craft

Fun with felt at home education group

7th January 2016 by Jax Blunt 4 Comments

First meet of the year, a workshop run by a felting expert. Now, I’m reasonably familiar with felt after my Kentwell experience, but I’m never going to pass up on the chance to work with an expert, and this turned out to be great fun.

Smallest designed a picture, I just love the way the colours and textures of felt interact.

I think she was quite pleased with it :))

Mind, Tigerboy looked pretty pleased with his flower too.

(Green on the outside, colours swirled inside, and some yellow and orange for the middle.)

And then you apply water, soap and pressure. The picture stays flat, once the flower is felted together, you work it round your thumb to give it form.

Nothing to do with the felting process – just couldn’t resist this shot of light on fibres. Who could?

It was a lovely start to our group home education year. One of my promises to myself at the solstice was to get a bit more involved in our local groups for the sake of the younger children – I want them to have a strong local network like the one we had when the oolder children were young up in Yorkshire. Many of the people we met through our early years education group, locally and nationally, are still our friends now, we are in touch regularly, go to youth hostels and camps together. Yes, I want that all over again 🙂

And on the way home, I picked up fruit and mushrooms from a roadside stall, and stopped for a picture of the big Suffolk skies.

A good day.

How to make a fabric indoor wreath

10th December 2015 by Jax Blunt 2 Comments

I was recently approached by Turtle Mat to take part in a wreath making activity, they were kind enough to send me the materials for the wreath and a catalog of their products. (Do check out their Christmas collection, I’m eyeing up a boot stand as a possible organisational tool to help reclaim the porch.)

I meant to take the wreath with me to Christmas camp, as I knew wreath making was one of the activities in plan for the week, but being incompetent, I left the bag with it and the fabric offcuts at home.

Yes, fabric offcuts. This is not a greenery wreath that I have in mind, though I may do one of those as well over the next few days as we’re fortunate enough to have both the greenery, and the relative who is a skilled florist just down the road. Today’s effort is all about the recycling, in this case, lots of fabric from our reenactment activities over the past year or so. Which means all the fabric I’ve used has special meaning to me, making the wreath even more cherished.

The construction technique is very simple. Take the wreath frame, and, having chopped your fabric up into suitable lengths (thinner fabric will cope with being thicker, thicker fabric needs to be thin, knotting length is about 10 cms) knot it around the frame. Being me, I designed a pattern to eke out the fabric I had least amount of which was the red wool offcuts, and taking advantage of the massive amounts of the thin stuff used in Big’s 1920s dress.

So here you have the makings of the wreath – wire frame, pile of fabric.

Chop fabric up, tie randomly or in pattern around the frame. It helps at this stage if you can find a volunteer who can tie knots – I found a handy teenager, although the 6 year old can tie knots as well now.

Repeat until frame full.

We only did the outer ring – mainly because I horribly underestimated how long it would take to cut up fabric and tie lots and lots of knots (about an hour and a half for what we did in case you’re wondering) and I’m still pondering what to do on the inner. When I work it out I’ll add in another picture 🙂

So, what do you reckon? I’m actually rather proud of it.

Thanks to Turtlemat for the invitation to get involved!

Circle time.

30th September 2015 by Jax Blunt 16 Comments

It will surprise no one who knows me that I’m pretty much making this up on the fly 🙂 (If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, pop back to the first post about creative circles here. I’ll wait.)

What I have in mind is a situation in which we all support each other. The support each person needs/ wants may be different, and that’s something that we’re going to have to be flexible about. What I think we should do first is introduce ourselves and what we’re looking to get out of a creative community. Is it pure support for effort? Are we looking to skill share, learn from each other? Are there targets you want to set for yourself? Or is it more about aspirations and wishlists?

So I think the first thing to do is an introduction and goal setting post or comment. If you want to use your own blog/site/profile to do this that’s fab, and after I sleep I’ll drop a bloghop into this post so that we can all find each other. I’ll use a bloghop rather than a straight linky so that people can travel blog to blog rather than having to come back here. (All a bloghop is is a shared linky – when you join in you get a snippet of code to paste into the post you’re entering, and then the linky list will show up on your post too.)

