more plastic

I have had a crappy, crappy week.  OK, so Thursday was good as I had a day of work and went to a beading class, but Monday was horrific.  I got a migraine, at work, at 5pm.  There was nothing for it but to drive home.  I've never felt that nauseous with a migraine.  I stopped several times on the way home and really didn't think I'd make it.  I went straight to bed (when I got home, clearly not in the middle of the road) and slept.  I got up the next day and went to work.  Bad move, it came back.  When will I learn?  I suppose when they stop frowning on me for taking time off for migraines...  so many people think a migraine is just a headache.  

But you didn't come here to hear me moan, you came here to hear me waffle on about plastic.  Again.  UTEE was #62 on the great big list.  What's UTEE?  It stands for Ultra Thick Embossing Enamel and is a supply for card makers, you can use it like embossing powder to make raised elements on cards.  I saw at the Hobbycrafts show last year a lady demonstrating using it for cabochons to use for jewellery making.  I bought a couple of tubs.  They sat.

These are the supplies you need - the UTEE itself (it's a couple of quid for a pot), ice cube trays or something similar as moulds, foil pie cases and a heat gun.  You also need something to hold the foil case with as it gets hot.  Simply pour some of the UTEE into the foil case and heat with the heatgun for what feels like about 95 years until it melts, pour into the mould.  It sets AS you are pouring it!

I was aiming for a pebble with a picture in it. I cut a circle of scrapbook paper, melted some UTEE and poured.  I hadn't melted enough.  I melted some more and added it to the set nugget.  That's the left hand image - as you can see, this approach doesn't work as the first bit sets and stands out.  Attempt 2 (centre) involved me not melting enough (you really do need loads!), so reheating the nugget I'd made with some more UTEE.  It goes yellow.  Attempt 3 (right) was the best of the lot, BUT, I'd obviously put it into the mould with some powder (I'd tried to measure the powder in the mould so I melted enough!) and it left that pattern on the surface.  

I was frustrated by this point, and it had taken centuries to get to that point, so I had a go with a butterfly mould and Mother-of-Pearl UTEE, then a heart mould and Silver UTEE.  Much better!  I will be experimenting with this stuff again.  If there's any interest, I could do a tutorial.  Or not, up to you.

I'm linking up to Fiona's New to Me challenge.

Skill Builder Bom - Woven Star

This post is part of the Skill builder BOM, hosted by Pile O Fabric.  .

Remember this?  The cross on a pedestal?

I did this to it...

I have no idea if this is the correct way to fix a block - maybe I should have removed the borders and unpicked each row.  I didn't though.

Much better!

Related posts

Soundwave and Magnum

Em-Dash
The Mood and Woven Star

giveaway win

Not one, not two, but three!

First I won a giveaway over at live. create.  I won a gorgeous quilt pattern by Casey York Designs.    

Then I won the monthly link-up giveaway at Quiet Play.

And then I was one of The Village Haberdashery's CAB winners for the month.

Is my luck turning again?  I hope so, I seriously need some cheering up right now.

friendly plastic

Ladies and gentlemen, we have another entry for the Craft Book Challenge on Ange's blog.  The book is Fun With Friendly Plastic - Suzanne McNeill and involves... yes, you've guessed it, Friendly Plastic, also known as #46 on the mahoosive list!

I have often seen this medium demonstrated at the craft shows we go to, and back in November, at Harrogate, both me and mum bit the bullet and bought a little starter kit.

It involves a Teflon mat (the black thing), some pieces of a special kind of plastic (on the right), some sequin waste (bottom right) and a comb (top left).  You also need a heat gun, which I already had.

Basically, you cut strips of the plastic and line them up.  They are heated with the heatgun until the plastic becomes soft, you can then mesh them together and draw patterns using the comb tool.  My first attempt was a black and silver chevron. I love this effect and think it will be perfect on a card for a man.

Next I heated a single colour of plastic and drew a design with the comb, before punching out a shape with standard biscuit cutters (yep, my biscuit cutters have been seeing a lot of use recently, not for biscuits though!).  I like the effect, but I'm not sure about the colour!

A different approach is to heat the plastic whilst it sits on tin foil (did you know you can cut yourself badly on tin foil?  Unfortunately I do, it bloody hurts!), cover with sequin waste and push a cutter into it.  Turn the whole thing over and push from behind. When it's cooled down you take the cutter off.  It doesn't cut through the sequin waste so you have to snip with scissors.  Again, I like the effect but not the colours so much.  The problem was that I bought a beginner's pack which meant I didn't get to choose the colours myself.

