Messy Tuesdays!

I know its not ACTUALLY a Tuesday! but this has been waiting to be blogged for the past fortnight however I lost my camera in the middle of all the mess .. not actually true! its just been a bit busy fitting in domestics, family, work AND the Easter holidays for me to be totally organised and post it ON a (Messy) Tuesday!



here it is - then! - my TOTALLY messy section of our lounge.
I've been following these entries and confessions of messiness each week now and don't feel quite SEW bad about my crafty-mess intruding onto the family areas now I know that half of YOU are the SAME as ME!! totally MESSY!!
Of course, I blame our tutor, Sarah, for this! At least when I only machine sewed, it was all contained upstairs in my SEWING ROOM! but now that I'm needle felting, hand stitching, beading, well its all come downstairs! and the MESS just surrounds me where I sit in the evenings - as you can see:
My KNITTING is in various bags which include the Vneck tank top of which I'm about half way done, and my poor 2nd sock is STILL about 4 rounds from toe shape/finishing! a basket of library books have stacked atop boxes of my beading and threads and then there's the foam and needle felting! (I'm banned, now, from doing this during important tv viewing - especially during FOOTBALL! on account of all THREE of them have made threats to cut my foam block, snap my needles and do other nasty things to my fibres IF I don't stop "crunching" away ..!)
I can take a hint!
The long suffering family know better than to say anything about such crafty messiness, but I can tell they'd rather a wife/mum who wielded a dusted and vac and baked cakes and other such treats for entertainment, and every now and then I make an effort to TIDY UP and move stuff about. Admittedly, it mostly involves moving boxes and packages and projects UPSTAIRS and then bringing fresh bags, samples and projects DOWNSTAIRS and on occasion I've had to fib a bit and say that NO this ISN'T (necessarily a NEW knitting project, its just a trick of the light fooling you into thinking THIS is pink, when last night it was beige yarn ..)
I'm not, of course, fooling anyone. they know as well as I do, that I'm basically just a MESSY person and its just as well, as I often say, that I'm NOT the house-proud sort, or else I'd surely be nagging hubby to be doing a bit more DECORATING!?
My excuse is, that I grew up in a shambles of a derelict old waterworks cottage which never quite managed to somehow get finished, and we always had boxes of "stuff" piled up the stairs, on the stairs, atop the stairs, in our room, in the kitchen, in the pantry, .. you get the idea? I'm, therefore, sort of used to clutter!

Quilty Projects!

Remember the strips of pink fabrics I bought? A couple of my quilty-pals suggested I lay the strips onto a foundation fabric to create effect below and I set to and spent the last week working on about a dozen 9" squares (trimmed to final 8.5"'s) having fun with the fabric and the machine!

I liked the neat idea on one of the links they suggested I look at, of leaving a section in the middle of the foundation fabric empty to create a sort of framing effect, but overall I'm quite pleased with what I've actually got!
Started off being quite particular with my fabrics and getting the shades just right but by the time I realised I needed to just use what I could in order to get as many blocks as possible, it was just anything goes!!
Silly, really, to be making a PINK quilt when there's only ME that likes pink and dh has already muttered about it better NOT be going on HIS side of the bed!!
I think I might use it as a throw! perhaps for my "messy" corner in the lounge .. ?


While out on our OTHER family day out, I err happened upon a quilty shop and just HAD to buy the cushion kit, above! All the fabrics cut out including bondaweb and wadding and backing, pattern instructions too for £12.50


Nice to get to do some applique and make up this cushion without having to worry about being creative and original or anything! Slightly annoyingly I found they'd cut the 9.5" strips at a short 9"'s which meant I had to fudge and fumble about and substitute some pieces, but never mind! the cushion looks lovely and I enjoyed "playing" with my machine stitching through the layers in a variety of patterns using my walking foot!
I might make up some more cushions too, as ours are in need of replacing I think!

MORE books! (yawn zzzz)

You know me! I love my books!

Above book purchased last week from The Works, a snip at £1.99 just for the yumminess of some of the patterns within (textiles and wallpaper "patterns") and an interesting read while on the bus home too!

More library books! We're lucky here to have such a good selection of modern crafting books available to loan and these three reflect my interest in felting and embroidery!


Picked this knitting/crochet book up at the local Countrypark we visited today, in their gift shop - while waiting for the family to buy their duck/bird feed I noticed they are also running a Felting workshop end of the month and couldn't resist buying the book above, bargain at £3.99 - I've read much of it and for the price not much more of a magazine, not bad!?
(the family, meanwhile, are resolved to my just FINDING knitty-fibre stuff while out on day trips, not quite believing it is all entirely fortunate, I mean coincidental!).

The weather was a bit grim, mixed with showers, sleet and SOME sunshine - but we enjoyed the THREE AND HALF HOUR walk around the country park, in the main! (slight problem when we lost the trail we were supposed to be following for 2miles, and found ourselves on the cycle route for 5miles half way round! exhausted we finally found the end of the route and all our feet and legs are aching, as you can imagine!!).

Trapped Fibres! (and other experiments)

I had a lot of fun this Easter holidays with experimenting with some of the bits'n'bobs I bought at the recent Sewing for Pleasure show - below are some of the yarns and other bits of fibres and fabrics "trapped" between layers of the sticky soluble stuff purchased from Arthur Ridley; I machine stitched the sandwiched before dissolving and then needle punched it into a "pattern" on some felt (this counts as being HOMEWORK! too! - pattern being our end of term project).

