Dreaming Spirals

I haven’t done much quilting related stuff this summer, but having spent the last week making crafty things with kids, I thought I would post some pictures of what I had done with them previously, partly to remind me and partly in case anyone is looking for ideas. We have an all-age service at church each month and I come up with a related craft activity to keep the kids quiet at the beginning. It is quite a challenge because the children can be anything from 3 to 11 and there is only 10 or 15 minutes to do it in.

Here are a few of the things we have made over the months…

Pipe cleaner men

Treasure box

Masks which we decorated

This is what I’m doing next Sunday. A foot out of fun foam, decorated with all sorts of twinkly things.

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Well, the comments consensus for the identity of the triffid was either a pumpkin or a watermelon. But I looked at it this morning and there are a few small fruits on it.

I think this looks like a courgette after all! This is more or less actual size so it has some growing to do yet… if the slugs don’t take a fancy to it first.

Here’s another one:

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Sorry for the quiet few days. I’ve been helping with the kids’ crafts activities at the holiday club at church all week so I’ve been absolutely shattered by the afternoons. So here are a few more pics of the views from the tower we went up to in Oxford. Maybe in a few days I’ll have something else to talk about!

This is one of the colleges.

This is the Radcliffe Camera, which is a sort of overflow for the Bodlean Library. Apparently the Dangerous Sports Society at the university used to require people to climb up to the top of it as a condition of membership!

I liked the colourfully painted shops on the High Street.

But this is my favourite… looking at people enjoying a cup of coffee down below…

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We went to Oxford for the day last Wednesday. It was fun. One of the things we did was to go up the tower of St Mary’s, the University church. The kids like climbing church towers. Well, any towers….

Here it is, taken from across the road, sandwiched between two very modern buses…

This is where we were - where you can see people standing…

Here are a few of the people we saw up there:

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I couldn’t wait any longer. I was feeling rotten on Tuesday so I shoved the fabrics into the machine to cheer myself up. The comfrey one spelt disgusting. Truly disgusting.

This is the madder. The most successful one. The deepest red piece is the one I put in first. I added the rest at intervals over the weeks. The purply ones were a light blue silk shirt. This was madder powder so it was obviously very concentrated. The red piece is bigger than a fat quarter. All the fabrics are silk.

This is the next most successful, which I thought wasn’t going to work at all. The bindweed. It is a pale yellow colour. I think I really needed to boil up the plant material and extract the dye first to get a deeper colour or put a smaller piece of silk in there, but I’m sure it will be useful.

The comfrey was the most disappointing. I had already left the comfrey leaves rotting in water for a few weeks previously so I thought the dyestuff would have been stronger - the fabric on the left is the blue blouse I started with, and the one on the left is what I ended up with. Very slightly greenish fabric. I think I’ll stick to using it as plant fertilizer.

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Back in May (gosh, I can’t believe it was so long ago! I made some ATCs for Dale’s swap (Dale Rollerson runs The Thread Studio in Australia and she was hosting a swap of ATCs which she first exhibited in Sydney).

A few weeks ago, an exciting parcel arrived with the ones Dale sent me in return. Here they are:

This is by Marj Long. The background is more purple than it comes out on the photo (or at least on my laptop screen) and seems to be made of something a bit like very stiff tyvek.

I can’t read the name of the maker of this very well as the sticky fixer used to put it on display has torn some of the paper, but I think it is Doreen Conboy.

This one is by Jenny Knight - I love the background especially.

This one is by Robin McWhinney who lives in Queensland, Australia.

This one is by Dale herself and she made it on her embellisher machine, which I gather uses felting needles in place of thread to attach things to each other. The colours are much deeper than the photo, and I love the textures in it! It is fun to see what can be done with this machine.

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Most years we have a potato plant growing from our compost bins, and this year is no exception. Last year I actually harvested some potatoes from it. Now, if I tried sowing this purposely, they would be all small and mangy and the slugs would get them. So how come they do so much better when they happen by accident?

Here is the potato plant:

This year, however, the compost has gone one better. We have an unknown plant, a triffid, in the other compost bin! (Well, hmm, actually it’s not a triffid, I suspect it’s either a cucumber or a courgette plant, but a triffid sounds more exciting!).

Here it is, nestling in the bin:

I suppose it says a lot for the lack of heat in the bins! Which is why, whenever I spread the compost on the garden, we get a bumper crop of weeds coming up too - rosebay willow herb in particular. Here is the triffid in close up:

And yesterday I went out, and lo and behold, there was a flower! A most beautiful flower! Can anyone tell me if this is a courgette or a cucumber or something even more exciting?!

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This is what we made on the Creative Papercraft course. Making things like this isn’t really my style (I like messier things har har!!) but I enjoyed learning the tips about making cards, envelopes, etc, so that they come out nice and smart and not battered and messy. James Skinner, the tutor, was amazingly generous with his handouts and the use of his tools and materials and very free with hints about how to do things, and very humorous with it! (He also had a shop where I was parted from some of my cash and bought, amongst other things, some paints for marbling so look out for the results of that experimentation in the future). We couldn’t do marbling, which I was disappointed about, because the college couldn’t give us a suitable ‘messy’ room for the purpose but James demonstrated it so now I’m keen to try it.

We did paperweaving - the one on the right was how he showed us to do it, but I decided to bring my own style into it and did a (much quicker) but - inevitably - wackier one on the left…

We also did iris folding, which struck me as being a bit like foundation piecing except with paper and sellotape:

This is another card we made:

We made some little boxes. This one was made just by folding paper, and then securing the middle bits with glue.

Here are a couple of other boxes which I made in the last lesson when I had finished off everything else I was doing but there wasn’t much time to start anything else! The little cats were punched out of card with a punch.

We also made envelopes and I have come away with templates for other boxes and envelopes, which I can use as a base for my own designs, so this was a very useful course for me to do.

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