Music Bag

Darling daughter has been ferrying her music between piano lessons, violin lessons and choir in a succession of grotty plastic bags for ages, and they fall apart easily when pointy book corners poke through the plastic! We decided that action was necessary and a couple of weekends ago we spent a pleasant (if cold...) afternoon on the verandah felting this bag.






















I bought an open-weave men's cotton shirt from the Op Shop to use as a base, cutting it into the front, back and handles and - bravely! - deciding NOT to stitch the cotton backing together before felting on the basis that the multiple layers of wool should be enough to hold it in one piece by the time I'd finished... This is typical me: I've not really done any nuno felting before, so I take a quick look at a book or two, assemble the materials and have a go, while vaguely trying to remember all the injunctions about how to lay out seems around a resist that I was taught a couple of years ago.

Anyway, with a bit of effort it seems to have worked! The "seams" are very strong (probably because they've got 4 layers of fleece them plus turn-overs holding the cotton backing together down the sides and along the bottom), the top edges are straight and the wool is properly felted. Daughter and I laid it all out together, which took an hour or so, and then she made the straps while I battled with the bag. We used the bubble-wrap and rolling pin method which saved some time. I then blanket-stitched the top edge in a contrasting colour, using the same embroidery thread to sew on the handles. And last weekend we finished it off by making the lining (complete with pen-holders and an internal pocket!) from some old sari fabric on the sewing machine. Darling daughter chose the lining material, helped to cut out the pattern, stipulated the placement of pockets etc., and sewed it on my machine, and then I hemmed it in place and reinforced where the handles are attached.

Bookbinding with children

A weekend or so ago I fulfilled a promise I made to a friend's children who came to my January craft classes and wanted to do more book making. I said I'd have them over some time to learn how to make a coptic-bound sketchbook, so they came for a sleepover and we spent 7 absolutely intense hours making these books. The children were aged 8, 9 and 10 and they did brilliant work!



























The oldest child is about to go to Switzerland for 6 months to spend time with her grandparents and attend a Swiss school, which will no doubt help her language skills and her self-confidence, so I suggested that we make wrap-around felt covers for the books because I can imagine her particular sketchbook getting damaged in her bag as she travels. We also made pockets in the books and used lots of different sorts of paper (squared paper, graph paper, pastel paper, plain paper and - fortuitously! - some pages taken from an old Swiss calendar showing beautiful photo-landscapes of mountain scenes). One of the girls has a bit of a thing about elephants and she chose a grey felt for her book cover: we used the excess felt to make two ears and a trunk, and I embroidered little eyes, a mouth and a tail on her cover so she has a really unique book!

Back to school

In this climate many kids go to school with their own drink bottle, ready to fill it up with water regularly to avoid dehydration. The best bottles (in my humble opinion!) are made of stainless steel which means that they don't leach nasty phthalates or degrade quickly or sit in landfill sites for a few hundred years! Unfortunately they aren't insulated and usually the necks aren't wide enough to fill with icecubes and you can't put them in the freezer... so what you need is an insulated bottle cover.

First find a wool blazer (I got mine in the second-hand store), then shrink it in a really hot wash to felt the fibres. Then cut both sleeves off and put one inside the other (right side out). Pull the wrist end of each sleeve together and stitch firmly to form a base, then over-sew one top edge over the other top edge to hide the raw edges and create the top of bottle cover. I slipped elastic into the top seam and tightened it a bit: enough to stop the cover slipping off the bottle in darling daughter's school bag but not enough to prevent the bottle being removed for washing. Then I embroidered her name on it.

The end of the week

The children in my craft workshops have worked SOOOOOOO hard this week! I'm particularly impressed with their dedication to learning to knit. Here are the three baby owls who joined Wolly and Bob...

















I'll be teaching again on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday next week and spending the next couple of days plotting new craft activities to keep them amused! Have a great weekend.

Holiday Craft Workshops

This week I've been running children's craft workshops from my studio for the first time. It's Thursday morning so I've done three out of the five days on offer this week, and I'm exhausted but happy! So far six children have been with me this week and we've worked on papermaking, felting and - once our handmade paper was dry - book making.





















A bucket of paper pulp to start! I soaked the shredded paper on Sunday night and on Monday morning the kids helped me blend it up into 'Paper Soup', and then sieve it into 'Paper Porridge'.





















