Speed Craft #3

I'm back to telling you about my Sunday at Speed Craft, hosted by Debbie Bryan.  You can read my previous posts here and here.

The third table we went to was called "handcrafted robin".  We had no idea what that might involve and having done it, I'm not sure what I'd call it!  I didn't think to take any process photos, which would have been useful.

We were given a wood blank the shape of the whole robin.  It had holes drilled in it.  The and back are also a wood blank.  The red breast is acrylic.  We simply had to hand stitch the various elements together.

We then glued a piece of leather to the back to hide the messy stitching.  I had some time left at the end so I played with some other small blanks the tutor had for jewellery making, but I can't find them now, I might have left them behind.

This was interesting to do, but it was just like doing a kit as everything was pre-cut.  It would be interesting to make my own, if I were into cutting wood and acrylic that is!  Mind you, I do have a dremel or two...

Next up: Mono printing

Speed Craft #2

If you missed my previous post about Speed Craft, please scroll down.

Our second table was ceramics.  The tutor was Katie Almond who we've taken two classes with before - the first at Debbie Bryan where we made plant pokes and brooches and another in Leicestershire where we made a cake stand.  I collected my cake stand when we went to collect these little bowls, so I must show it to you soon.

I can't believe I managed to make this in just 45 minutes.  Rollling out clay, stamping it to make the impression, stamping and cutting out the letters and painting it all with glaze is a time consuming process!

I'm going to use it on my dressing table to keep my rings in.  The motif is a bit off-centre but that doesn't bother me.  I wish I'd been able to paint the outer ring of motifs, but I just didn't have time.  I stuck to the red/blue/navy combination again!

As you can see, it's just a shallow little bowl, around 4" diameter, so cute!  Once again, I really enjoyed working with the porcelain clay.

Next up: Hand-built robin

Speed Craft #1

A few Sundays ago me and lovely mum went to a fantastic event at Debbie Bryan called SpeedCraft.  It was basically the crafting version of Speed Dating, just with slightly more than 3 minutes per craft.  The room was laid out with 5 tables.  We took our positions at our first table and crafted madly for 45 minutes.  The bell rang and we had to stop, we then had a 15 minute break to get ourselves to the next table, via the coffee pot and toilet.  We went round all 5 tables and tried each craft.

It was brilliant.

We've already signed up for the next one which, unfortunately, isn't until April.

I'm going to take you through our day but I'm going to do it over 5 posts otherwise this post will end up too long and then I'll have nothing to post about for another 2 weeks.

Our first table was origami where we learnt to make these paper stars.

Mine is made from just two colours of paper and book pages.  This was pretty frustrating at first.  It took us the first 25 minutes to get the hang of it, then we had the rest of the points to fold before the time was up!

Here's how it looks from the back.

After the initial confusion, I did enjoy doing this and I love the look of the book paper.  There were inks and stamps available for us to stamp designs on our finished stars, but I decided to leave mine au naturel.

Next up: ceramics.