Craftanoonevening

Well, another craft space happened at my place last Friday. Thought I'd post some pics, cos it's always inspiring to check out what other people are making! It goes without saying that it was a LOVELY mellow vibe.

Jotara brought along her hook rug - it has an amazing floating quality of movement, reminiscent of a sea anemone. Very tactile and delicious!

My Nan was down from Brisbane, so she came along, even though her current watercolour projects were too hard to transport. Instead, she set about untangling a few massive bundles of wool Jotara was working with. How helpful!

Here's me working on the old scrapbook, of course! I was very excited, at the end of the evening, to realise I only have ONE DOUBLE SPREAD and TWO HEADINGS to go, before the thing is COMPLETED!!!!! Unbelieveable!

Jotara, Piper and Bek, who was working on a knitted scarf, in between poking Piper in the head!
Anna's output for the evening: three stamps, from go to whoa! A tree, an elephant with a raised trunk, and an elephant with a lowered trunk, inspired by fabric I had on hand...

This is one of the pages I got done (excuse the bad photo). I was very pleased to get this one done (the letter O) because I knew I'd have to get into the creative zone and be willing to make a mess of tissue paper to get it happening. But that's the point of a long craft space - I had enough time to get into that head space...

The boys (Gord, Pete and Jesse) even got to puzzling in the kitchen (and letting Jasper suck on beer bottles!). Fun all round...

Craft night

Well, the craft night last night was great, in my opinion! I was actually able to finish some stuff, in between dealing with my kids, etc (not that I did too much of that, in the evening, anyway, when there were a fair few other people for them to bounce off! And most importantly, a Pippa to play with!). Not only that, I got to hang out with people I really like! Can't get much better than that!

Here's what was on the go:

- Anna was embellishing two tops for some lucky new babies...

- Jennie was knitting a sleeve for her DH...


- Nat was knitting a baby hat with bargain yarn!


And I dragged out the scrapbook and finished four pages - whoo hoo!


Here's the saga of the scrapbook. We were in Canada a year and a half ago, for five months, visiting my DH's family. I decided that, for Christmas, I would make his parents a scrapbook of our time in Canada, an ABC of our experience, in fact. I'd never done any scrapbooking before. And given I was putting all this effort into pulling together layouts and Photoshopping photos, well, I thought I'd make one for us as well (two relatively identical scrapbooks).

Anyway, I left it a bit late, so the last week or two, I was up til 5am way too often in an effort to finish the gift in time, and being an ABC, I couldn't leave out any pages! I got about half? of ours done, and then I had to leave it, otherwise I was going to kill myself with fatigue. So yeah, it has remained unfinished til now, til I dragged it out last night and saw the light at the end of the tunnel. What an ace feeling - gotta love finishing off old projects!

Now for some reason, I neglected to take a photo of the beautiful red shawl my Mum was knitting - not quite sure how that happened, sorry Mum! And I didn't even think of snapping a shot of Samara's gorgeous array of tags earlier in the day... bummer... But anyway, you get the gist. It was just a really pleasant vibe, mellow music, conversation punctuated by periods of industrious silence, and a virtuous sense of accomplishment (for me anyway!!)....

Anna finished these two tops - top job mate!


And here we are at the tail end of the night - Mum, Jasper, Anna, Jennie, Natalie and Sally.

Flashback Friday

Can't believe it's been a week since I last posted! I guess I haven't done too much crafty stuff, although there's always knitting on the go. Actually, I did wake up one morning with a compulsion to sew something, a prototype of an idea, and I worked at that in all the little spaces I had that day, but now I need to make the next stage - how's that for secretive?! I will post about it when it all comes together, but yes, it's made for a boring blog this week.

And I can't even find a musical flashback photo - bummer! Here's a photo of me anyway, with my Mum and Dad in 1981. Tonight my friend Anna and I are hosting a craft space at my place, from 2pm til 10pm. We've hosted craft nights before, but I felt like we hardly got going and then it was time to wind it up, hence the early start. I also felt like I was forever jumping up to make people cups of tea, so this time I'm just going to leave all the stuff for that on bench. I'm not talking masses of people here, just our friends who are interested in making stuff. I'm hoping to finish the tea towel I started at the stitching night at Meet Me at Mike's, and perhaps tackle the next bit of the prototype, but I want to set low expectations so that whatever I achieve feels good! I could even post some photos, now there's an idea...

Before then, however, there's a house to tidy!

Here's Piper with the one finished crafty item of the week, a spider who came together 20mins before I had to dash off somewhere. So yeah, no finesse, but Piper was happy!