I just contributed this tutorial to CRAFT Magazine, which demonstrates how to make a needle felted pin cushion. Check it out!
Archive for the ‘DIY’ Category
Just Posted: DIY Voodoo Doll Tutorial
Thursday, January 19th, 2012Inspired by Lace
Thursday, December 1st, 2011
Don’t Forget about the East Side Culture Crawl this Weekend!
Tuesday, November 15th, 2011This weekend, or November 18th, 19th and 20th, myself and my house-mates will be opening up our studio for the Eastside Culture Crawl. It’s my first time ever participating (out studio was literally just finished a couple of weeks ago), and I’ve been busy needle felting and putting kits together.
Our studio is located behind our house in the alley, on Pender & Heatley. Head North East of the pirate house on the corner that you see in this google street view and you should find the alleyway. If you’ve reached Hastings, you’ve gone too far north. There are a few studios in the alley, and we’ll have our sandwich board in the alleyway.
At the event, I’ll be there demonstrating how to needle felt, and displaying some of the work that I’ve put together over the past couple of weeks. Along with the kit comes a special barbed needle for felting, a foam pad, fibre, and an instruction manual for how to make a needle-felted mushroom. All of the felt for the mushroom kit was hand-dyed with Kool-Aid!
This series is based on the characters from the stop motion Rudolph series that we all watched growing up!
(Yeti still in progress)
I will also have some knitted items, and greeting cards available for sale too. Hope to see you there!
Crafty Times: Natural Dyeing & Spinning
Monday, September 5th, 2011Dyeing with indigo!
The coolest part about indigo is that the colour changes once the item being dyed is exposed to air (and oxidizes). It starts as a bright green, and then changes to the deep blue indigo shade. It’s like magic. You can’t really see it in these photos unfortunately, I caught it after it had changed.
In other dye projects, I’ve been experimenting with natural dyeing by using jam jars (thanks penny!!) They work if they’re placed in the sun, but my stovetop gets pretty hot so I dyed over the stove. This solution is made up with berries that had gone off. I set out the blackberries and cherries and extracted the juices – and dyed some wool with it.
This wool was over-dyed. It used to be yellow – from a batch of onion skins – but is now this berry colour!
I also finished up a spinning project that I’ve been working on. Made my first hand-spun sweater! It was lots of fun, but it weighs a ton. Turns out I have to start spinning so that it traps more air – and less fiber, making it more “lofty.”
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Crafty Workshops: Basketry and Mighty Ugly
Saturday, September 3rd, 2011I recently took part in 2 awesome workshops led by 2 lovely individuals. The first was a basketry workshop with Sharon Kalis, who works with the Park Board to collect invasive species – that she then turned in to public art that’s displayed around the city. To make these installations, she invited those interested to learn – to take part in a free workshop. She did a series of these workshops, and I was involved with making basket orbs that will go up near Science World. It was great fun!
Sharon showing us how it’s done:
The second workshop was Mighty Ugly led by Kim Werker at Vancouver Hack Space. She encouraged us to make something really ugly.
This one’s mine. He is having a bad hair day and is going on camera in around 15 minutes!
Internet Troll:
Kim also has a workshop coming up at Plush on Main on October 8th if you want to check it out.
