Cake stand, not a cake in sight...

Today I have something unfinished to show you.  What's that?  When do I every show you anything finished?  Well, yes, you're right!  So nothing new today then.

Me and wonderful mum went to a class to work with porcelain clay and make a 2-tier cake stand.

We've taken a class with Katie Almond, the class tutor, before and loved it, so had no hesitation signing up for this one.  I absolutely love Katie's style and you should go and check that link out, even if you have no interest in pottery, it's inspiring for many other crafts.  

Above is a sideways picture (it's round, why did I feel the need to turn my phone round??) of the bottom tier of my cake stand.  I think it's the top.  I used some acrylic stamps which came free with a magazine to stamp the dress-maker's form, the Singer and the tape measures.  I then coloured them with glazes.  The light blue patch on the right hand side is where I rolled a piece of lace into the clay to make a nice texture.  I'm hoping the glaze on that area comes out very pale, I'm kind of wishing I hadn't painted it now.  I made all the buttons round the outside and in the middle and had the idea of making them spotty or stripy as well as solid coloured when I realised how hard it was to paint the sides!

I cut out a small tag shape and some stamped letters which I very carefully painted with a very thin paintbrush.  I have no idea how this will come out!

Here we have the top.  Possibly.  The blue lines are where I impressed an open zip into the clay.  I only painted the tape, leaving the teeth unpainted.  At the bottom is a button jar and some stamped buttons, along with the handmade buttons that I've glazed.  I got the idea of doing the mini bunting from another girl in the class, she was doing big bunting for her tea party themed plates.

We should be getting the finished pieces back any time soon, then I'll put it together and show you how it turned out.  Fingers crossed my painting hasn't ruined it...

kheops bracelet

Another jewellery post about another workshop at The Bead Shop Nottingham!  We had a flurry of classes recently and there were a couple I still hadn't told you about.  As I was away last weekend I had to write these posts in advance as I knew I wouldn't have a chance later to had to go with what photos I had.

This bracelet is made with Kheops beads, I don't know if you remember me showing them to you before when I made a couple of necklaces?  They are paired with size 11/0 seed beads and 4mm crystals in this bracelet.

It's pretty striking, I think.  I also love the closure. One of those bars pulls down onto the other to close it, ingenius!

herringbone bell flowers

If I'm being totally honest, I can't remember when I went to this workshop at The Bead Shop Nottingham to make herringbone stitch bell flowers.  It was within the last month, but I can't remember if it was the same day as the Luna cab, or a different day.  So many workshop, I'm getting confused.

We thought these were lovely when we saw them published on the website advertising the workshops, and we registered straight away.  They're made with size 11/0 seed beads, with pearls as top caps and pearls and crystals on the dangles, though the green one has green seed beads on the dangles as none of the crystals or pearls went very well with the colour.

We had plenty of time in the class and the pattern isn't that difficult, so I set to making one larger flower and two smaller ones (larger and smaller than the red and green ones above).  I'm thinking of making these into a pendent together.  Of course, I need to add some crystals and pearls and finish them off, but I'm going to play around and see if I can get them to sit nicely together.

You know what?  I'm going to write a post about all these FIFFS projects I've got going on. Maybe that will push me to finish them off - most of them have only a few minutes, less than an hour, to get them done!

Making books

A couple of weeks ago, me and wonderful mum had a very crafty weekend.  On the Saturday we did a ceramics course (more about that coming up in a future blog post) in Leicestershire and on Sunday we did book binding in Derbyshire.  We live in Nottinghamshire so are pretty well placed for these things!

The workshop was brilliant!  We had such a good time and I'm so proud of the two books I brought home.  The booklet above (which is upside down, it's clearly Australian), was the first we produced.  It's a very simple booklet made with ordinary copier paper and a thick paper cover.  It's A5.

We made holes through the pages with a bradawl and then tied it up with polyester thread, though you can also use linen thread.  

I need to get me a bradawl and some linen thread as I'd like to make some more of these.

When we'd finished this booklet, I had somewhere to take some notes as we moved on to making a hardback book.  Yes, this is a real-life hardback book.  And I made it!

