My Creative Space

Well, that was a much longer blogging hiatus than I had intended, but things just got away with me. Now my blogging mojo has, hopefully, returned.

I took three weeks off over Christmas and pootled around, doing some reading/crafting/TV watching/family stuff/time away. All very pleasant and satisfying. Another post will have some pics of our holiday in Adelaide and Mt Gambier. But this being my first Creative Space for the year, I suppose I had better post something actually created!

These are completed ATCs (Artist Trading Cards), my first ever, hence the distinct wonkiness. I did take pictures of the back too but have forgotten to put them on the USB which I am using at work to download these. I agonised over the backs for weeks, but in the end an article in Sew Somerset got me thinking and I decided to just embroider my name and the year in deliberately wonky hand stitching, and hand stitch the backings on.

They all have a basis of Mazey Patchwork, with hand embroidery and embellishments added after the initial machine stitching.

This has a heart-shaped Suffolk Puff held in place with a flower button, a silver charm that says Be True and some hand stitching. The fabrics are velvet, polyester chiffon (off-cuts from dressmaking) and quilting cottons from the stash.

This has a Suffolk Puff held down with a fancy button from somewhere, hand embroidery, a scrap of lace, and the fabrics are various scraps from the stash including a polyester chiffon.

And the final one has much the same mix of fabrics, hand stitching, and a clutch of tiny teddy buttons I bought at a craft fair somewhere.

For more Creative Spaces look over here...

Some embroidery

Remember the bits of Mazey Patchwork I cut out and showed a couple of weeks ago.  I have been slowly starting to embellish them, production line style.  First of all, some hand stitching - pics below.  When I have embroidered a lot of them, or got bored, I will find appropriate beads/buttons/stuff to add to them.  But I;m too tired to do anything most of the time :(  At least I have three weeks off work starting Christmas Eve!!

Picasa has gone all fancy and added all the fun filters that you can get on mobile phone apps now!

I would like to wish all of my dear readers a wonderful Christmas, if that's what you do, or a wonderful holiday, or a blissful unawareness of the fact that anybody is celebrating anything at all.  Maybe by next week I will have something else to show.  Then again, maybe not!

My Creative Space

I have had a bit of fun.  The to picture is a piece of my Mazey Patchwork, made by sewing various scraps onto a base fabric, like crazy patchwork only deliberately left all frayed.  Then I chop it up and embellish the pieces individually.  I finished the big piece quite a while ago but haven't done anything with it, so as I had the day off yesterday I cut out some pieces to start fiddling with at the weekend.

It looks like I might have a few hours on Saturday at my MiL's before attending my neieces 21st, so I am packing up some of the small pieces together with a selection of threads (probably mainly blues with a couple of contrasts) and I will pootle around embroidering them.  Further embellishments with buttons or beads or suffolk puffs, or maybe all three, will follow later at home.

For more creative spaces, pop over here.  It's the last official Creative Spaces for the year, though I promise I will continue to post any pics of anything that I might find time to do!!

My Creative Space

I have been knitting, slowly and not very interestingly, on the green cardigan from a few weeks ago.  Nothing much to show so we'll just move along here.  I will take more photos when it gets a bit more exciting.

What I have also been doing is playing with photo software on my phone.  It is ridiculously amusing.  And creative - sort of :)



This is a bowl of pansies picked by George and floated in a bowl to make me happy :)


This looks like I have been all clever and done a painting, but actually it is just the photo, fiddled with.



This is a Mazey Pretty Things brooch, and a prototype of a new type of brooch that will be forthcoming in due course (ie. when I get it right!)  This one is actually a button, not centred very well, but the real ones will be button brooches, a bit smaller, and hopefully properly centred :)

Then I played around with different effects.  It was fun :)









I hope to do some more knitting this weekend, start some embroidery, and maybe organise some craft books/magazines.  Plus reading, and cooking, and watching TV (oh, and washing and ironing and going to the supermarket and maybe even having conversations with family members!)

