The craft taster day

After a nice long summer break, we returned to making last Saturday. There wasn't only one craft to try but three! 


Felt making, cross-stitching and beading with wire were all at our disposal. Once you get in the making zone, time seems to disappear rather quickly. 

That is until you stab yourself with a felting needle. I forgot the plasters, oh dear... 


Busy crafters in this picture are carding and needle - felting. The colourful results of their labour can be seen below. 

Fantastic intricate designs can be needle - felted, a great example below...

And then there was cross-stitch... 

...that I love to do on the train, or any other sort of transport, well maybe not my bicycle... We were putting some of the designs onto cover buttons too. The one in progress above ended up as a butterfly and it was taken home to complete. 

Making something on the commute to work prompted conversation about the kind of things that you can make while watching the telly, or in this case waiting for the plumber. One of the crafters got busy making so many beaded wire flowers... 

Beads galore

On Saturday we threaded many, many beads through wire and wondered if we would make anything by the end of the workshop. As with much creating and making we were testing out the ability of waiting in order to achieve...delayed gratification...

Well most of us managed, and very enjoyable it was too. There was even time to make a wee bumble bee, well, maybe not so wee, it being almost the same size as the flower...

Everything matched, even nail varnish, I think this was down to the overall bias on the colour red today  






 
And here is a picture demo of how the whole threading the bead thing worked. The beads are sort of like knitting stitches, you have to make sure to count your rows so that you get the right shape. Much scolding by me if you add an extra bead where there wasn't supposed to be one! Ah, but sure that's what I'm there for...















So increase and decrease depending on the shape you are after.

You end up with a whole heap of petals ready to be all rolled into a flower formation.

And hey presto, there it is, all rolled up with green florist tape, you can't see the tape in this picture though. 

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.