Christmas Robin

There’s nothing like the happy anticipation of opening a new craft kit with it’s colourful materials waiting to be created into the picture on the packet, the needlefelt robin kit Sarah bought me for Christmas was no exception.   The kit contained a polystyrene robin form, soft felting wools and two sharp, barbed felting needles.

The contents of the kit

The process of stabbing the wool into the polystyrene form was relatively simple and I started with the orange wool for the breast.  In no time the bird was sporting a rather dashing moustache.

The makings of a flourishing moustache

It was satisfying to see the wool working up into a felt cover over the polystyrene and I quite quickly gave the robin his red breast and cream underwear.

The red breast is complete and the cream wool has been blended over the top and down to his tail.

A layer of brown covered the robin’s face and went over his back to his tail.  I might have been a bit energetic in the tail region, I could feel the polystyrene disintegrating under it’s felt covering.  Black wool was used to create a beak which was a bit fiddly but the eyes were straight forward and so the robin was completed.

The completed robin, according to the pack instructions.

As there was a generous amount of wool in the pack I thought I’d have a go at making something else but I would need something to support the wool while I created the felt.  Boyes had some needle-felting equipment including a brush-like base but at £10.35 the Barnsley War Cry went up.  Luckily Boyes also has a household department and a scrubbing brush for £1 would be ideal.  So having saved on the base I went back to look at the wools and picked a pack of gorgeous reds.

The cheap scrubbing brush and a selection of red wool from Boyes.

Against the vibrant reds the little robin looked a bit dull so I brightened up his red breast.  I thought he needed something else on his back so looked through my bits and bobs and found a mixed bag of wools which contained a long strand of felting wool in variegated brown.  I hadn’t even realised this was felting wool so it was a lucky find.  Thin strands of the brown wool were applied over the beige areas giving the robin some extra colour.

Perched on Kev's hand to show off his new colours.

The pack didn’t contain anything for legs and feet but I couldn’t leave him without them.  I shaped a pipe cleaner into a pair of legs and shaped 2 smaller pieces into v shapes which I stuck on for toes.  By now I had got the bug and had been watching youtube videos so I had seen how the wool can be wound round the pipe-cleaners to cover them.  This was rather more fiddly than it appeared but eventually I had a leg and toes all covered in orange wool.  At that point Mr Berry piped up – he thought it would look better in yellow.  I didn’t have any yellow but that was the least of the poor robin’s problems; the covering of felt had made a giant foot which was pointing sideways. 

The robin with that big foot.

Luckily the foot wasn’t yet attached so I could try a different technique.  Firstly I snipped through the pipe-cleaner to separate the legs, I hadn’t decided how to attach them to the body so that wasn’t a problem.  To reduce the bulk I gave the pipe-cleaner leg a shave.

The shaved leg and big foot strike a pose.

Then using less felt and a dab of glue I covered the leg for a better result.

The scrubbing brush has many uses and here it enables the thin and thick legs to stand on their own foot.  The thin leg is in much better proportion to the robin.

I had by now studied some techniques on youtube and chose the method of adding some cream wool to the top of the leg – again a dab of glue helped here – so the cream wool could then be felted into the robins under-carriage.

Adding the cream wool to the leg so it could be attached to the robin.

The robin has ended up with a pair of chickens legs but I think he looks better for them and if he doesn’t mind perching against something he can stand up on his own. 

The completed robin - thanks Sar. 

A Patch of Winter

Small, quirky houses is a theme I love to return to. They make great repeating patterns, while differing slightly in shape, colour and design, and have the added fun of wondering who might live inside them. A little village of autumn houses has been hanging on my kitchen wall for a couple of years, sewn in appliqued felt onto a bit of abandoned patchwork, with buttons and beads to make the gardens. If you look closely enough, there are some tiny cat buttons frisking among the flowers.

The autumn patchwork with added cats.

Recently, I found yet another bit of abandoned patchwork and decided it was time for a seasonal update. Winter was on its way.

