Spring into Design

Evening all,

hope your week is going well so far. It's nearly Friday so that's a positive!!

I have been working on a little challenge this week, that I thought would be fun to get everyone involved with. After the success of Faye Brown Design's advent challenge that she arranged in December I thought it would be a nice idea to have a spring time version. I have created 31 prompts for each day of March, the idea is to create something for each of the prompts, literally ANYTHING a collage, photograph, sketch, digital design, print anything you can think of. And of course you don't have to do all of them you can dip in and out only doing the ones that inspire you, or you can do all of them and create a spring inspired collection.

And of course you can take the prompts as literally or as loosely as you wish, just let them inspire you. Share your work using the  hashtag #springintodesign. 

So, do you fancy it?! Who's in?

Freehand machine embroidery workshop at The Makery...

Hello,

I'm so sorry I've been so quiet, January was quite a roller coaster of a month for me and the time just slipped away.

But I'm back and raring to get cracking again. Starting with a day trip to Bath yesterday where I took part in a freehand machine embroidery workshop at The Makery. This workshop has a maximum of 8 students taking part so you really get hands on help. The staff there were fantastic and when I turned up super duper early offered me a cup of tea and really made me feel comfortable. Susie the main tutor was fantastic really enthusiatic and very patient. As you know I've done a bit of freehand embroidery before but it was good to really learn from scratch.

I was introduced to both a wipe-off fabric marker, it's like magic, you draw on your fabric embroider over it then just dab it with water and it disappears (this is life changing!) and also Bondaweb, before I was using superglue to attach my fabric before appliqueing it on.. this stuff is amazing you just iron it and it attaches. wow. Mind blown!


There was a lovely selection of fabrics to choose from, for our appliques. The tutors were always on hand to help with any technical problems we may be having.

 I decided I wanted to try my cutlery work in applique and introduce a plate motif:

I was super happy to see polka-dot fabric in the selection (and may have accidentally treated my self to some in the shop after!)

With half an hour left I decided to make this little chap. 

The three hours absolutely flew by. It was so much fun and the work created was fantastic. 

After the course I had a mooch round the shop, as I had participated in a workshop I got 10% off the goodies. I could't turn that down now, could I? So I came away with a selection of treats and as soon as I got home got cracking on some more designs:

I definitely would recommend The Makery the courses really are value for money, I'm definitely going to be signing up for a few more. But first I've got some more embroidery to do...

See you soon

xx