Student

My blog posts stopped when I started at Univeristy in September, the spare time I had that I spent on blogging is now spent on course work.

This post is an attempt to show some of the stuff I've been doing, no major works of art have emerged yet, I'm just enjoying being aloud to experiment.

This is from my book project, I had lot's of ideas, one of which was to make a zine from random articles but I then found this machine which the library was getting rid of. I ended up make a sort of audio book using a poem and photos.

This photo is from the 'Balance and Tension' project. I was looking at the tension caused to the viewer by things not bing quite right and what could be more wrong then sharp things in your jelly?

This is a photo of a mould I've made for the 'Perfect Prop' assignment. We have to make a prop, I decided to make a replica of a stovetop coffee perculator.

Felted Bowls

Hi all, sorry I haven't posted for ages and ages but I've been felting!


These are my first attempts to felt round a ball. They are two halves and I have felted the left handside one a bit more. The one on the right is my favorite as you can see all the fibres around the rim, it's just as it was when I cut the felted ball in half.


I have taken step by step photos for a tutorial but I'll explain quickly how I did it.

You have to make lot's of what are called in the trade - Pre-felts, which a small pieces lightly felted, you dry them, then.....................


your pin and stitch them all around the ball until you have lot's of layers built up, then you felt it. I will explain the whole process properly soon.



Then I made these bowls with good old fashioned kitchen appliances. I started felting them by hand and got bored and put them in the dishwasher. The dishwasher didn't felt them much but it made an interesting shape to the edges.


This pink and brown one is my favourite, you can't see from this photo but in the middle is a brown dot. When I had felted the two colours together a bit I cut a circle out of the middle and turned it over.





For the last few years my Mum and Dad have gone to Amsterdam to see the tulips and each year they buy an Amaryllis bulb for my nan, sister, me and one for them. We all get given them in paper bags with the colour of them written on it and every year the colours are completely different!! There follows lot's of up-date phone calls between my Mum and all the recipients letting us know what colour they really are, can't remember what colour mine was meant to be but it wasn't dusty pink.

Easter

Hope everyone is having a nice long weekend.


.............and it wouldn't be Easter without Easter Nests, ours went a bit odd with the chocolate overheating but with a bit of vigorous stirring, a night in the fridge and mini egg decoration they are now perfect.
I made some mini cheesecakes from a recipe in Nigella's How to be a Domestic Goddess, they are a bit of a flaff but taste v. nice!

Bread and Butter

On one of our days out while camping in West Sussex we visited the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum.

It's a fantastic place, full of buildings that have been rescued and painstakingly taken apart and rebuilt at the museum.




One of the buildings is a working water mill and Euan brought some flour ground by the mill......

and decided he wanted to make bread with the flour.

At another of the houses someone had been making butter, which he was very interested in, so while we were walking through the woods on our way back to the car park it was decided to try and make some butter to go with the bread when we got home.

I found a recipe for a really simple loaf called a Grant Loaf:

700g stoneground wholemeal bread flour
1 teaspoon of salt
7g sachet of easy-blend dried yeast
1 tablespoon of Honey
600ml Tepid water
and a 2lb loaf tin greased with butter.

It's very easy and very tasty.

Mix the flour, salt and yeast with your hands.


Add the honey and water and mix it up with your hands, after about a couple of minutes the dough should start to become slippery and elastic and leave the sides of the bowl.

Put the dough into your tin and smooth the top.

Cover with a damp clean tea towel for about 30 mins until it's risen to about 1cm from the top of your tin. Pre-heat your oven to 200c (400f) gas 6 while it's rising.

Bake your loaf for about 35-40mins, remove the loaf from the tin and tap the bottom, if it sounds hollow then it's cooked, if it makes a thump then put it back for another 5 mins.


Making butter took a bit longer. I found a great explanation of how to make butter.

We could have made it by hand but we (I) decided to do it in the food processor.

Basically the cream is whipped up until it separates. (It was at this point that enthusiasm wained and I was left to carry on by myself)

It's then washed in water.

Then mashed to remove more water. It's really easy to make, to see more detailed and illustrated instructions check out this site.

And there you go, home made bread and butter, plus a homegrown cucumber, it's just like the 'Good Life'.

That's me, the one with the glasses!

Make bags, Save the planet!

this beautiful bag was made by Courtney as part of the Swapbot 'pod'

let’s do something positive to reduce the hideous number of plastic bags being used - 1 million are consumed per minute globally - of which hundreds of thousands end up in the oceans.

the idea is to get together with people in your local community, drink wine and make reusable cloth bags (from old duvet covers, curtains from charity shops etc) and hand them out to the unsuspecting public for free on specified dates outside different supermarkets.

meet new people, do something marvellous for the planet and beat other pods (groups) of baggers with your morsbag tally.

go to www.morsbags.com to be a part of a wonderful thing!

p.s. non-commercial/ non-profitable - just full of beneficial things for everyone, especially whales!

(the above is the blurb from the morsbags site)

I have joined the Swapbot 'pod' to make bags, (Swapbot is an international online swapping group) we are all making bags and giving them away locally. But I would love to start a local group, even if people couldn't sew they could join in buy donating material and giving out bags.

One Week Wine

What do you do with all these brambles? we asked ourselves. Then it came to me, One Week Wine!

I had seen a 'how to' in CRAFT:03 so we decided to give it a go.


What you need is.................

a container, sieve, yeast, 2 litres of bramble type berries and (though we didn't think so at the time) muslin.

We started by pushing the brambles through the sieve..........

but we soon realised that squeezing them through muslin would get more juice out.

Decant the juice into a screw top container.

Add about a level tea spoon of yeast and leave for 7-10 days.

Do not keep the lid on really tight, this could cause a build up of gas and it will explode! Keep the container slightly unscrewed so as to let some of the gas out. Do not open the container and look in, if you do the air will react with the wine and could cause it to bubble out.

After 7-10 days your wine will be ready to decant........

let it stand untouched for 6 hours so the sediment will settle and then pass through some muslin.

And there you go, one week wine.

It might look quite inviting but it tastes bloody awful!

It was used today as part of a barbecue sauce recipe and I did toy with the idea of making it into Sangria!

It might not taste to good but it was fun to make and we are now planning our next adventure in home brewing and eyeing up our neighbours apples!!!

Make your own envelopes.

I love handmade envelopes but it's taken me a while to have a go at making my own but I have to say I now love making them and got carried away and made loads!

Want to make some? here is how:

Find an envelope the same size as one you want to make and carefully pull it open. This will be your template.

Select some paper for your envelope. You can use anything including magazine pages, wall paper or scrap paper.

Draw round your envelope....

and cut it out.

Now this is the bit I just discovered and it makes your finished envelope really neat.

Place your envelope template on top of your cut out envelope. Fold the envelopes together using the template envelope as a guide for the folds.

Fold all the sides in, remove the template envelope.......

and glue the side flaps closed.

There you go, handmade envelopes, you can even make your own glue that can be licked to seal closed.

Let's make kittens.

Finally got my sewing machine out from under my desk, oiled it and sorted out the tention.

My apprectice tailors knocked up some little cat stuffies-

boy02 now begs me to let him do 'practice sewing' on the sewing machine every day after school.