ChateauGoth: Crafty Bits

Welcome to Bex's Crafty Bits

You're in the middle of nowhere with no funds and it's pouring down so you can't get out on to the allotment, what do you do? Get depressed? Heck NO, no way......this is a sign that the fates have all clubbed together to give you a bit of crafting time - woop woop. After all, who am I to go arguing with fate? Grin.

I have been so lucky to have been welcomed, with open arms, to a local craft group. The ladies there are totally amazing and we have a great time pooling ideas and trying out different crafts.

Some wool from local sheep and alpacas was donated to the group and some of it was dyed by members of the group ready for use by anyone.

Here's my first attempt at making some wet felted wrist warmers out of sheep wool:

As well as being wrist warmers they could also double as an emergency wrist cast or natural ornament as they are thick enough to stand up on their own!

With spare bits of wool I needle felted repairs to the blankets on the sofa to mask the results of the last dying moments of the bits of wood that leapt, in flame, from the fire in a desperate bid for freedom:

The hearts were done using heart shaped cookie cutters. The shape of the cats heads may look familiar to cat owners as I cut off the top part of a Whiskers treat pot to felt these.

Next we had a go at making some slippers, this time using some hand dyed alpaca wool. Tis a tad cold at the moment, although not quite a cold and the slipper making process made my hands look:

Thankfully, for you, I don't have any photos of my blue feet! The last part of moulding the slippers involves using each foot as a mould and shaping the squidgy, massive, soapy slipper to it. I distracted myself during this process by watching Callie and Nige battle it out as snowboarding Sonic the hedgehogs on the Wii....some very interesting moves were witnessed!

Once dried out, days later, the slippers looked like this:

Next to a bit of jewellery making where one of the group taught everyone a stitching technique. I haven't seen sooooo many beads in one house before. We could have place a serious challenge to the NEC craft show. So a bit of waxed cord, a button, some sewing thread and a few beads later - ta da:

The challenge for us here is to craft without buying things. Now, as any crafter knows, the temptation to make crafty purchases is very strong and can virtually always be justified. But (at the moment and I'm certainly not making any promises for the future) I'm trying to be good. Thankfully after Ron and Nige did an awesome job of rewiring the whole place I have a bag full of cables. One of the ladies at the craft group is also an electrician so we have a nearly endless supply of different sizes of cable. So we all started stripping and this was the result:

The thicker copper wire is from mains and lighting cables and the very fine copper wire is from telephone cables. We have discovered an amazing new tool to use to strip the coloured coat off the copper wire - the humble potato peeler.

Whilst the pliers were out we also played with some other bits of coloured wire we already had in our stashes:

Last but not least, Callie and Nige have been let loose in the shed with tile cutters, polishers and a pile of empty bottles. The chopped up bottles along with a couple of sheets of glass that Nige cut to shape from a broken piece in the green house, some coloured off cuts and glass beads from the craft group were all stuck together with glue and grout to make 2 new windows. 1 window is for the woodshed and the other for Niges shed. At the moment the hole in the woodshed wall is being filled in by a garden gnome. The gnome is proving to be neither windproof or waterproof (strange that) and it lives in constant fear of Niges catapult. So here, to save poor Mr Gnome, are the replacement windows made out of odds and ends:

Mine: