Time for a Happy Dance!!

You know what that means! Warning: This is a picture-heavy post!



Uh huh! The Spring girl is finished, the lucky last in the whole set. Here they all are together:



Don't they look good all together like that. I haven't worked out yet exactly how I'm going to put them together, or what they will actually end up being, but that's ok, there's no rush. There's plenty of fabric around the edges of each girl so I have plenty of room to move. Of course, I immediately moved on to something else, and finished it too! (ok so that's because I finished the Spring girl a little while ago, but hadn't taken any photos yet but shhh, no-one needs to know that!) So here is a cute May Gibbs bookmark front and back:



It is based on her famous book Snugglepot and Cuddlepie. Crafty Things had the kit sitting around for years, so I ended up stitching it instead.

And yes, I have the next one all ready to go :-)


In between doing those cross-stitch projects I made these from a pattern produced at my local-ish quilt shop.



Meet "Moggy" and "Sproggy". (No I didn't think of those names, they were on the pattern. Wish I did though!) They are not very big and only took me a weekend to make. Plus I did them all myself, no help needed :-) My machine-sewing skills are improving slowly!


So until next time, off I go to do some proper work.

Drawing Day 2009

Calling all those who love to draw. Why not participate in Drawing Day 2009 by creating a drawing on June 6th and uploading it to flickr, your blog or one of the other particpating sites. Check out the information on the Drawing Day site.

Playing with Inkscape

Crafty Things has been playing with a new little computer program called Inkscape. It is a vector drawing program. She made me a tag for my blog posts.


Ta Da!

Cute or what?

I am really enjoying my Art & Fashion class. First was my book and next is this gorgeous fellow.



Everyone in the class has an opportunity to make a softy. The teacher has a copy of the book, Softies that most people use patterns from to make theirs. Because I've made a few softies before, had a little experience so to speak, I took the chance to design my own. That's right I made this fat little penguin up out of my head! I drew a picture of what I wanted him to look like and tried to make pattern pieces that resembled that picture, and on the whole it worked! He is made from felt, with buttons for eyes, and the main body shape is made with a square base and four leaf-shaped pieces with squared ends to give him lots of roundness. He's only about 20cms tall and has toy-pellets in the bottom to stop him falling over.

I'm so pleased with him and got lots of comments from my classmates who all wanting to take him home with them.

In other news, Spring Girl is finished! All four seasons are now done! Hopefully I'll have some decent photos to show you soon. Today is all grey and no good for photos.

Mother's Day Crafting

Now that Mother's Day is done and at last my own Mother's Day present has been given to my wonderful MUM!!!! I can share some of what I have been busy with. This year I have been lucky to be working with a couple of classes of children and so the same Mother's Day gift was created by both classes ( all up I think about 55 were made). I got the initial idea from an art idea at this site. One of the posts on this site created a little wooden frame from wooden tongue depressors.

I modified the frame and added two pegs to the bottom to change the frame into a note hanger.

This one became the prototype for trialling art materials to add the wording. As per usual I forgot to get a photo of one of the finished products from all those that were made.

There are two different sizes of sticks used -two larger waxing stick are at the back and this meant that there was plenty of space to drill two holes for the hanger. My Fiskars drill came in quite handy for this. Over the two larger sticks eight smaller waxing sticks or tongue depressors (the name depends a bit on where you buy them from) are glued on and then some black gesso was put on by masking an area off. Lastly came the pegs and decorating.



Pony beads and cotton were used for the hangers. Little punched flowers and buttons were added for decoration. One of the classes punched and dyed all of the flowers. In the end we used opaque white paint pens and soft coloured pencils to add the wording. In the prototype photo I trialled coloured pencils, crayons and white drawing pencils.

On to the knitting status. I have finished one more neck warmer and have two almost finished. The finished one was made with some lovely purple wool and given to my Mum as part of her present - the other part was a "Mum's Notes" board.

Shop Update

Ok, the first set of luggage tags are now for sale in our Madeit shop!



This pair is pocketless, since we're still figuring out how to make the card stay in the pocket.


So easy to use, you just thread the hairband through the zipper pull and loop it over the tag! Simple, but effective!

Now I'm off to the couch to cross-stitch with Marley & Me, and nurse the rotten head cold I've picked up.