and the winner is...

Number one, picked by DH, please excuse the photograph, it's late and the number was lost with the flash on. Thank you to everyone who commented, and Crafty Cripple, please e-mail me so I can send out your prize.

Monsterous Bags

Thank you for all your lovely comments, I'll be picking the winner sometime tomorrow. As promised here is a post that doesn't involve pictures of flower brooches. I have been working on a few bags this week. The grey monster is a commissioned piece, and I have to say it's one of my favourites, I just love her big, adorable eyes and cute nose. She is made from Gotland and Merino. The girlie pink monster (Shirley) has gone into the etsy shop, look at her sweet wensleydale locks of hair, I'd love curls like that. The last one has been embellished with a flower which is a slightly different design from my brooches ( I have been spending some time trying out different flower shapes). The flower bag has also been listed in my etsy shop. The pink and lilac bag have both been hand dyed with natural dyes, lac for pink and logwood for purple. I bought all my dyes from DT crafts, they come in a powdered form so they're really easy to use. However, I do have plans create a little dyers garden and am starting to research which plant to get.

Giveaway!!

OK, here it is, my little giveaway to celebrate the International Day of Felt. The theme for this day was the segment of the colour wheel yellow through to red. So I've made a little felted flower from merino wool and dyed it yellow using fustic. For your chance to win just leave a comment and I'll draw the winner at random on Friday the 9th of October.


Oh, and I promise not to show any more flowers for a while, they have rather dominated the blog recently.

Why it's been quiet...

I haven't listed anything new in the shops for a while becasue I've been busy with this lot. Forty flower brooches and ten soap stone are now on their way to Italy, phew! I've now got a couple of custom orders I'm working on then I plan to make a whole batch of products for the shops. I have lots of ideas for a coordinated range using natural dyes which I'm very excited about. I'll be showing sneak peeks on here before they are listed so keep a look out.


Did you know today is the International Day of Felt, our region of the IFA has worked on a project for this event which will be displayed at the IFA stand at The Knitting and Stitching Show in Harrogate.

To celebrate this day of felt I'm going to offer a little give away either today (or tomorrow if I don't get the item finished in time), so please call back soon.

Oh, and one last thing. I am debating whether to sell the instructions to make my flower brooches in a PDF format in my etsy shop, would anyone be interested?

Flowers

More flower brooches which have been dyed with natural dyes, they look so yummy together, can't wait to make more.

Dyeing with Nature

The kids have been back at school for nearly two weeks now. Over the holidays I did very little craft wise, so it took me a while to get back into the swing of felting again, but this week has been much more productive than last week. I have been experimenting with my natural dye kit that I bought from DT craft and design at woolfest. I decided it would be easier to felt items first then dye, rather than dye the wool tops. Here are some of my pieces, which are slowly making their way to etsy and folksy. I love the fact that you're never quite sure how they will turn out, it makes the process much more fun.

Dyed with teal (and some left over logwood)

Dyed with logwood

I did some more flowers today using madder, they have a real autumnal feel to them. As soon as they've finished I'll share them with you.

And here's something I've been meaning to blog about for a while. Do you remember this top I made on Charity Musoma Van der Meer's workshop, well I made a similar one for my daughter in lilac. She wore it to her leaver's disco (she's just moved up to Junior school).

Felt Making Workshop - Felted Vessels

I still have some places left on my felted vessels workshop on Saturday the 15th of August. The workshop runs from 10.30 to 3.30 and is held at Calcutt Village Hall, just outside Knaresborough. The cost of the workshop is £30 which includes all materials, you just need to bring a packed lunch. Here are some examples of the type of work produced...

If you are interested please get in touch with me at fibrespace@gmail.com

Camping in the Cairngorms

Hi Folks, I'm still here, just enjoying summer with my family. We've just got back from camping in the Cairngorms National Park for 10 days!! That's our longest ever camping trip. That part of Scotland is beautifully stunning, I took lots of photographs and am planning to create a body of felting work which is more art than function, something I've not really done before. I can't wait to get started on the sketch book, something I rediscovered whilst on my City and Guilds course. I was always very precious about work that went into my sketch books and consequently they never really flowed, but on the course I just went for it and didn't worry to much about the end result, and it turned out keeping a sketch book can be fun. My 7 year old daughter likes to join in to. We sit together at the dining table with all my materials spread out and experiment with colour, techniques and shape. Here are a few of my holiday snaps...

that's our tent in the left hand corner, with spectacular views of cairngorm in the background.

We made it to the coast one day but it was very windy, so I sat sheltering in the sand dunes taking photos whilst M helped the kids build sandcastles.


This is the lake that's on the edge of the campsite.


We did a lot of walking.



and saw lots of different creatures.


but my favourite bit was feeding the reindeer.