I Was a Winner.

Boy, oh, oh, boy, I was a winner in a blog giveaway run by DragonflyCrafts. Look at the lovely goodies I received.

The parcel with lovely photo card.

The contents. The sewing on these is just so even and the colours fit together beautifully. Thanks very much, Fiona.

On the creating front a few felt softies have been created. The first was an elephant - made as a sample to show a group of children. the pattern came from the very useful book on my bookcase - My First Sewing Book Hand Sewing by Winky Cherry. The patterns in this book have been ever so useful over a long period of time.

The eyes are split pins and the tail has been plaited on after the sewing was finished. The idea for the split pin eyes came from the kits I have purchased from Paper and String. The elephants sewn by the children were then decorated with glitter and fabric paints whereas mine was left very plain.

Second on the felt softie creating spree was a little car. This time I created the pattern myself with some help from some images found trawling the web. Again this was a model to inspire a group of children.

When I worked on this softie with the children we left out the split pin idea. I had tried this to see if it would look like a door handle but in the end decided the car looked fine without this addition. I did wonder about adding buttons for the wheels but have not tried out that idea yet.

Last on the creation line were some Perching Doves from Fa La La La Felt. I purchased an ebook copy of this great little book of felt Christmas decorations and chose the doves to have a go at first. I tried out several different variations before settling on the way I like to make these. They are a little addictive - I couldn't just make one!

With these two I followed the directions in the book to stitch the wing detail but I added the curve at the top of the wing and a second row of decorative stitching inside the first.

With these two I experimented with stitching on a wing that I had cut out with pinking shears but in the end found this to be a little fiddly. I also experimented with both blanket stitch and running stitch around the outside and decided that I preferred the running stitch. I love the way Amanda Carestio has designed these to be sewn onto pegs! Instead of buttons for the eyes I again resorted to split pins.

The ripple blanket is still slowly growing - lucky for me the recipient is so relaxed about when she will get the finished item!

Happy Crafting

Lucky Me and Some Creating Has Been Happening

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.

Wow, I've made more than I thought...

I was very lucky to win a cross-stitch chart from Cathy at It Will Be Funny Tomorrow. Janlynn's Just-a-chart The Gift of Music arrived safely in the mail yesterday. Thanks Cathy, I love it!

In other news, one of my crafty Christmas presents is all finished!


This knitted washcloth came as a kit with the cotton and instructions - all I needed was the pair of knitting needles. The cotton felt lovely and soft and the colours are just gorgeous! It was fairly quick to knit and has a great textured finish. I learnt to do side edgings for the first time :-) It turned out not quite square, probably because of my tension which has always been very tight. I could just go to bigger needles but I don't always like the look and feel of it then, and so long as it isn't clothing I'm knitting, I don't generally bother.

The sewing machine got a workout the other day too. My grandfather's second wife recently passed away and while Crafty Things was at the funeral she was offered her sewing machine and overlocker. Crafty Things already has multiple sewing machines (4 or 5!) so suggested I would find a use for them. At the moment we don't have any to put them so my grandfather is looking after them, but Crafty Things did bring back two crates full of fabric and sewing supplies.
Inside one we found a stack of aprons, all pinned together that just needed sewing up. We decided that I would sew them up when I found time and then sent them to my grandfather who could then do what he wanted with them.
I got the stack out and found two had already been sewn up and I sewed the other four fairly quickly. Now they're all ready to be posted away. No photos unfortunately because they turned out extremely blurry (still learning to use my camera properly!)



While I had the sewing machine going I made myself a second pincushion - the pink one on the right. It's a really quick and easy pattern from a patchwork book Crafty Things has on her bookshelf. I like being able to just pink the outer edge and leave it rough.

I managed a little more stitching on my Underwater cross-stitch last night while watching the Twenty-20 cricket. It's starting to be close to being finished! I am really looking forward to finishing it, it's the biggest one I've ever attempted so it's quite and achievement.

Late - but I wanted to share!

This is a very late but as has been said on this blog before things just got hectic. Before Christmas I was lucky enough to win a giveaway. Paper-and-String was giving away three beautiful felt penguins and I was the lucky winner.



This parcel turned up in the letterbox just before Christmas. Inside were the three little penguins in their own little felt box and some other unexpected goodies as well.



Felt ric rac and felt flowers! Wasn't that a lovely surprise. Thanks so much, Sarah from Paper-and-String. The penguins looked right at home on my Christmas tree during the festive season.

The promised pictures

Here they are, the pictures of my lovely mail and stitching.

First, the opening of the package:

This is how it appeared.


And this is what was inside.


The goodies! I can't wait to try them out. Unfortunately there was some strawberry body scrub that leaked on the way and so isn't in the picture.


And this is my progress on my stitching. Quite a bit more than in the last photo!