Therese from the lovely blog Softies Central ran a very generous giveaway in January and I was one of the lucky winners. The book was my prize. It was on my wish list to own and I felt very happy when Therese picked me as one of the winners. a top addition to the bookshelf!!
On to some crafting. I have been experimenting with some corking again. I have introduced another class of children to the lost art of corking - also known as french knitting or spool knitting. I am trying to encourage them to make something more that a great long length (that however seems to be the passion at the moment!) and have shown them the book I wrote about in this post (I have just checked the link I gave on that post and is no longer working. It looks like the book is no longer in print).
I was also lucky enough to read about Noreen Crone-Findlay's latest e-book. It is called Spooligarumi and has some great instructions in it for creating some little corked creatures. Of course a copy found its way into my inbox very quickly and it was just the thing I was looking for.
I have created three little spool knitted critters this weekend with the aim of trialling some different techniques for making critters from the lengths of spooling. The first was a very little bird. For this I made a length of spooling and sewed it up by winding it around a texta and stuffing a cotton ball inside. I added wings with two very short pieces of spooling that were joined to make a loop.
Next was the crocodile\alligator which has pipecleaner supports threaded inside the tubes of corking. This is from the Corking book by Ann Sadler. The aim here was to see if it could be done using the most basic of all corkers - the cardboard roll with four icypole sticks attached. When the spooling was done passing one thread over one thread the end result was not firm enough so I experimented and tried passing one loop over two and this gave a much firmer result that was great for adding the pipecleaner supports. For the difference look at the tail and then the rest of the body.
Last to be created was this little guy.
All in all a nice crafty weekend.

Well done, Tracey! This is great!
ReplyDeleteCongratulations :o)
It is so exciting to see my designs come to life in some one else's hands!
AND.... your wee bird and crocodile are just brilliant!
Yay!
blessings
Noreen
Well done on the win!! I remember having a "Knitting Nancy" when I was in primary school and making some cokring. I love the little animals you ahve designed.
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