Long Time Between Posts

Oh dear, it has been another long time between posts!

Unfortunately other parts of life have been very hectic of late and there has been little crafting happening. We have been dealing with ill relatives, funerals, work and housework and once they have been dealt with there has been little time left. Blog reading has been a welcome luxury but blog posting has just seemed unattainable.

I did do some crafting - not for me - with a class of children that I was fortunate to spend some time with. I got them all making a hessian coaster for Mothers Day. A square of hessian with the edges frayed was the starting point. They then removed a thread further in to the square and re-stitched this with some contrasting wool. This was repeated two or three times on each side to create a threaded pattern. i then backed each coaster with felt.

Here is the first side with two of the re-stitched threads done and the next thread removed ready for the third row of stitching. It was important to remove each thread one at a time and to skip a thread of hessian before removing the next thread to stitch. This helped to keep everything from falling apart. Some of the children did have difficulty with the edges continuing to fray but most coped very well. Some chose to go over and under two threads, others three and some one and each coaster looked very different. Unfortunately I have not got any pictures of the finished coasters to share.

Adding the next thread. The felt was added once all the stitching was done and then all the loose yarn threads were trimmed back to the frayed edge. Leaving them a little longer stopped them from pulling out easily. I zigzagged the felt on but another way would be to fuse the felt to the hessian.

The children also decorated a plain brown paper bag as the wrapper for their gift.

For me there had been a little order placed with Amazon. Now I have to wait patiently (oh that is hard!!) for the books to arrive. One is the next book in the Cute Stuff series, the other is the Softies kit and the third is one about making books. I read about the making book one here, borrowed it from the library and then decided I needed my own copy. Thanks so much to Melissa for posting about it.

In other the news - the apron got used very successfully at our mother/daughter adult education class and my daughter came home with some very nice recipes to add to her collection. My apron has not been made as life intervened but I had an old one that I could take.



(Sign off name courtesy of a link from this blog.)