Finally I tried another project from the book.  Four triangles of plastic sitting together are heated, then you use the comb to make a spiral.  It didn't look great, so I then did some more lines on it.  You can cut it square after this, but I like the sticky out bits so this has become a brooch.  

I enjoyed playing with this medium and I will finish up the plastic I've got, but I'm not sure if I'll continue much with it, I suppose I need to experiment more and see what else I can do.

I'm linking up to the Craft Book Challenge on Ange's blog 

I'm also linking up to Fiona's New to Me challenge.

hardanger SAL #1

I'm afraid that along with my lack of on-line time comes a lack of unimaginative blog post titles!  It does what it says on the tin though, this is my first post on my progress for Mabel Figworthy's Fancies Song of the Weather SAL.

For those of you unfamiliar with it, this needlework technique is called Hardanger.  This Wikipedia entry explains it all and you can find some free patterns on the internet by searching, or check out my Pinterest board.  For those who don't want to click, Hardanger is a counted thread embroidery technique, using kloster block and surface embroidery.  It also includes cut work and needle weaving and it's great fun.

I found Mabel Figworthy's Fancies Song of the Weather SAL in March, but you can start anytime and at just £3 for the whole year, it's unbelievable value!  I started January's block with every intention of taking a photo after each session.  Here's session one.

In this section I've used Perle 5 thread.   The white zig-zaggy line is made up of kloster blocks - sets of 5 satin stitches in parallel holes.  The tulips and star are all made with satin stitches, but as it's counted fabric, they look perfectly neat and symmetrical.

The end of session two actually saw me finish this as it's a pretty quick stitch, there is no cutwork in this one. If you look closely (sorry, no idea why I didn't take a close-up pic) inside the white kloster blocks, you can see a small herringbone designs, this was worked in Perle 8 thread, as were the daisies.  I struggled with the daisies - the centres are colonial knots which I'd never worked before and my petal placement doesn't work.  I may take them out and start again at some point.

And then I completely stopped taking photos of each session!  This is February's block.  This time we did cut within the kloster blocks.  I accidentally cut one thread too many, but when I needlewove the bars (alert - made up word!), the loose thread was enclosed and you can't see it.  The little patterns inside the blocks are called Dove's Eyes and I need more practise to get them neat!  The blue stitching is beaded stitch, which contains no beads, but there are beads between the lines of stitching.  I added the 2 blocks and fan in each corner, I'm planning on making 2 pieces each 2 columns by 3 rows and all the other blocks are squares so I felt this needed "squaring" to make it fit with the others.

I then started block 3 but only got as far as most of the kloster blocks.  The dirty marks you see are made by my Frixon pen so I knew where to stitch.  I'm keeping a 20 thread border between each block and will add a pattern in at the end.  I've been looking through my books to find something suitable, but I won't be able to start until June when the last block of this set is released, so plenty of time!

I'm working them all in white and shades of blue.  I had to go with Anchor thread as I need Perle 5, Perle 8 and stranded cotton in each colour.  I have 5 different shades of blue and I'll scatter them about so hopefully they'll look nice!

If you like cross stitch or embroidery, I'd really recommend Hardanger, the cutting really isn't that scary at all!

On a non-related post, I just spell checked this post and it always amazes me that the spell check on Blogger doesn't recognise the words "blog" or "internet"...?

extruding

I know my polymer clay posts aren't very popular, but even if no one reads, I'd like to have a record for myself.  Feel free to skip ladies, I don't mind.  BUT, before you do, please note this is #42. Extruding clay on the ginormous list.  I'd also like to thank you for your comments on my post on Saturday, it's nice to know you're not all going to hate me if I don't get back to your comments!  I hope I didn't come across as self-pitying, that wasn't my intention, I just wanted to explain.

I found the most amazing tutorial on The Crafty Network for using an extruder and I had to put it to the test.  If you play with clay at all, go and check it out.

You start by extruding the canes, here's what mine look like.  This was actually all one cane, but it looks different everywhere you slice it.  Layer them up on some scrap clay, roll over to neaten and smooth the edges, cover with cling film and cut out with a biscuit cutter and...

Ta-dah!  How amazing is that! (if I do say so myself...).  This one was made with just red, orange and white.  It was time for a rainbow.

Here are my rainbow canes, looks like the two on the left show the ends of the cane where I cut it, so no difference there, but look at the differences you get!

This time I squidged some clay into one of my moulds (made by casting a glass heart necklace I have but didn't make), then added the slices.  The effect is not quite so good... I've since bought some heart shaped cutters.

I'd only used half the rainbow of clay colours I'd conditioned and rolled, so I put them together again, this time in chunks of three colours.