Part of the appeal of houses is that they are such simple shapes to cut out, - just rectangles and triangles which are easy to vary in size. I used cotton in pale blues and greys so they would stand out against the dark blue patchwork and sewed them on with running stitch close to the edge. A very fine embroidery needle prevented too much fraying.

Basic houses, ready to sew.

The fun part is customising all the houses. I raided my box of fancy scraps - lace, ribbon, net, velvet, satin, sparkles and silk-  and lovingly cut out tiny doors, windows and trimmings for the roof. Once again, the invisible thread earned its keep to hold them all in place. I couched silver thread around some of the doorways to add a bit of definition, and sewed bead knockers onto the doors. 

Adding trimmings to the houses

It was at this point that I wished I had put a snowy landscape behind the houses. Undoing all the sewing to add one in didn't seem like any fun at all, so I painstakingly sewed bits of sheer fabric between each house, trimming to fit as I went. After that, I added the triangle trees, which were made from felt or fleece. I embroidered the plain white felt with tree-ish patterns before cutting out the triangles, which made it much easier to embroider right up to the edge. To finish off, I couched on strands of loosely-spun white wool for the snowy ground, and sprinkled on iridescent snowflakes. The outer squares of the patchwork were turned over to make a border. 

So autumn has passed and winter now reigns on the kitchen wall. I was pleased with the mixture of different textures and patterns, and sticking strictly to the blue and white colour scheme has given a good wintry effect. Sadly, I didn't have any white cat buttons to play in the snow. I imagine they are inside their houses, curled up in front of the fire. 

The finished winter picture

Happy New Year

After a December dedicated to camel costumes and Christmas sparkle, it was a bit of a relief to sew something plain and simple. At work, our clunky old laptops have been replaced with new, sleek devices, which are thankfully lighter to carry and have batteries that work for more than 5 minutes. Mine clearly deserved a snazzy case to protect it on the daily hike to and from school. Off to the fabric drawer!

There are always leftovers from a quilt project, so I used up fabric squares cut for Jo's quilt, mixed in with some of the beautiful batiks that Deb and I bought in Birmingham. To save the long-winded job of measuring and cutting out templates, I reused paper triangles which have been lounging in an old ice cream tub for about ten years. Good job I'm a hoarder! On New Year's Eve, I set myself the challenge of getting all the bits sewn by midnight, and took a start photo to get myself going. 

Laid out and ready to sew (cup of tea on hand), New Year's Eve 2017

That proved a bit optimistic! After chatting with everyone on phone and skype, doing the last washing up of the year, and watching the neighbours' fireworks, I only had about half the pieces joined, but ploughed on to finish it on New Year's Day. A piece of bright blue fleece (leftover from a puppet project) doubled as wadding and lining, and I machine quilted along the seams, following the patterns - a zigzag on one side, and diamonds on the other. 

Machine quilting "in the ditch" follows the seam lines.

Binding wide enough to give a good lip and something to grip on proved hard to find - even Boyes let me down. In the end I folded a long piece of blue material (left over from a shoulder bag project) and machined it on. Now my device can be safely tucked away and the cover adds a splodge of brightness to these grey January days. It's amazing what you can do with leftovers.

Tucked up and ready to go to work.

Fiddling and Felting

Christmas is the perfect occasion to make little bits of inconsequence and sell them off at the School Fair. A crowd of tinselly owls has gathered on my dining room table over the past month, and now they have been joined by elves, robins, snowmen, gingerbread men and santas. I have taken my life in my hands and been at work with the viciously barbed felting needles.

The felting needle close up.

 To needle felt, you stab like fury into a mass of wool fibres, hopefully avoiding your fingers. The barbs on the needles catch the wool and matt it together to make a felt surface. In this way, you can sculpt the shapes you want, without having to cut out complicated patterns and sew seams and darts. You can then add small details, with more gentle stabbing, and keep working at the surface until it is as smooth as you want.

Here comes Santa Claus. The wool fibres before I get needling.

