My Happy place

This very old project (like two years) has been reinstated on the to-do list.

It was going well, until it wasn't and then I had to start again.

But the basic horse / donkey plan is sound,

even if the Appaloosa was an abject failure

Sleepless nights about horse legs have turned into sleepless nights about bridles which means I am getting closer. I can be heard muttering about girth straps and brow bands to anyone who passes by and I am cutting and sewing pieces of felt so small they are a joke.

I have a new order of felt arriving this week and I think I

I might just be on to something.

I am giving you the side eye blogger

Blogger is being a bit of an arse lately , but that's not the reason I haven't been posting.

I have been feeling a bit hamstered and over-doctored and generally out-of-sorts but it is all OK and I have given myself a sound talking to!

When I am not here, chatting to you guys I am usually floating about at the day job, or hopefully farting about in the sewing room. Sometimes I am teaching, sometimes I am up to my ears in secret stuffs and sometimes (though not often) I am just having a cuppa and a bit of zombie killing time.

I am (very often) on Instagram posting pictures without the blog-need to stop and chat.

There have been some birthdays which meant I made a wool version of my Circus tuffet pattern - and I LOVE IT ! But 'cause I am an awesome mum I gave it away to my TWENTY-FOUR year old daughter. (I know, how is that even possible?)

 I made a new creative card pattern : This is Karma Chameleon and he can be made in either cotton (degree of difficulty quite painful) or felt (super easy). It is the ear worm that will get you with this one !

I made him with hand dyed felt from Winterwood and seriously wanted to make a whole mountain of them

 but this little fellow needed some time as well.

This is P is for Pig , my newest friend in the Alphabet animal series. He is number seven so there are only 19 more letters to go.
Do you all get the newsletter ? It's kinda boring but it does give you shop discounts - current discount uses the code BLOGLOVE for 25% off all the stuffs until Tuesday midnight.

So stakeholders, we have 19 letters to go, having used D E F G H P T - what do you suggest ?
(and no you can't make rude words out of it yet - you know I have tried !)

Frankie & Dee

(coming soon)

It got away from me

but it's close 

The teeniest tweaks are getting twuck and the sweetest of breaths are being held.

gloomy

It sometimes happens, that the things that are meant to be first come second,

while the things that are third, came first. 

So the things that are second will have to be third

and the things that are fourth are yet to be sewn.

(and the 2 has nothing to do with it).

It is grey and raining here today and if tea were alcohol I'd be dancing with my knickers on my head by now.

Playing by the rules

 Do you set yourself rules ? guidelines? parameters? Do you give yourselves little rewards when you have finished something? I do it all the time, then I change the rules, move the goalposts and dement myself .

 The rule for the weekend is to finish off some things, and I mean completely finished. No leaving the hand sewing for another day. 

As a result, yesterday I wound 11 little pom poms and sewed them to eleven little hats

I stuffed , closed, added ears and tails and nostrils

to eleven hat-wearing hippos.

On the make

I am a bit at home, and a bit all-at-sea at the moment. I am trying to use this holiday time wisely and not get too distracted by Bookface, and the instawobblies and so forth. If I owe you an email, its coming.... I have been distracted.

This little man has been brewing for such a long time - and has had many many changes and tweaks. He was never quite who I thought he was until

 he got a friend.....

 and even though he is still not who I thought he was going to be, 

I am very pleased that he is who he is.

Heads 1 - 5 (or diversion up ahead)

The heads on sticks have had to be patient this week as the evenings were full of dull-work.

That little head on the right is so full of possibilities - Is he another little hand sewn fellow? Or is he someone else altogether? 

 I can't help thinking of blue linen dungarees.

(Which is not where I thought I was going at all)

Getting stuff wrong

I am a firm believer that getting stuff wrong is part of the long and winding and often diverting path to getting stuff right. That’s not to say I enjoy getting stuff wrong but I am getting better at accepting (through gritted teeth) that my ideas of wrong often make little or no sense and they may add days or weeks or months to certain projects but they will not be ignored. It’s just better to go with it.

Before I went to Portland I was working on a project but simply ran out of time to get it off to the testers and finalised.

and that's a good thing because when I got home it just didn’t look right. This girls eyes were too big (This is her second head transplant by the way).

She needed new hair, but her body was alright so off to the transplant clinic for her…

but her friend looked funny…so it was of with her head as well.

I remade them both and dressed them and accessorised them and………………blah.

They are fine but I can’t show them here because you will all tell me they are fine or you might even tell me they are great. But ‘fine” is just not quite right enough is it? This morning I am starting again from scratch. I have thrown all the pattern pieces away, I have a cake in the oven and I’m thinking it will end up OK.

I’ll keep you posted.

head down

Arse up ! that's the way it is around here. For all this busy-ness there is very little to show. I just finished a huge fun project and will share it all a bit later on and am mid way through pattern writing and drawing and sewing on a heap of stuff. (I know it is incredibly unfashionable to say this, but……… I like being busy, none of this slow-movement crap for me) I have enough projects bubbling in my brain to keep me going well into my dotage.

I got a delivery of felt yesterday was wondering if it is the cold weather that draws me more to felt at the moment, kind of like the way knitters get drawn back to their yarn.

These are the guys we will be working on in my kids classes in the next holidays. Its a bit of a departure, with wool and minkee and polar fleece but so much fun! I The pattern is huge, I have written it as three complete separate patterns so there is no flicking back and forth for instructions. Its not really one that’s destined to be stocked by patchwork shops so it might become a PDF one of these days….. and looking at that photo – you know I am going to have to re-do that duck….the beak? the tummy? Colours all wrong !!!!

See . Who has time for the slow-movement? I have a duck crisis !

A long time between drinks

I know that it must seem like nothing new is brewing hereabouts but I have been working. A new bag has just been released, a Creative Card is ready for printing ….

and my newest friend, full of beans and red cordial and backyard circuses is running wild.

He is being tested and tweaked as we speak, and has evolved quite a lot since his very first introduction.

and you know what? When he smiles at me like that, I can’t help but smile back and agree to just ten more minutes on the swing.

(and a name ? Is he still Seamus or is he someone new entirely? Any suggestions?)

Fabric flinging

Fabrics have been flung  and interfacings have been faced

plans have been changed, edited, compromised and abandoned completely

but he is almost here, and I want to stay up all night until every stitch is stitched and every crevice stuffed.

Hey hey

Ever since Seamus , (gee that was a long time ago) I have had the idea of a monkey on the backburner. I Love monkeys ! About a year ago I spent a few days playing with heads but it ended in disaster.Yesterday I pulled them out and tried a few new variations

I tried the inserted muzzle kind of thing, and I tried an awesome darted variety (that would drive any sane person completely bonkers)and eventually I settled on a muzzle type four piece head with felt to highlight the facey parts.

A four piece head means either a four or two piece body , the first two piece body meant he had dangly legs which were cute and floppy but they wouldn’t work with the undies I wanted to try, so onto a four piece body with button jointed legs….  I got this far, little pinned-on ears and chunky baby kind of limbs….yeah, not loving him yet so today I decided to add some character to see if I could see where I was heading.

Aha, I added a bit more “face” and the felt undies. A cape and mask (of course). gee those undies are badly aligned aren’t they?

but hmmm.

The arm is too straight and unfriendly looking

The leg is…. on drugs ?

The cape might be a bit short and the front overlappy bits are far too wide.

Do I need larger leg holes in the undies, the obviously need some embroidery etc. to make them look like undies

The tummy might be a little extreme.

The mask was just for effect so I’ll need to do a few more variations.

Lower the ears?

Sounds like complete plastic surgery.

 

Lucky he is a patient kind of patient.

(Throw your hat into the ring guys, I am not precious… what kind of surgery is required?)

People power and no I am not styling these photos

After quite a bit of faffing about in the land of bookface, asking for opinions, I was able to move forward with the bear guy that sprang up just before Christmas.   

You know, I think the thing about toys is trying to make something that looks like the real shape of animal , but also looks appealing… a kind of compromise between a really truly representation of an animal and our idea of the animal.

(and of course the limitations of the person doing the actual making) I also think I think way too much.

    

So the Polar Brothers are born and I do really like them. Kind of real, and kind of cute and the best thing? that crazy Minky fabric makes them all touchable and rub-on-your-cheek lovely.

 

Please do ignore the gargantuanly headed deer who appears to have collapsed under the bears….

He just can’t stand on his own two feet.