Enough With the Beaded Knitting Already!

I think I might now be a bit sick of working through Betsy Beads, fun as it has been.  I'm not too pleased with my latest effort - my fault, not the instructions or anything - and I want to move on to something else.  But I heartily recommend the book as it is chock full of fun things to try and good instructions.

This time I made a gathered beaded bracelet.  I think I twisted it accidentally at the end and I'm not wild about the way it looks, and unpicking the relevant bits don't really interest me.  It may be usable in another craft piece at some point in the future - nothing need be wasted.

This is lace weight cotton and size 8 beads.

I do actually have a major piece of beaded knitting still lined up, but not like this.  I want to do a shawl which will have some beads added to it using the crochet hook method.  But I don't want to start that for a couple of weeks as it's a biggish project and I don't want the distraction of Christmas and a possible holiday afterwards to get in the way.

And now for something completely different.

Just to prove that even big kids like construction toys:

'I was tidying up upstairs and I got distracted.'

And we have pigeons nesting in the passionfruit vine directly the side of our patio.  It is rather cute watching the little baby pigeons get bigger.  I took this photo a week ago and they are bigger already.  The mum is very devoted.

Owing to complicated family issues, Christmas is still slightly up in the air, though I am still intending that we will spend it with George's sisters-in-law and the children that are currently in Australia.  It will the first Christmas without their mum and that will not be too easy.

George and I are hoping to go to Adelaide for a week after Christmas, but again family circumstances make it a bit hard to gauge whether we can actually go or not.  Nothing is booked yet (except for a dinner date in Glenelg on December 28th!).

Knitted Beaded Beads

More experiments inspired by Betsy Beads - I'm getting my money's worth from this book!

I made knitted beaded beads for this necklace, using instructions from the book.  Although there are several different types of beaded beads in the book, I essentially ended up using only three - rolled, beaded-end soft bead; rolled, knit-side-out soft bead; and rolled, purl-side-out soft bead. There is a cloisonne bead in between each knitted bead, alternating white and black.  I experimented with some others - there is one slightly larger rolled bead but I decided they used too many beads, considering that I had a limited selection of size 6 seed beads of appropriate colour ways to make this necklace look coherent. (Like the last necklace, this is made using 4ply cotton and size 6 seed beads).  I had a go at knitting bead covers for large round beads but couldn't make them look neat enough - I will have another go at that at some stage but there are other techniques in the book that I want to play with, so I don't know when I will go back to them.



This is an example of a rolled, purl-side-out soft beads.

On the left is a rolled, knit-side-out soft bead, and on the right is a rolled, beaded-end soft bead. And you can see one of the cloisonne beads.

And I hope to wear it tomorrow with a plain black Tshirt and the upcycled skirt from the last post.

Beaded Knitting Necklace, Dog Bed and Refashioning

I have actually accomplished a couple of things in the last week or so.

I am trying various things from the book Betsy Beads by Betsy Hershberg, as mentioned in a previous post about knitting necklaces.  This is the only thing I have completed so far, as now I am knitting a pile of beads to string together, and they are time-consuming.  This is knitted with 4 ply pink cotton and size 6 seed beads, in a purl I-cord (as opposed to the more 'normal' knit I-cord).  According to the book, doing I-cord in purl forces it to spiral.  My tension obviously isn't tight enough, even though I am using tiny needles (something like 1.5mm, can't remember exactly) with the cotton.  It did spiral a bit, but I still have to twist it a few times to produce the desired spirally look when I wear the necklace.  I didn't do a great job of attaching the magnetic clasp, sadly, though that doesn't show so much when you are wearing it, but it looks nice on and I am quite pleased with it.  Pictures of the knitted beads to come, eventually.

I've been meaning to make Sirius a new dog bed for ages, having bought this cheerful polar fleece some months ago.  She eats her beds, and I don't resent it when it's polar fleece, which is cheap, so I make her one every couple of years.  This is bigger than the previous ones, and it's a bit like a nest.

I think she likes it!  She likes to have a bed under my sewing table in the family room, even though she can't use it when I am actually sewing.

I also did a ridiculously easy refashioning project.  I was culling my wardrobe recently and picked a few summer dresses to donate to op shops.  This one was in that pile, but I realised that I really liked the fabric, and I was only ditching the dress because the top fitted badly (it either rode up, making me look heavily pregnant, or pulled down, which exposed half my bra).   So...