The fibres tamed into a ball. This tool contains 4 needles and is good for
 starting a model.

Needle felting is perfect for making Christmas decorations. It is possible to make tiny shapes like a snowman’s carrot nose and attach it without sewing or glue.  It leaves an attractive fuzzy surface, and you can easily add soft wisps of wool for scarves and Santa’s beard. Pompoms can be needled securely into the felt, relieving the need for the dreaded invisible thread.

Santa and one of his elves, watched over by the baleful eye of a tinsel owl.

I had a surplus of polystyrene balls left over from another Grand Project, so I have used these as a base for heads and bodies. The wool is stabbed directly into the polystyrene. The trickiest part of making a character is always the eyes, so I’ve tried out a variety of methods. It’s possible to needle felt in tiny circles of wool, but hard to get a neat result. I also used  pompom eyes and stick-on boggly eyes, but my favourites are tiny round black beads, either sewn or glued on (very fiddly, either way!)

The Christmas Fair is on Friday, so this rather drunken crew will soon be off to their stall. I’ve enjoyed having them sitting around on the table – but let’s hope they don’t suffer the indignity of coming back unsold!

I just had to make a squirrel! This little chap is one inch high, and he will be staying with me.

The Patchwork Background

In the design stage of my holiday quilt I carefully measured the squares which would contain the pictures so they would fit nicely into a patchwork background.  Unfortunately, after the first couple of pictures had been created, I completely forgot about these sizes and so a bit of re-designing was required. 

I started by drawing up squares on paper to tack the pictures in place so they could be worked into a patchwork background.

Tacking the pictures onto their paper squares which were drawn out with the very useful patchwork template Sar gave me during our session at Chesterfield

I then started to make the small blue squares which would represent the narrow canals.

Those blue squares do look very small!

With the help of graph paper I drew up the design around each picture and now I had strayed from my original design I was able to create different spaces around the square which I thought were more interesting.  I marked out the patchwork pieces ready to be cut into templates.

The design on graph paper with each piece numbered and this photo was a useful reference once the template had been cut up.

The process seemed easy in theory and I gaily cut out the templates, tacked my fabric to them and started sewing them in place.  But it soon became apparent I had missed an important point, the squares didn’t fit accurately together due to the thickness of the fabric which I hadn’t taken into account.

The bottom of the dark green square should have fitted flush with the bottom of the cygnet square

It took a bit of fiddling to reduce some of the templates so all the pieces fitted snugly together.

The cygnet surrounded by green countryside

The next pictures were given a surrounding in a similar way but I used a bit of guesswork to trim down the templates so they fitted together.  The lines of small blue squares represent the narrow canals and the wider blue squares are for broad canals. 

Progress so far and the quilt is coming together

As always I'm thinking ahead to the next stage and hopefully it won't be long before I can start adding the finer details to the quilt.  

The Last Three

My three remaining pieces for the holiday quilt were all executed in embroidery but in very different styles.  For the first piece I used the Birmingham Museum's mock up of Staffordshire Hoard ornamentation as the basis for my first design. 

Birmingham Museum's reproductions from the Staffordshire Hoard

I love the intricacy and fine ornamental shapes in the top item but also wanted to incorporate the bright red garnets which featured in so many of the treasures found in the hoard.  My design quickly took shape but the stitching was not so straight forward.  The red bead 'garnets' didn't stand out against my bronze thread and the ornamental shapes in the design would also be lost.  The gold version of this thread wasn't a very attractive colour so after some experimentation on a try-out piece I settled on a bronze outline filled in with variegated yellow to represent the reflections of shiny gold.  The red beads and red sequin eye stand out on the paler background and I was pleased with this interpretation of my design.

My Staffordshire Hoard bird

 On one of our walks we came across a large family of swans, 7 cygnets came across the canal in the hope of being fed but they were out of luck.  I pondered a design of 7 cygnets but even in very basic outline the resulting square would have been out of proportion to the rest of the quilt.  I settled for just one cygnet sewn in long and short stitch in various greys and I have to admit it gave me some trouble.  Luckily the fabric stood some unpicking when I inadvertently used a green-grey on the body and then again in my attempts to complete the bill within the outline.  And after all that I am not really happy with the result so there might well be a rethink and another version of the cygnet at a later date!