These are my moulds and deckles in A3, A4 and B5 sizes. The kids were great at sharing AND at cleaning up after themselves!





















Ordinary cleaning cloths like these are used between each sheet of wet paper...





















Here we are working outside on the verandah, couching fresh sheets of paper onto wet cloths and layering them up into piles on rectangles of 'felts' (or in this case, cheap carpet!)











































We squeezed the paper piles between boards using clamps. The children had a lot of fun trying to tighten up the clamps!
















We unpacked the clamps and used a rolling pin and a brayer to roll individual sheets of paper up onto the newly-cleaned windows! There were enough windows so that we could have one each plus a spare for the paper I made 'for everyone'
















These are some of the books we made yesterday




















We made simple pamphlet books, tried out Japanese Stab bindings, made a star book from folded coloured papers and a wagon book. The children were much more interested in the process of constructing different kinds of book than actually creating the contents, and were trying to squeeze as many different binding techniques out of me as possible!











































It's been a really interesting learning experience for me, not least because my group this week has been equal numbers of boys and girls, with ages ranging from 5 to 12 so I've had to be flexible enough to teach across a range of ages and skills. Later on today some of the group will be back to learn how to knit. I'll let you know how I go...

Meet Bob! Free knitting tutorial #2

I felt that Wolly needed a companion, so enter Bob! Bob is also simple to make.





















I cast on 16 stitches and knitted a stripe pattern of 3 rows of garter stitch and 1 row of purl until I'd made 7 stripes. Then I swapped to stocking stitch for 6 rows.






















Then I started decreasing at the beginning and end of each knit row until I had 10 stitches left; then I knitted another row and started increasing at the beginning and end of each knit row until I had 16 stitches again. Then I did another 6 rows of stocking stitch and started the 3 knit rows/1 purl row pattern until I'd matched the other side.



















I made Bob up in exactly the same way as Wolly, knitting the same legs for him. I added a cute crest made from some spare 'ends' left over from sewing up Wolly, and although you can't see it, I made a little tail for him in the same way!






















Darling daughter thinks they're really cute so once they've done their birdy duties as examples in my classes this week they'll probably find their way onto her bed, joining her other toys!

Te-wit te-woo! Free knitted owl tutorial!

I was searching for some easy peasy knitting projects suitable for my children's craft classes which - yikes! - start on Monday, and after trawling the internet for a while I realised that I could easily make up my own. So I did. Meet Wolly the Owl (well he needed a name, didn't he? And I used to call owls 'wols' when I was little. So there).

You could adapt this very easily to make it smaller (fewer rows of knitting for very new knitters), and you could adjust yarn thickness and needle size to make it bigger or smaller. And who know what you could do with different yarns, stripes or whatever?





















First, knit a rectangle. I cast on 20 stitches using 8-ply pure wool on 6mm needles. I knitted 18 rows in garter stitch, then 24 rows in stocking stitch and another 18 rows in garter stitch and then cast off knitwise.





















The legs were a hoot (sorry): using a pair of 6mm double-ended needles I cast on 7 stitches in a contrasting colour and knitted 2 rows in garter stitch. I then cast off one stitch at the beginning of each of the next 4 rows to leave 3 stitches on the needle. I then knitted about 3"/7.5cm of i-cord which is very easy: simply knit the three stitches but don't turn the knitting around... just move the right hand needle to your left hand and, bringing the wool around the back, knit three stitches again, trying to pull the wool a bit tighter on the first stitch. Keep doing this and you make a really nifty cord! I've used it many times for ties, cords or knitted string and it's quick and easy.





















I cut out small pieces of scrap felt for the eyes and beak and wings, pinning the wings on so that I would sew them in with the seam. Ditto with the legs. I sewed the eyes on using blanket stitch and just put a few stitches across the middle of the beak before I sewed up the side seams and the bottom seam.





















The only 'complication' with sewing Wolly up was that although I turned him inside out to sew up most of the side seams, I went from bottom to top and for the last 1"/2cm I turned him back the right way in and sewed up his ears from the outside - this simply meant that the seam allowance sticks out rather than being turned in, which makes his ears stick out too.

I stuffed him with some polyester stuffing I had left over from another project but he could easily have been stuffed with fleece.





















I really like his wonky character... and the fact that he took less than 2 hours to make - and I'm not a speedy knitter!