 Quick chop of skirt from bodice, and removal of a couple of inches of it to tidy it up and make it above ankle length rather than scraping the ground.  Pictured with trusty scissors and the roll of black elastic that will provide a waistband.

A quick pin, a careful zig-zag, and a skirt, voila!!

Knitted Armour?

When I was at the Fibre Forum in Geelong I was fascinated by some knitted necklaces that a couple of people were wearing, in a variety of colours and textures and lengths.  It turned out that they weren't I-cord (French knitting) as I thought they were, but simple narrow strips of stocking stitch which curled over on itself.  They had got the pattern from Dairing, a specialist yarn supplier in Melbourne - though 'recipe' would be a better word.  As it happened, Dairing were one of the suppliers selling stuff at the Forum and, although I had been told how to do it and variations that could be done and could have done it myself, I bought a kit from them containing several patterns, a cone of bronze metallic yarn, a cone of silver metallic yarn and a cone of  'yarn' that was a narrow ribbon of reflective tape (like the sort of thing you find on backpacks and cycling gear).

Basically you cast on 8 stitches and knit in stocking stitch until it is long enough for your purposes.  You can knit with one strand of yarn or as many as you wish - change needle sizes to make it tigh or loose, from necklace to necklace or within the same piece - use beads if you wish - and I'm sure there are LOTS more variations that I haven't explored yet. I've so far only used to yarns that came with the kit but I want to experiment with others now.

 This is actually a photo of the necklace below, but I used the flash and it really shows the reflective yarn!

This is the reflective and the silver yarn, heavily beaded with chunky bronze and silver coloured beads - they were actually a mixed bag of spacers.

This is both metallic yarns, knitted on two different sizes of needles to give textural differences between sections.

This is bronze with bronze bicorn beads.

This is all three yarns with the same spacer beads as a couple of pictures above.

And this is all three yarns together on big needles.

It proves to be VERY hard to photograph metallic yarns :(  Sorry that these don't show up very well.

They were fun to make.  I have a book to read called Betsy Beads : Confessions of a Left-Brained Knitter by Betsy Hershberg, which I bought before seeing the pieces at Geelong, which is about very similar things.  I even bought some knitting/crochet cotton and beads to go with them when I bought the book, and I am going to explore that now.

Oh yes, the post is called Knitted Armour because the other piece I have done, which isn't in this post, looks a bit like knitted chainmail.  It needs a chain applied to it which I haven't done yet, so I will photograph and post that one when it's done.

My Creative Space

I am still experimenting with buttons.  i am was just about to give the whole thing away because I was getting frustrated with the scale, and I don't think these will take over from my other things in the long run, but I have gained some terrific ideas along the way.  They are all button brooches, so they look like buttons from the front but have a brooch back on, er, the back.

Ok, so this is, obviously, not a button, nor a brooch.  It is a cake.  Not even a cunningly fabricated textile cake meant to worn on something (a hat maybe).  It is a Stephanie Alexander chocolate cake and you can tell by the amount left over how disgusting it tasted.  This was a whole 24 hours after making it!

This is a brooch with seeds beads embroidered on silk dupion.  It is not a cake.

Ceci n'est pas une gateau.  It is a mass of French knots on silk dupion.  You may have seen it already before it became a brooch.

Yeah, I showed this one before too, it's cross stitch in variegated thread.  On silk dupion. 

This is silk dupion decorated with a scrap of sari silk from The Thread Studio.  Lovely Dale sent me a baggie of sari silk scraps when I won a Facebook giveaway.  I promised I would use them on something.

And this is a cake. 

This is one of the buttons I bought at the button fair I blogged about a while ago.  I have a whole card of these, the original card, which I am going to keep if I ever use all the buttons.  They are immediately post-war Parisian.  The fact that I had matching embroidery thread in the pile by my chair was a complete co-incidence!

(Actually, the blue thing isn't really a cake).

For more creative spaces pop over here.  There might even be cake but don't blame me if there isn't!