For much more interesting creative spaces, go visit here!

Blogtoberfest Giveaway

Well it has taken me a while to recover from all that Blogtoberfest posting!  But I did do the draw for the giveaway and am delighted to announce that the winner is Robin Norgren of http://www.mycreativepeace.blogspot.com/.  I have notified her and will send her a Mazey Pretty Things brooch as soon as she lets me know her details, and I will post a pic of it here - AFTER she has received it though!

Blog posting will return in a few days.  Well, maybe next week.  That effort wore me out a bit1

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I blogged about this a while ago but it still holds great resonance for me.  Part of me wants to do scholarly stuff on the subject, another part of me wants to do work inspired by it instead.  (While the major part just wants to sleep).

Hope you have enjoyed Blogtoberfest!  It has been fun.  I found it a good way to go through old photos and use Blogger's pre-scheduling thing, plus the occasional new post.  And don't forget that giveaway.  I will draw it (or my disinterred, and disinterested, husband will) over the weekend. 

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A final reminder about the giveaway:



Now for the giveaway details. Every comment received this month will go into a special magic giveaway hat (well, the name of the commenter will!) and after the end of Blogtober I will get a completely disinterested bystander (ie. my husband) to pull a name out of the sorting hat. Each time you comment your name will go in.


The giveaway is a Mazey Pretty Things fabric brooch - see my sidebars for my Made It and Etsy shops to give you an idea of what they are like. I will post to anywhere in the world with great delight.

The idea being that EVERY time you comment, your name goes into the hat. So you three or four people who comment on every post, be warned, there is a strong possibility that you might win something!

The whole time thing is too hard to work out, so I am going to say that all comments received by the time I get round to reading the blog on November 1 AEDT will count.  I have no idea what time that will be in any other partof the world.  Except Queensland.  It will be an hour earlier there.

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Just another reminder about the giveaway:



Now for the giveaway details. Every comment received this month will go into a special magic giveaway hat (well, the name of the commenter will!) and after the end of Blogtober I will get a completely disinterested bystander (ie. my husband) to pull a name out of the sorting hat. Each time you comment your name will go in.


The giveaway is a Mazey Pretty Things fabric brooch - see my sidebars for my Made It and Etsy shops to give you an idea of what they are like. I will post to anywhere in the world with great delight.

The idea being that EVERY time you comment, your name goes into the hat.  So you three or four people who comment on every post, be warned, there is a strong possibility that you might win something!

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I might as well remind people of the giveaway this month.  Here is what I wrote a week ago:

Now for the giveaway details. Every comment received this month will go into a special magic giveaway hat (well, the name of the commenter will!) and after the end of Blogtober I will get a completely disintered bystander (ie. my husband) to pull a name out of the sorting hat. Each time you comment your name will go in.


The giveaway is a Mazey Pretty Things fabric brooch - see my sidebars for my Made It and Etsy shops to give you an idea of what they are like. I will post to anywhere in the world with great delight.


Look forward to hearing from you!

Surprisingly no-one has noticed the typo, or at least been too polite to point it out.  My husband would like the world to know that he is completely disinterested (i.e. unbiased), not disintered.  He is NOT a zombie and I do NOT dig him up from the garden to draw blog giveaway winners!

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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!

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Now for the giveaway details.  Every comment received this month will go into a special magic giveaway hat (well, the name of the commenter will!) and after the end of Blogtober I will get a completely disintered bystander (ie. my husband) to pull a name out of the sorting hat.  Each time you comment your name will go in.

The giveaway is a Mazey Pretty Things fabric brooch - see my sidebars for my Made It and Etsy shops to give you an idea of what they are like.  I will post to anywhere in the world with great delight.

Look forward to hearing from you!