The cygnet which may be replaced

I may not have saved the best to last but it certainly was the easiest, a little mouse from the vesta box. 

The mice on the vesta box in the Jewellery Museum

The mice on the box were carved with little detail beyond the outline so I've represented this with a simple outline sewn in stem stitch, my favourite stitch.  The black bead eye was attached with the not so popular invisible thread.  

The little mouse sewn on calico

So now my animal squares are complete my creation moves into it's next stage, the patchwork canal and it will be interesting to see how that works out. 

Tessellations and Tribulations

Deb came for a visit over half term. As we all know, Deb is renowned for her challenges, but this time it was me in the driving seat. At school, we were planning a STEM week (science, technology, engineering and maths), and I had to come up with a tessellation and transformation activity, that would be suitable for all ages and abilities, from suck-it-and-sneeze-on-it 4 year olds to the hard-to-please 11 year olds. My inspiration came from the yellow patchwork quilt hanging in the living room, and the Perfect Pattern game was devised.

Many patchwork patterns derive from right angle triangles, particularly in blocks of 16 squares. I decided to keep it simple for the kids, and made the squares for them, divided into two triangles. Deb was roped in to aid production, and we soon had an efficient system of slicing, gluing and laminating, incidentally introducing Deb to the joy of the rotary cutter.

In full triangle production. Note the healthy snacks!

With a good selection of triangles, we settled down to trying out game rules, and found many ways of making patterns, the aim being to get a pattern with horizontal and vertical symmetry. Of course, just messing about with the pieces was fun too.

Making perfect patterns with the patchwork cards.

The patterned sides of the playing pieces were made from card. Deb and I had a walk down to the great little craft shop in Staveley (Time2Craft) to buy it, and were unaccountably sucked in to the wool section next door, which was full of delights, including colourful tinsel wool. I announced to Deb that a ball would be purchased and transformed into small glittery owls, to sell at the school Christmas Fair. (The school fair is a great excuse to make bits of nonsense without them hanging round to annoy you afterwards.) Back home, we experimented with less demanding wools before trying out the tinsel. Deb producing a sparkly snowman in white, sewing the tiny pompoms onto his face with invisible thread and heroic determination. It turned out to be impossible to crochet the tinsel thread, but it knitted up quite easily and several owls have so far been produced. Unfortunately, the long strands refused to accept pieces glued on, even after holding bits in place till the fingers lost all feeling. Invisible thread to the rescue – whatever did we do without it?

Tinselly owls and Deb's jolly snowman

While Deb was here, we also had a trip to Hobbycraft, and, for the first time, saw a tambour needle for sale. I fancied trying one; after all, how difficult could it be? I spent the afternoon making holes in fabric while the thread languished on the back, refusing to be caught by the tiny hook. Deb retreated to the loft to sort her stuff, suggesting that YouTube was my only hope. I found an instructional video and put it on repeat.  Eventually a wobbly line of chain stitch emerged. The good thing about the tambour needle is that, if you make a mistake, it is very easy to undo. The bad thing is, even if you haven’t made a mistake, it is very easy to undo. In fact, when you have just done a perfect line of evenly spaced chain stitch and you are standing up proudly to show it off,  it is distressingly easy to undo

Never one to give up (especially having spent money on the thing), I have persevered on a test piece, which has turned out rather jazzy, because I tried out every type and thickness of thread I have. It’s good for very fine threads, and also metallic threads that take a lot of punishment when they are constantly pulled through the fabric by needle. My skill level is still firmly at beginner though – there won’t be any chain stitched fripperies at the Christmas Fair this year.

The tambour needle and my wobbly, lumpy, but colourful chain stitch, with a hopeful smiley face drawn in the corner for reasons unknown.