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...

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 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!

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!

My Creative Space

I needed a good long rest after Blogtoberfest!!  I have been slowly knitting away at the green cardigan I showed a couple of weeks ago, and reading, and watching telly.  Oh, and working.  Eugh.




What is this?  A staple gun.  A pile of vintage lace.  A square artist canvas covered with quilting fabric.  (Badly.  The front looks OK, but you should see the mess I made of the back!  Or rather, you aren't going to see!!)  I bought the staple gun but the rest comes from the stash.  I have been collecting bits of lace for yonks, and the fabric covered canvas dates from TAFE days when it was going to be used for something but wasn't ultimately.



After much stapling. Some of the lace isn't dead straight, but you will see in the next picture that doesn't matter too much. My dog doesn't like the sound of the staple gun, apparently :(


A new display thing for my earrings!  (Err, some of my earrings.  You can't see the three necklace boxes full of studs and non-hook hanging ones).

Not an original idea.  I saw a similar thing on Pinterest, using an empty frame with lace across, but I didn't have a suitable frame, and I did have the canvas, and I am trying to shop from my stash when possible these days.

More lip-smacking Creative Spaces here

Blogtoberfest 27

I haven't done Creative Spaces for a while, but here is one:

I am knitting the Kimono Jacket on the left of the photo in very green Patons Sorrento, for once using a pattern written for the yarn I am using - unusual for me!  Sorrento is a nice blend of 62% viscose and 38% cotton and will be a nice summer cover-up.  Of course I won't finish it for ages but it's more about the knitting (and the colour!) than the finished object.  This comes in two versions, one long and one short, and of course I had knitted 15cm of the long version before I realised my mistake, and then realised that I couldn't really fix it because the stitch counts were different and that it would easier to start again.  Slowly.

More Creative Spaces scrumptiously displayed here.

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

Well my work week has been distinctly uncreative, being fraught with tedious but stressful issues that i just want to forget about.  So I am surrounding myself with wonderful, creative purchases - and yes, most of them have been bought this week, except for two of the books that I bought a month ago and then forgot about!

After six months of working for a living I had saved up enough to buy myself a new sewing machine in a sale.  The last day of the sale!  It is a Janome Memory Craft 6500 and it does whizzy things.  I believe.  It will probably be Saturday before I have the concentration and energy to actually try it out.  But the instruction manual is interesting! 

Graham certainly thinks so, anyway.  Now he will be able to tell me when I am doing something wrong!  And to give him his due, he actually does know quite a lot about the subject in general and I expect he will soon be up to speed on this particular beast.  Maybe I will follow Baby Bear's lead and give it a name (she names all her musical instruments).

And then I bought some books, mostly at the Craft Fair at Jeff's Shed the other weekend, all which I am hoping will provide creative inspiration of one sort or another.  And I actually bought another three today but they can wait for another photo session!

For more creative spaces, pop over here.  Maybe some of them have actually made something rather than just buying inspiration!