Blogtoberfest 25

I am doing an online Button course with Karen Ruane.  I am a bit behindm ost of the others, because of working and time and all, but I am having the most fun!!!  These are the only pictures so far, though I am busy working my way through a pile of others.  Karen insisted that we not copy her slavishly but to use our own ideas, and of course she is a very wise woman.  I adore her work, so my first attempt actually was a go at reproducing her work fairly exactly, and I got frustrated and cross and hated what I was doing.  so I pulled it out and did what she had said, use her ideas as inspiration but do it my own way, and of course she was right.  I ended up much happier with these two.

The bottom picture, the one with the two circles in it, is the work before being damp stretched.  I had never tried that before and wondered if it was worth the effort, but now I can definitely say that it is.  I used Perle thread on silk dupion and embellished with some precious little flower sequins and tiny seed beads.  The top two pics are taken after the damp stretching, and believe me it made a difference.  They look much crisper and nicer now.

So I have already learnt a lot.  No matter how much you love someone else's work, it is always better to use it as a jumping-off point rather than trying to copy it.  Damp stretching is both easy and miraculous.  Silk dupion is wonderful to stitch on (though you do need to use a hoop, which I don't normally do, but I am finding invaluable). 

I am now doing some with colour, still on the white silk.  But there won't be pictures for about a week.  And there are other fun things to learn, about lumps (puffs, actually) and turning them into actual buttons and/or brooches.

Blogtoberfest 13

This is a piece I did in the second year of my Diploma when we studied 3D objects.  We had to end up with a container.  I can't remember if it had to have something in it or not, but mine did.  I chose to do a reliquary because they have always fascinated me and I love the application of textile arts to religious symbolism. 

After a bit of researching I quickly came up with the idea of Santiago de Compostela and the pilgramages undertaken to the Cathedral there, known in English as the Way of St James.  I had lots of fun playing with various surface and design finishes until I came up with the one I finally chose, which was fine white silk randomly splashed with silk paint in warm colours of red, pink, yellow and orange.  It was lined with red silky stuff.  I also embroidered it in random patches of running stitch using similar colours, but not on painted patches of the same colour.  I became very fond of that technique of patches of running stitch and it became one of the main embellishments I use in my Mazey Patchwork.  Gold paint and gold thread was also used, because I wanted an opulent feel in keeping with the idea of a medieival reliquary.

I had intended using stiffish interfacing in it but my teacher at the time got all huffy about using a synthetic interfacing and told me to use calico.  I did trial calico and it seemed to work but I regret not using the original idea as it never did stand as stiff and straight as I wanted.  She and I were a bit mixture, big personality clash and completely different interests and values.  She taught me for two subjects that year and told me that she was only passing me in one of them (not the one we did this project in, she couldn't very well fail me in that because my final project was as good as anyone else's!) because she didn't want to do the paperwork involved in failing me.  Miserable woman.  She didn't work there again after that year.

A reliquary obviously has to hold a relic.  I used gold Delicas to bead a tiny vial using peyote stitch, including a tiny beaded lid which was attached by a couple of beads and fastened with a beaded loop, and it contained the arm of Saint ... I can't actually remember the name I made up but I created a wholly fictional saint, with a back story and everything!  The arm came from a nasty little plastic doll from the $2 shop that I hacked off and stained with paint the colour of dried blood.  I think I may have included a hand as well.

The 'lid' comes from the tops of the panels, six I think there were, triangular in shape, with threads tieing them together and a shell shaped gold button to hold it altogether (the shell being the symbol of St James of Compostela).

I chose this particular picture for this post because I like to think of it as a rather arty-farty photo, but I do have more process-oriented photos that I can post if anyone is interested in the more practical side of it.  It was a fun thing to make and I am still proud of it!

Blogtoberfest 10

Another pear.  This one is made from air-drying clay (which stinks, btw), deliberately left roughly moulded with finger prints in it.  Then painted and rubbed with a wad of kitchen towel and left to dry again, and then some gold paint rubbed lightly on bits of it.  Then stuck down lightly to a piece of patchwork fabric and peyote stitched around with seed beads to form a huge bezel, if you think of the pear as a large cabachon.  Then shadow stitched with black embroidery thread (perl or stranded, I can't remember).  I also can't remember if I used felt or thin cotton wadding for the wadding.