If you don’t have a blog – maybe you’re going to be using instagram or flickr to share images? – you’re welcome to join in by leaving a link in the comments 🙂

The sort of thing I have in mind is this:

I’m Jax. (Yes, I know you know that.) I’ve been writing fiction since I was in my teens, but I’ve never had anything published. My long term goal is to change that 🙂 My intermediate target is to have a finished manuscript that I’m pitching out by this time next year, and I’m going to try to use nanowrimo to kick the writing off. I’m probably going to need constructive criticism and virtual biscuits, and kicking off twitter every now and then.

Alongside the writing is my drawing. I want to get into a habit of creativity, and to stop worrying about it being perfect, or always better, and get on with just doing. I took part in a great sketchalong challenge with a couple of friends, but life got in the way and I just kind of stopped. I want encouragement to keep it going.

And finally, actually making stuff. I’ve been saying for two years I want a new reenactment outfit – that has to actually happen. And I’ve a stack of unfinished objects of the crochet variety that I’d like to get finished.

So there you go, that’s my bigger picture. Looking forward to hearing yours. When we’ve got an idea about what everyone wants out of this, then we’ll work out how it works. I have a whole bunch of ideas, from joining in with creative events, to encouraging each other to submit work, being beta readers, and maybe even sharing actual real life bits of art or craft.

Still up for it?

Opening a creative circle

27th September 2015 by Jax Blunt 20 Comments

I have written stories for as long as I can remember.

I’ve never joined a writer’s group.

I’ve started drawing and painting and general art. But I’m not sure about the local art club.

And there’s knitting and sewing and crochet and spinning, costume to make and felt to, well, felt.

Creativity is something that gives me great pleasure, but I have a habit of losing focus.

At the back of my mind is this idea that if I could create a creative community around myself I could give and receive support and direction. Perhaps I could take a story from first idea to novel. Maybe I could illustrate a picture book.

(There was a self taught artist who has only been painting for two years shared on instagram’s own account today. There is no limit to where we can reach if we let our dreams lift us. )

So I have this idea that we could build a creative circle. Share our goals. Set challenges. (I have some ideas) Offer encouragement, gentle constructive criticism and support. Anyone fancy joining in? Please comment if so. And feel free to share. You don’t need to have a blog to join, just some way of sharing your work, be it photos or whatever really.

Hoping there are a few of you that think this sounds like a good idea!

Getting creative with insurance savings from Cavendish online.

1st June 2015 by Jax Blunt Leave a Comment

Do you have life insurance?

I don’t. I did, once upon a time, when I worked for a bank. It kind of came with the package. But that lapsed a while back, and one of the reasons I’ve never got organised again is because of the cost. But recently I was approached by Cavendish online to undertake an insurance based challenge. They asked me to compare and contrast the costs of life insurance found via their price comparison website, Cavendish Online with the meerkat fronted Compare the Market.com.

The results were enlightening. I compared two policies for £180,000 over 18 years (all children through university, we hope!) and with the policies located by Cavendish Online, I’d save £2.63 a month. Over the course of the policy, that’s around £568. Not bad eh?

As Cavendish don’t spend money on funky mascots, and that’s part of why they’re cheaper (every time they say, although obviously I can’t confirm that!) they suggested that I might like to use some of the savings in creating our own mascot. So with £10 splashed out on craft materials we got creative.

First of all, design. We had a few ideas, so I sketched them out.

You won’t be surprised to hear that Smallest chose the flower 🙂 She called it Power Flower – she was quite taken with the whole mascot design process.

Then we used a mix of chenille and ordinary pipe cleaners, and some fleece for felting.

Needle felting is a surprisingly relaxing pastime. It’s quite therapeutic continually stabbing a ridiculously sharp and jagged needle into soft felt 😉 You’ll want to be very careful when needle felting around small children – Smallest has tried it before under close supervision and done very well, but not on this kind of free form design. When we did it before we basically stuffed felt into cookie cutters and then stabbed the felt within it, which keeps little fingers out of the way. Felting a face onto a flower though is a bit more fiddly and I didn’t have any guides, so I did this bit myself.

What do you reckon, did I do a good job?

Of course, Smallest didn’t want to give up her flower, so we had to make another one. I haven’t quite finished the second face yet, but it’s coming along nicely so far.

So here’s Power Flower and her buddy in the garden, best place for flowers after all.

Thanks to Cavendish Online for the suggestion – it was a really fun craft activity. And food for thought on the insurance policy as well.

Disclosure – this is a sponsored post.

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