Betty Barnden in a recent issue of Sewing World magazine had a little bag project in which fabrics were similarly trapped and I was rather taken with the "pattern" achieved and decided to have a go myself:
Here you can see I've laid a piece of pale green silk dupion, atop are cut bits of other fabrics with some long strips of nylon and then a piece of polyester organza in palest pink is placed on top and the whole piece is free machined in a nice pattern before cutting into two bag shapes and assembling. (I made my bag up a little differently and omitted the button closure as I don't plan to use this bag - too small for practical purposes being the main reason) And I beaded one side mainly to experiment with my recent purchase of assorted tubes of beads and the new book on beaded bags had some neat ideas eg the little loops and fringes which were fun!


The bag will go into my sketch book as a sample for both pattern and working with solubles too, I would repeat this for some other project in the future I feel certain!

Before breaking for Easter holidays, we were tasked with looking at "pattern" and I scratched my head for days and wondered whether it was too late to swap for flower arranging or sugarcraft! before deciding to do a set of different treatments on one simple pattern:

Using the basic idea of cutting out a square into two "shapes" and placing them on a piece of paper and framing the two shapes to create a simple pattern, I worked on a machined piece (above right) in which I used machine stitches and couched yarns to create the pattern. Next I worked on a piece of felt, needle felting some of my new fibres into the rectangle sections and needle felting the yarns to reproduce the same pattern as before (above left). Finally the sample at the bottom is the finished piece of the yarns and fibres that I'd sandwiched right at the start of this post between the soluble sticky backed stuff, free machined, then soaked/dried and cut into shapes and used some yarn to hand stitch all onto a piece of black Linton Tweed (sample/fabric) which I re-discovered while tidying and sorting my sewing room!


The final piece, above, is just bits of merino and some of the silk rods (from Sewing for Pleasure, temporarily forgotten "whom" I bought them from!) and I have a nice varigated embroidery yarn to finish it off with some hand stitching too!

Sewing for Pleasure - 2008 - NEC

On Friday we had our usual annual girls' day out to the NEC for the Sewing for Pleasure show and the four of us thoroughly enjoyed it and declared it an excellent show! Unfortunately my friend's daughter was unable to make it on the day, so my friend decided she'd go again! with her on the Sunday and certainly we found plenty to keep us busy for the entire day and I'm sure her 2nd trip will be good idea!

I was straight in look at the books but this time decided I couldn't find exactly what I wanted and am pleased that I saved my money as I ended up overspending by MILES!!

First purchase was 20 balls of (advertised as) cashmere for £20 from The Black Sheep, my pal, Ann, bought 10 balls of Jaeger fleece for £29 and a super pattern book too!

I went around the whole show about three times in total, picking up bits and pieces here and there including stabilisers, knitting notions, bead/pendants and chains, hoops, and then rather accidentally found a stall selling a magnetic board with rule and strip of magnetic something or other which I was assured would help me with my lace charts! From these ladies I also bought a beading mat which feels like fleece (sort of) and they demonstrated how it helped in working with tiny beads and at £1 I picked one up!

Mostly I was looking for "creative" bits and pieces and found two or three stalls selling a variety, I bought a lot from Stef Francis which you can see below; I bought some soluble fabric and a mini embellishing variety pack from Arthur Ridley and enjoyed his talk on Embellishing machines in one of the lecture rooms too. I bought some fibres for needle felting from Knitting 4 Fun and had a very interesting chat with the stallholders about felting in general, I was tempted to buy some wool and banana & nettle yarn to knit a felted bag but didn't want to rush into a purchase in the last few minutes - I wish I'd gone back to this stall before 5.30pm when they were closing!

I did wonder whether to renew my subscription to Sewing World again this year, but as per usual I did! Slightly cheaper to renew at show time, plus a goodie bag of mostly nothing much! but this time there was a rather smart hobby bag which is quite useful in size.

We enjoyed, too, the fashion show and it was rather nice to sit down for half an hour too!
A lot of walking, the day was tiring and as we'd not finished in time we weren't able to go into the accompanying hall for the Hobbycrafts which was a first for us! Normally we're done by 4.30pm and spend the last hour in there before finishing with a reviving cup of coffee before setting off for home!

Lastly I bought a couple of clip-on LED lights sold half price, £5 each, for the lads after being assured that the cheaper batteries to be found in some shops work just as well, unfortunately the lads weren't as enthusiastic as I thought they might be, and I rather wish I had bought the banana fibre for myself now!! ho-hum!!

Stitch! explore pattern

Our homework for this week was to explore pattern within stitch (or knitting).

I chose to machine some samples and after my no.2.son.12yrs helped me by producing a sheet of patterns (and muttered about how it OUGHT to be "mum" helping him and not other way round!) following my rather basic contribution of a square of machine quilted lines to represent "tiles" which was my chosen pattern, I got rather carried away and couldn't then STOP!

I've tried to use a variety of fabrics and techniques and am rather pleased with the results.
An opportunity, too, to get out some of my machine feet and I tried using my couching foot for the first time and had some fun making cord with some of the super threads we'd got as freebies from our friend on the course last week (you can see it on the zig zag couched cord on the left).

Getting stuck in ..

At college last week we were treated to a help ourselves to hanks of threads! One of the ladies had a friend who had a surplus amount and wanted rid of it, naturally we all dived in and here you can see my lovely bundle!
I've used some of it already in my stitching to explore pattern but in the meantime it sits in a nice tin on the shelf looking all yummy!

As has been said often, ALL yarns coming INTO the house MUST first be approved. by Bertie. Here you can see him getting his claws out and having a good old rummage before finally allowing me to stash it away.

The weather this week has generally been wet and windy, neither cats have appreciated this and I've caught Bertie mucking about in my sewing on a few occasions, here you can see him rolling about atop my homework! (naughty cat!) (have had to put note of apology on one page, the muddy pawprints are really rather obvious and I'm not able to tear the whole page out and start again as I'm then out of sequence).