! the finished piece by crafter Clare...you can use this to make all sorts of things with some needle and thread, or just keep it the way it is. 


The wool that I use in the workshops is Merino 70's which is super soft and I get it from Wingham Wool Works. It needs to be carded first before it's made into felted pieces. I'll have to get a picture of this process the next time we have a felt making gathering.  

Wet felting - an introduction

We combined needle and wet felting today and started making felt beads or balls which ever way you want to call them! Lots of elbow greece needed to felt a piece of sheep fleece into a nice round shape. Soap and hot water too of course.

You can felt a piece of fleece into a ball without needle felting, but for a nice even shape with no lumpy bits we needle felted them first into rough ball shapes before plunging them into hot water.

We welcomed Varignia to the group of makers - she is a very talented crafter herself and uses recycled materials in her own creations. 

Ah...another member of the group, Simon, all tangled up...

And the transformation of all those felted balls into a stunning necklace. This is Clare's masterpiece.  

More needle felting

We had some different members come along today to have a try at needle felting, so we continued the 2-D work with those fantastic vibrant colors of fleece. But we also branched into 3-D territory, what needle felting is all about really...

This was the start of a sheep that I was working on. Pepa made a much better one!

Many ouches along our way, the only dangerous thing about needle felting, ah well...

Our second crafty meeting!

Today we were weaving on home-made looms (wooden frames you can pick up in pound shops) with my extensive wool and yarn collection, some of it free-cycled, some of it belonged to my gran and the rest I have picked up over the years. Eight of us descended on Bianca's place for a creative afternoon.

This was the proudly completed beautiful weaving creation made by Gaia. Amazed how into this we all got. So after I left you guys stayed there till midnight to finish your weaving? Mad...

Crafty Things Begins!

This is our first official crafty gathering. Hurray! We did start a couple of weeks back with some crochet, but sadly there was no photographic evidence. Today we were needle felting, making some 2-D work. The felt (or fleece) that we were using comes in amazingly vibrant colors...we are all drawn towards different ones. We were needle felting onto pieces of felt that you can pick up in haberdasheries.  

You can also needle felt any kind of wool onto the same piece, it doesn't have to be all fleece. All of our designs turned out very differently.