This WILL be the week

I get the table back tomorrow, the whole dining room in fact. So I shall be able to get on and do something.

I have added a couple of things to the make list -  the first is not quite straight line sewing but something I have done a lot of before:

• Rain hats and summer hats - I think I have some material for both and the pattern is a doddle!
• Door hanging organiser - old jeans and more of those squares of material samples I Freegled. This may be my first make, I need more space to shove things away
• Roving organiser - like those bags for bottles of wine, but smaller, for felting wools and the other needle felting bitses and pieces - should stretch my ability to sew straight and make pockets! 
• Some kind of jewellery organiser - for the broken beads and bits I am collecting. Clear pockets??? Or shall I just buy a tower of drawers?? I may continue with the organiser theme - one for each type of 'thing' in my ever growing stash!
• Any bits of leftover material will be cut into petals and sewn into flowers - little teeny ones for page markers to be glued to strips of fused plastic bags
• Book ends - no not sewn ones. Old exercise video cases glued to old DVDs to make bright book ends for my desk at work

My camera is charged and I am ready to go - tomorrow when I get back from work!

The door organiser will have to be 3 or 4 pockets wide. Tab topped to hang off some dowling or a curtain pole. On one side there will be some belt loops for hanging scissors through. The bottom could have a couple of loops with poppers, to hang separate pockets/bags of makes in progress.

I can almost see it now! I will have to draw it up and start collecting the materials for it! Not forgetting heavy duty needles and thread for the machine!

W/B 20th January: things to do

I am getting properly sorted now. OH has gone back to work so I have the kitchen table back!

My resolution for the week is to get my ideas book out and to go through my material stash and designate a project for each piece.

I need to stay neat and tidy so I must be ruthless. I will Freegle anything I don't immediately like! Honest!!

I also have to make a couple of trips down into the cellar! We had a tidy and threw a lot of stuff down there. The idea was that if we didn't miss it we would get rid of it. Unfortunately someone got carried away and just put everything down there. So my brand new, never been opened bag of brooch backs is down there somewhere - and I need them NOW! It's just as well he works away!

I want to be sorted before I start car booting again. I need to reduce the impulse buys and go with more of an idea of what I want to buy/make. I now know my sewing skills are sadly diminished so I will be looking at straight line projects like these:

• Plastic bag holders: easy tubes with elastic at each end (French seams hopefully)
• Square bags with some decoration: buttons, needle felt or a photo (I have never even opened the clever paper I bought)
• Girls skirts into bags: linings with and without pocketses
• Skirts into pinnies: well, the idea seems simple in my head!
• Jumpers into scarflet, wrist warmer, hat sets (well I do already have the pattern sketched out!)
• draft excluders: but I'd need to think about the stuffing!

I think that'll do for now....
So, the camera is on charge and I have tidied the table..... tomorrow night I shall start sorting!

Unless of course work gets in the way! I do have a bit of marking left to finish - oops!

Little Blue tutorial

I thought I would add a bit more detail to my first attempt at a tutorial (below). Forgive the awful piccies, it was quite late evening and I don't have clever lighting!

The equipment you need for needle felting is not really very exclusive. You must have the proper needles and after that everything else is down to your imagination. I was given needles and the brush thing and bought some roving from a well known hobby store because that's the first place I saw some in the flesh.

The needle pen carries three needles. The bristles on the brush are nylon. I have seen some dog/cat grooming brushes that could easily be used instead. This one is the bigger of the two commercialy available ones I have seen. The cookie cutter is just one possibility for templates for flat felting. Since I started thinking about this I have wandered round the house looking..... loads of things could be used!

Cardboard cut outs are next on my list. I will be re-using cardboards boxes to make some new templates. I will draw or glue shapes on and then cut around them - another tutue in the making! The only other material you need is the wool roving or tops. I think you can get synthetic versions too, but I haven't tried any yet.

Place your template on the brush and some roving into the shape and then simply start to stab!

Don't stab too deeply as this means you push the roving further down into the bristles of the brush. But don't worry if you don't get this bit right, as it just means you have more tidying to do in the next stage.

When you have stabbed one side and  are happy with the results, take off the template - looks sad doesn't it? Peel off the shape, turn it over and pop it back into the template and start stabbing again!

Repeat the turn until you are happy. I also stabbed into the edges to tighten them up. Take the shape out of the template and carefully stab into the edge. In the picture on the left you can see the left hand side is tighter than the right. I then removed two of the needles from the needle pen and added some detail. A darker blue for the centre of the flower and some yellow for two stamens. I pulled out an extremely small amount of yellow roving, twisted it and then used the single needle to stab it into the flower shape. 

I have read that you can give flat work a neater finish by spritzing with water and then ironing it. I might try that with the next make! 

How lucky am I?

First I get a logo made for me by Sarah of Dragonfly-Jersey It started off with someone else posting on Craft Forum about logos and look what  got? I think Sarah's talents are amazing. She insists it is just for fun - she makes jewellery really!

And then I win a beautiful set of jewellery courtesy of Kat at With U in Mind The jewellery is really pretty and she has promised a little surprise too. Obviously I shall put up photos when the parcel arrives.

I hope my year continues to be so lucky! Somehow I think 2012 is going to be a goody'un.

Thank you to both Sarah and Kat.

First make of the year

Happy New Year to you all!

I got quite excited yesterday and decided to try to make something with a little bit of 3Dness. So I grabbed one of the hooks I use to hang the ratties hammocks to use as a shape...

I started to stab some roving into it

They look much less clunky than the one I made yesterday. I like the way they look quite fragile, you can see through them in some places.

Then I simply stabbed it together, I left the tail ends almost completely un-needled on each petal. I also needled some of the petals together a little to give it a slightly cupped shape.

Now I need to shuffle through my box of bits and see if I can find a bead or a button for the centre (possibly) and to decide how I will finish it - hair slide or brooch or save it until I can think of something else.

This is fun. It took 2 1/2 Judge Judys to find the bits, think about it, make and photograph it. So I doubt I could make a living doing this, but it is fun and feels creative(ish).