Books are made from signatures, sets of pages, which are made by folding A3 sheets of cartridge paper and slitting them with a kitchen knife.

We made 8 signature each with 8 leaves.  They are rough cut as we didn't have access to an industrial guillotine, but I like the finish.

Again, holes were made with a bradawl before the signatures are stitched together.  That's a piece of linen tape in the middle, it just helps to add some stability to it.

The cover is made of grey board covered with book cloth, I chose a lovely teal colour for mine.  The covers aren't decorated, but they could be quite easily.

Can you see the little stripy bit below the pages on the spine?  This is called a head band and apparently all hardback books have one.  I had never noticed this before but Mr C had.

I was originally going to use a piece of ribbon as a page marker, but the ribbon I chose was too thick and it wasn't working out so I changed my plan.

I am unbelievably proud of this little A6 book!

Luna cabochon

About a year ago I discovered the most wonderful cabochons in The Bead Shop Nottingham.  I bought a couple just because I loved them, but never did anything with them.  If you want to see what they look like, go here.  It turns out we'd missed the workshop using Luna cabs (we missed one?!?), so we asked the manager if she'd put another class on for us, and she agreed!

I took a Thursday of work and we took another workshop (more on that coming to a blogpost near you soon) in the morning, and then settled down for an afternoon of bead embroidery.  Using a piece of bead foundation, we glued our cab down, and then held it in place with some peyote stitch.  We then used O beads (which I also own but never knew how to use!) to stitch a decorative ring before adding an Ultrasuede backing and a row of crystals.

It was really hard to get decent photos of this, I wanted to show the way the Luna cab just seems to shine, whilst also getting the shine of the crystals.  I used my tablet for these photos, I really should have used my camera as the tablet doesn't have a zoom feature.  The problem is that I have no way of transfering the photos to my PC except by taking the memory card into work and slotting it into my laptop.  It would seem that modern technology has left me behind.

This will become a necklace, I already know how I'm going to do it, it's on my Finish-It-FFS pile!

Ceramics

Back in August, wonderful mum and I did a workshop with the very talented Katie Almond (go and check her out) at Debbie Bryan, a wonderful handmade shop with a tea room which hosts workshops in a variety of disciplines.

If you've clicked that link to see Katie's work (and you really should), you will know it was a day of ceramics.

We worked with porcelain clay, rolling it out and imprinting various designs and patterns on it.

We used rubber stamps, lace, trims and paper cut outs to make a variety of different patterns.

The workshop was to make the plant pokes you see on the right, though my plan was to use them as bookmarks as I killed off all our plants years ago.  We also made some brooches.  We cut them out using paper templates and used punches to create different shapes.

You can see I used lace quite a lot on my imprints.  Then we painted them with under glazes.

I thought they looked terrible at this stage, but it was hard to tell how they'd turn out as glazes don't work the same way as paint.  Katie took them back to her studio to fire them and we got to pick them up a couple of weeks later.

This is them after firing.  As you can see, they don't look brilliant and they're too thick for bookmarks.  

I think I did better with some of the brooches though.  I really wish I'd had more time to paint this one so that I could pick out the pattern better.  I should have done the wing in the same dark blue as the flower round his eye.

I'm really happy with the one in the middle.  The one on the left doesn't look too bad in this photo so I might make that into a brooch too.  The one on the right didn't work. The grey paint I'd used just doesn't work with the blue.  I could paint it with ceramic paints to try to save it.  Wonder if that would work on the plant pokes too?

Either way, we had a great day and I went home daydreaming about finally owning a kiln one day!

Viennese Waltz - update 7

I can't believe another 3 weeks has gone in the SAL!  I only realised when one of the organisers, Clair, emailed to remind us, so I whipped this baby out and put in.... wait for it... 2 whole threads!  Here's where I was:



And here's where I am:

Masses of difference, eh?

In case you've forgotten, I'm stitching this as part of a three-weekly SAL, aiming to get us finishing our pieces, either new pieces or WIPs.

You can go and see what the other participants have been up to here:

Claire, Avis, Gun, Carole, Alison, Jule, Elizabeth, LucyAnn, Kate, Cathy, Jess and Jacqui