My Creative Space

I am trying to turn my 'Mazey Patchwork' into my signature style, and this week has been about working on this piece and taking close ups of it.  Basically it is a stitched form of complex cloth, which once it comes off the machine is cut up into random shapes and then further embellished with hand stitching, beads, buttons, etc, lined with satin or something similar and turned into brooches and other fabric jewellery forms.

Enjoy!  And enjoy other creative spaces here!

My Creative Space

I am enjoying a day off today! OK, so I took Wombat to the doctor this morning, but he was enjoyable company and we had morning tea so it was fun. Then we came home and I have been managing to relax creatively ever since!

The latest non-haiku. I;m not sure why the photo is so bad, other than my dubious photography skills. Oh, and the fact that the camera is dying and is going to be replace sometime soon. (Not that that will improve my photography skills, but maybe the pictures will bebetter by default anyway!)

The latest completed hat.

The latest hat-in-progress. I am actually get sick of hats but I want to finish off the yarn I bought to knit hats, which means one more after this one, and then embellish them and get them up for sale at Mazey Pretty Things.

And I have spent some time on my luvverly new sewing machine. I am making a Mazey patchwork cloth to cut up and embellish and turn into brooches, etc. I think of it as my version of a 'complex cloth' and each layer adds extra to it.

This week at work hasn't been too bad - I have been able to concentrate on my actual job, which I quite like, rather than running around doing other people's work as well as my own. And then having today off helps! Performance review tomorrow - a little nervous.

For more creative spaces, see here!

My Creative Space

Another week fraught with tedious personal and work stuff.  But at least I got to play with the new sewing machine at the weekend, and a love affair is definitely in progress!  I tried out lots and lots of stitches and stuff :)

Then I did some more playing in black thread (rather than the white which I had been using for the samplers), realising that, on the random fabric I had pulled out of the stash to practice on, it would look good for something specific I was vaguely thinking about.  (Can you think vaguely about something specific?  What I mean is that I was thinking I could use some of these stitches on fabric and then cut them up and make brooch/hat adornments from them, and then realising that the black and red would work well with the yarn I was using to make hats).

And the hat with the attached glasses and antlers?  From the other day?  Well, I canvassed opinions from people on here and on various Facebook groups and decided that it might be better to make it a little more mainstream.





So it now has a gum nut type scrumble on it.

And these are all going to be adornments for other hats in a similar style.



This was meant to be a brooch in the red/orange MazeyPrettyThings collection, but somehow got left out when I was sewing backing fabric on them.  So it is going to be sewn down to a slightly larger piece of the red and black, machine embroidered fabric.


This a dreadful photo, don't know what happened there!  But there is a glittering green button in the middle of this.



And another green button on this one.

These three will probably have brooch backs sewn onto them and pinned to hats and sold together, so that they can be worn together or separately.

Please go and enjoy some other people's spaces :)

My Creative Space

I spent this week finishing off a prototype hat design.  While I still think it was an amusing idea, various feedback from people has made me think that, though I might make a vague attempt to sell something like this, it might not work.

We start off with a simple, comfortable cloche-cum-beanie.  This one is knitted out of a nice, smooth acrylic/microfibre mixture that feels really nice to the touch (though obviously it is less warm than wool).

We gather together some embellishing supplies.  Pipecleaners, a bag of - well, what do YOU think they might be? - and a bag of assorted yarns.

Silliness ensues.  A pair of retro, vintage specs are sewn in place just where you would put them if you were to push your retro, vintage specs up on top of your head.

And then a pipecleaner is wrapped in novelty yarn, bent into shape (sort of) and wrapped around the nose-piece of the glasses, thus making removable antennae/antlers.

Well, I thought it was funny.  A couple of people have told me that it would not raise an eyebrowin their local neighbourhood.  I might wear it myself.  But would you?  Would you BUY something like this?  Is there any point in me putting in my new born MadeIt shop which so far has not even sold anything at all?

OK, at least I was creative.  And to see how other people have been creative this week, here is the linkety link :)