It is always a great day when there is mail other than bills. Today the postie brought me a parcel -it came my way from the US. Inside was this lovely book.
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.
He stands about 2cm tall. The eyes and beak are cut from card and glued on.
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.
Instead of following the instructions in the book to the letter I trialled adding the pipe cleaner supports as I knitted. This was good for being able to measure the size of each piece needed. All in all a very successful experiment. The finished critter is a little larger and thicker that the one in the book but it still looks fine.
Last to be created was this little guy.
He is made from the instructions in Noreen's book. I was very happy with the end result. The corking was created with a cardboard roll tube and I used the one over two technique again to get a good firm piece of knitting. I hope that I am being clear about what I mean by one over two. I have three loops on each stick and lift the bottom loop over the top two so that the stitches have a better tension.
All in all a nice crafty weekend.
The stalk was made first and stuffed lightly to keep it firm. The red part of the top came next and this sits on top of the stalk. The little patch of white was done last and is a piece of two pin spooling. This is stitched to the stalk to hold it all together. I didn't put any stuffing in the top of the mushroom but might try this another time. French knots form the little white dots on top.