I made another flower shape.  These were destined to become brooches, and no, they're not on my procrastinating pile, I've actually glued the brooch backs on already! 

A not-quite square one. There's a name for this shape... is it a parallelogram?  You can see I've used bits of all three sets of canes in this one, and I didn't smooth down much so it has a "stepped" texture on the front.

9 assorted slices added to a square of grey, this one became a bead and has a hole through the top corner so it will hang as a diamond.

Another heart, this time with the mixed canes.  I had a lot of the red/orange one left!

Next I made a black, white and silver extruded cane and used a sunburst shaped cutter and a teardrop shaped cutter.  The sun has one hole front to back at the top, and three at the bottom, each teardrop has a hole at the top so I can join them together to make either a pendent or a brooch.  This IS still on my procrastination pile!

I experimented with running the millefiori sheet through the pasta machine and got these stretched-looking shapes.  I made holes in them all so I can decide which to use later on.

I LOVED this technique and will be doing some more of it, next weekend probably!

I'm linking up to Fiona's New to Me challenge.

I'm sure I used to find sewing fun...

This is #49 lunch bag on the gargantuan list.  Just wanted to get that in before I forget!

I've been meaning to make myself a lunch bag for ages.  I've been using a shop-bought one that is fine, but has gone quite manky and has a persistent, lingering smell that I can't seem to get rid of - and yes, I do clean it out regularly!  I couldn't make just any old bag as I need to use ice blocks from the freezer with it.  It gets pretty warm in our office and there's not much worse than a warm yogurt for your mid-afternoon snack!

Then I came across this tutorial by Clover and Violet and I was away.  Now, this item was on my list under "projects I have supplies for".  I'm not entirely sure what I meant by this, unless it was because I had some of the heat-keeping-in wadding stuff.  I can't remember what it's called!  Supplies were needed and I found myself shopping... I needed some Lamifix (which I bought from e-bay) and somehow or other, I found myself at Hulu Crafts buying this charm pack of Noteworthy and two FQs from the same line!

This is where not having an LQS and not seeing fabrics in the flesh proves a problem.  Yes, the two FQs are from the same line so they do co-ordinate, but most of the fabrics have the orange or green in them...

I started with some simple patchwork - a high percentage of those points meet... though not all of them!  Then it was time to FMQ so out came the curved basting pins.  What a difference they make!  Why did I get by with ordinary safety pins before??  Having never really FMQ'd before, I dug out some scrap fabric and added some of the heat-keeping-in wadding (that's such a catchy name for it- if another supplier starts making it and wants to use that name, I'd be happy to sell it).

It wasn't until afterwards that I remembered I was saving that fabric to make Ange the pair of HK knickers she'd begged me for!  Sorry Ange...

The trial was successful, so I moved onto the real thing.  I LOVE it!  It was such good fun!  I do need to remember to stop for a pause with the needle down though - see that little stitch/line type thing above, in the middle?

I just did a random design - is this called meandering?  It's a lot tighter towards the end than the beginning, but I am SO chuffed with it.  (Speaking of being chuffed - my horse came in second on the Grand National.  I don't actually own the horse but I did pick him on the sweepstakes at work so he's earned me about a fiver!  Oh and yes, I'm actually writing this post "live".  The rest of the week's will be scheduled though, so don't hate me!).

Here it is from the back - no backing fabric as the bag will be lined.

Next came fusing the Lamifix to the lining fabric.  What a mess!  It looks dreadful!  I'd ironed the fabric, but the Lamifix had been folded for posting to me and obviously I couldn't iron the creases out.  I'd think twice before using this stuff again, but for a lunch bag lining, it doesn't seem to matter so much.

And here's the finished bag.  I completely forgot to put interfacing in the handles, so they're quite weak but I don't tend to have bricks or lumps of concrete for lunch, so they should hold up.

I also made the handles longer than the tutorial said so I can put it on my shoulder if necessary.

See the horrendous, creased lining??  Edited to add:  I do know that you sew a lining slightly smaller than the bag, and I have done. It's horrendous and creased due to the lamifix (see above).

Zip ends = disaster.  Absolute disaster.  There were just so many layers.

But, it's done.  So where does the title come in?  I hated every single minute of sewing this damn thing, after the FMQing.  I have no idea WHY, nothing in particular went wrong, I was just hating it.  I think that's part of the reason I'm staying away from my machine this weekend - though I may be tempted to FMQ my Skill Builder blocks... finally!

Edited to add: I do like the lunch bag, I like the finished product, I didn't enjoy sewing it.

This is my first time doing free motion quilting (other than on a coaster!) so I'm linking up to Fiona's New to Me challenge.