Blogtoberfest 9

When I was studying for my Diploma of Studio Stitch (Textiles) - textile art - we had a fantastic  teacher who was obsesssed with pears.  They are rather attractive, I suppose!  One assignment we were given was to choose from a small list of things (I forget the rest, but pears was definitely one of them!) and do three small items, each one using a different technique.  I started this as one of them but realised that it was so time-consuming that it was better to use it for my end-of-semester piece, a folder cover, and did three other pears instead.  (They will be appearing during Blogtoberfest!)

This was probably only my second major piece of bead embroidery and I am very pleased with it.  It mostly uses czech seed beads with some other beads from my stash, and some small buttons, sewn straight onto cream felt.  I still feel rather proud of this piece!

Me-Made-June Whenever It Was...

I have been a bad blogger.  I did finish Me-Made-June without any duplications, though I only made one item instead of two.  But I haven't felt like blogging recently.  Now ... I'M BAAACCKKKK...

Because it was a while ago, I can't remember which day I wore these things, but I did have them marked down as the last week of MMJ so here goes.



Good old Entre Chien et Loup!

This brooch was part of my Graduate Exhibition for my Diploma.  This is a shocking picture!  I take terrible pictures of my work :(  It was part of a set called Full Fathom Five and is meant to look like coral and seaweed and pearls (those are seed pearls that were his eyes!)

This cowl is the one I blogged about earlier and, because it took me an unneccessarily long time to finish it, counts as the one thing I made in June, to wear in June.  It is the Tilting Tardis cowl from Revelry (too lazy to look up) made from a Wendy sock yarn that is mostly bamboo and is silky and soft.  It is meant to be buttoned up.  When I was sewing in the ends I used them to sew up the seam without thinking, and then, as I could get it on over my head, just left it be!

A ubiquitous Clapotis of much Knitty and bloggy fame.  I made mine longer and narrower to wear it as a scarf.  It is one of the few things I have ever knitted in the recommended yarn, splashing out of Lorna's Laces Lion and Lamb, if that;s what it's called?  Anyway it is utterly luscious and I wear it a lot.

A pair of Jaywalker socks knitted in , I think, a Regia wool-cotton blend.  Again too lazy to find a link.  Hey, it's taken me over two weeks to write this post at all!

And that, I think, finished Me-Made-June.  It was fun but towards the end I got a bit distracted, at least in terms of recording it, as must be pretty obvious.  Sometimes life you actually have just gets in the way of the life you want to have.  That's happening a lot at the moment.

On a lighter note - I have just formed a hopefully fruitful relationship with the gorgeous textile art shop Open Drawer  (to which I obviously can be bothered linking!).  Whether they actually sell any of my work remains to be seen but at least they were willing to give it a go.  And that has given me a bit of a kick in the pants to do some other stuff.  I have had a couple of Etsy shops at various times, and set up the framework of a MadeIt shop earlier in the year, but have never really achieved anything with them.  I am inspired to start all over again with a new name, new goods, and, well, watch this space!!!

Me-Made-June Week 3

Another chilly week.  But not quite as bad as last week!  It did however start with a scarf.

This is knitted from Lincraft Prism and is 70% wool and 30% soysilk.  The pattern is from Knitted Shawls, Stoles and Scarves by Nancie Wiseman and it can be knitted either as a shawl (my MIL has a lovely pink and purple one) or a scarf.

I had to get my favorite glass brooch in somewhere this month!

Then it was a wet day and I had to catch the tram to work, which means walking through a park (which is pretty at sunrise, but gives you wet feet), and so I wore waterproof shoes and carried office shoes in the felted bag I made for Me-Made-May. 

This brooch, made some years ago, sits on the lapel of a designer denim blazer that I bought in an op shop about the same time that I made the brooch. 

A cold Sunday meant hand knitted socks.  These are Jaywalkers knitted in a mixture of wool and cotton.

I've worn very little of my own jewellery this month, mostly because I have had the perfect opportunity to wear the handknits!!  But I did wear these green and blue coralled earrings.

And finally, as Arctic blasts assailed Melbourne, I wore my Fetchings, knitted from the same Prism yarn as the scarf at the start of this post.

I haven't been doing My Creative Spaces for the last couple of weeks, because of the planning and photographing, etc, of Me-Made-June.  but I am going to this week, because I am participating in a KAL (Knit-along, for those who are wondering) and I want to show some progress pictures, and it's pretty much what I have been working on all week.