Functional Felt Swap

Well, yesterday was the deadline for posting our felt out and I made it to the post office 5 minutes before closing time, having stayed up late the night before finishing my pieces off. That's me, always last minute!! I had planned to make a knitting needle case but kept putting it off, I guess my heart wasn't in it - is that how the saying goes, it sounds funny, anyway, at the last minute I was inspired by a lovely Barefoots book I was reading to my Son, and ended up making this little ocean based sewing kit. I had a lot of fun making it so there might be some more in the pipeline.

Pincushion

Tape Measure Holder
Needle Case

Bird Nests

After a flurry of posting regularly I seemed to have slipped back into my old ways again! In my defense I am quite busy trying to make lots of things for the woolfest, without wanting to sound silly, I'm in the creative zone right now. I seem to have an unending supply of ideas at the moment and keep surprising myself with new designs. It makes a nice change from struggling to come up with new designs and relegating prototypes to the recycling basket. That's the beauty of felting, you can recycle it, my recent needle cases and notebooks were made out of a felt scarf I made last year, but was never happy with. Here's a few pictures of some of my latest creations....can you spot the theme?



And here are a few pictures I took at the weekend. My parents have a fantastic garden, so I took the opportunity to practice using my macro lens.

My first award!!

A few weeks ago I had a nice surprise, I was given the Arte y Pico award by ethel and edna, a lovely crafty blog which I've just recently discovered.

The rules read:

1) Pick 5 blogs who deserve this award for their creativity, design, interesting material and who also contribute to the blogging community no matter what language.
2) Each award must have the name of the author and also a link to their blog.
3) Each award winner must show the award and put the name and the link to the blog that has given her or him the award.
4) The award winner and the one who has given the prize must show the link of the “Arte y pico“ blog so everyone will know the origin of this award.
5) Show these rules.

So here's my 5:

1. Sarah at guerilla embroidery

2. Leah at Kneek

3. PG at middle of nowhere

4. Sarah at paper-and-string

5. Anabel at fieltromania

It was very difficult to pick just 5 as I subscribe to 109!!

And just to finish off the post I have some work in progress to show.

Sunshine and Felted Beads

Hurray!!! We've had a whole week of sunshine and it looks like today is going to be another good day. We've had to wait a really long time this year for the weather to hot up, lets hope it stays.

Last Saturday I went to the region 10 members day for the International Feltmakers Association. The theme for the day was jewellery, I had a great time and learnt some new techniques as well as being hugely inspired. Here's some of the work I did on the day,

A flower made from Finn wool.

A giant bead made from Finn wool.

Some interlocking hoops from Finn wool (not sure what I'll do with these yet).

And a bead made from merino wool.

As you can see I was quite taken with the Finn wool, so I ordered some from Piiku, it arrived yesterday, just look at the gorgeous colours!!


And finally, here's some beads which I've been churning out this week....


And here's a cute little bag modeled by my daughter, just before the grass was cut :)