Happy Birthday Jo.

This card doubles as a badge as well.

One of my birthday presents this year was a trip to

Hampton Court Palace Flower Show!

It was very busy, but a lot of fun, my parents and my sisters family came with me. I found there to be a lot of inspiration for future crafty projects as well as garden ideas. I took lots of pictures of the plants I want to have and got some great design ideas. I just need a garden! 

It was a great day out and I would recommend it to everyone. Though it might have been a bit less hectic if we hadn't had gone on the last day, it gets a bit manic in the last half hour when things get reduced. Also the trolleys people have to carry there purchases around are a great idea, we found it easier to carry the children and use the double buggy as our trolley. 

I didn't buy anything despite wanting pretty much everything, I have a lot of plants in my flat, I have a collection of Orchids, a small collection of Cacti and some random pretty house plants and herbs. They are all very much loved but there increasing size along with my philosophy that there's always room for more, means that there is currently a battle going on between my books and plants over space. Considering I am seriously thinking of getting ride of my futon to make space for a loom I am unsure how to proceed! 

humm I guess there is always room for more!

Molly's Birthday

Happy 2nd Birthday Molly. Hope you have a great day.

Silver Earings

On Saturday I made these, soldering the backs on was the trickiest thing, I had to drill holes in the back so that the silver wire would stand up to be soldered. This was scary I thought that it was going to go all the way through and didn't make a big enough hole, meaning that when heating the silver the rods kept falling over. Silly me.

More Textiles!

OK, so here are my final designs from my textile course.

 This is created by painting image maker over a photocopied picture and leaving on fabric for 24hrs. It is a bit stiff where I have pasted to much of the paste on, but other than that it turned out well.

 This is a screen print using the stencils I cut out.

And this is the reverse.

And this one is sponge printing through one of the stencils.

Textiles

This week was the last session of the Introduction to Textiles course. Over the past few weeks I have learnt a number of techniques for printing on to textiles. 

 

We did Marbling

Using glass to print onto paper and fabric.

I then used the last two classes to focus on printing on textiles using this as inspiration,

This is the stained glass in my sisters house, I drew a nice picture of this using my nephews chalk and sugar paper (I will have to start carrying a sketch book and paper with me) to take to my class and then made stencils from card.

I made a positive and negative stencil and experimented with screen printing and sponge painting on to fabric. These were all to wet for me to bring home and so will be in a later post. 

Here I used the stencil with foil and foil glue.

Weaving

It's been a while since my last post, no this does not mean I have stopped doing things. I have just been busy doing things, and not writing about them. Work has been chaotic to say the least and I had good news to, on the work front, which all started within 24hrs of talking about it and know I am a bit stressed. But I did find time to watch Green Lantern and Transformers (priorities!) alongside some craft time.

The Introduction to Weaving course finished this week but I could not attend due to work. Though I never had time to post last weeks activities on this course, so....... we weaved. Well we learnt how to set up a loom, which I'm not entirely sure I can repeat as it's a bit confusing and then we weaved, though we didn' t have much time for this as you can see from my sample.

Hopefully I will be able to do a longer course to really play.