#Crafting365 Days 36-48: The Joys of Embroidery, and of Orange

Time for another #Crafting365 catch up! Time flies when you're having lots of crafty fun...

On day 36, I cut my hair. I'm not sure if DIY haircuts really count as a creative task, but I am counting this one anyway! A bit messy, but not too bad and my hair has been looooooong for ages, it's a nice change to have it shorter again.

Day 37 was all about embroidery. You know that feeling when all of a sudden you just have to work on a particular project RIGHT NOW? I just could not resist the urge to work on some embroidery... so I sketched a whole bunch of new patterns and started stitching up this one which has been on my To Stitch list for, like, ever.

On day 38 I dug some pretty fabric out of my stash to plan something new. I adore these colours together.

The embroidery obsession continued on day 39. I thought I didn't have the right sized hoop to stitch up the patterns I'd sketched earlier (I think I used to own the size I needed but used the hoop to make a mobile? and then forgot to buy a new hoop to replace the one I'd cannibalized for my project? That seems like something I would do, anyway) ... but it turned out I had a bigger hoop that worked okay, hurrah hurrah.

On day 40 I started a new shade of yarn for my happy rainbow blanket: a lovely zingy orange. I am loving orange at the moment, and was actually wearing my orange cardigan (pictured at the top of the post) while knitting these squares :)

The orange-square-knitting continued slowly over the next few days, but I squeezed in some other crafty things too. I spent the afternoon of day 41 sticking lots of things into my "things that are too beautiful or interesting to throw away" scrapbooks. It's been such an age since I've added to my scrapbooks, I used up a whole glue stick adding all the new clippings!

Then on day 42 I was doing some filing and rediscovered a vintage pattern that had been "lost" for ages (because I'd put it in my filing pile along with accounts paperwork, etc, instead of a place where you'd think to look for an embroidery pattern - oops!). I'm delighted to have found this again and am really looking forward to stitching it. The pattern is designed for tapestry wools, but I'm probably just going to stitch it up with standard embroidery thread/floss. I'm also quite tempted to adapt the pattern to make a felt applique of some kind? Decisions, decisions.

By day 43, I was building up a nice pile of the orange blanket squares...

... and was finishing up the orange yarn on day 44. I'm knitting large garter stitch squares from each ball of yarn, and using the leftovers to knit mini moss stitch squares for my random patchwork blanket. Sticking with my orange obsession, my next chosen colour = a bright satsuma orange. So cheerful!

Day 45 saw more blanket square knitting, and more embroidery. My handwriting can be a little illegible at times, even when I write "neatly". My mum thought this pattern said "Poe the PEST..." and, well, she has a point, doesn't she? (It actually reads Be the BEST version of YOU). Terrible handwriting aside, I do love stitching handwritten text - though it does involve lots of teeny stitches to get round all those curves.

I finished my trio of embroidered designs on day 46 (I'll blog about the finished pieces soon, I promise!). The fabric I'm stitching on is so pale, I've taken care to keep the back of my work neat and to not carry any threads between sections.

 

I was feeling a bit sleepy on day 47 so I opted for something super simple: adding some more blocks of stitching to my scrappy cross stitch project.

When I do some cross stitch or embroidery and end up with a bit of thread/floss left over that's too short to really be worth keeping but long enough that it could be used to stitch a few stitches, I set it aside. Then when I've collected a few threads I use them to add some more blocks of colour to my patchwork project. I am so pleased with how this is turning out, and I adore how it's growing organically over time depending on the other makes I've been working on and what threads happened to be left over.

Then yesterday (day 48) I was gripped by the sudden urge to make something leafy and autumnal, so I grabbed some felt and got snipping! Fingers crossed this turns out how I'm picturing it in my head...

Six Years of Craftiness, in a Book!

When I was making up some books of press clippings earlier this year it got me thinking about other things related to my business that I'd like to archive or document somehow. I've got all my files and photos backed up, of course, and I back up my blog at irregular intervals too... but there's nothing quite like having a scrapbook or album to flick through, is there?

After a bit of research, I decided to try making a photo book. I'd heard good things about the books from Blurb and decided that getting a book printed would probably work out being a lot cheaper and a lot less hassle than going down the DIY scrapbook route (my printer drives me nuts! and the ink costs a blooming fortune!). I thought I'd chat a bit about how I put the book together in case any of you lovely folks are thinking of doing something similar.

Though I'm sure I may have written some interesting (?) things on my blog over the years, apart from my tutorials (which I'm thinking about making up into a separate booklet of some kind - a project for another day!) I realised that I was only really interested in collecting all the photos I've taken over the years. And I decided to stick to crafty photos only (leaving out the more personal home and life-related pics from my blog) as though there's room for personal stuff on my blog I didn't think photos of my old flat, etc, would sit well with the more business-y things like product photos... and now I'm single I have a lot less desire to look at photos of where I used to live :)

Blurb have an easy to use bit of software which you download and then use to create your book. It includes lots of ready-made templates for you to use, with spaces for adding text and/or images, but you can also create custom page layouts which was what I wanted. I made a custom layout with spaces for four square photos on each page, and then I used Pixlr to create collages from my photos and put one collage in each space to create pages jam-packed with images.

Using collages like this was great because the problem with getting photos printed is that you have to have good quality large images or else they won't print well... and though I have some hi res images a large chunk of my photos are really rather small. I take a lot of quick snaps because when they're just going to be used in a blog post or a shop listing, so why bother with a large image size? And I also lost several months worth of original files due to a computer-related disaster a few years ago so there are a whole bunch of pics where the small version I uploaded to my blog is the only one I've got. But you don't need large images to make collages, hurrah! Problem solved.

Your photos also don't have to be perfect, or totally fascinating when they're in a collage... so I could include photos of lots of the "everyday" bits and pieces that make up my crafty life (like photos of posting supplies) as well as my more "pretty" photos and I could include lots and lots of pics on a page... so a) I could fit in more photos, b) this would make it much easier to choose the pics I wanted to include as there was room for so many of them, c) I could fit "everything" in without having to spend loads of money on a whole stack of books and d) hopefully the finished result would be really visually interesting and, well, just fun to look at.

But enough of this waffling - on to some photos of the finished book! :)

I chose the hardback option, with a dust jacket and just picked a few of my favourite higher res images for the front cover and the back...

... the book is a large square (12 x 12 inches / 30 x 30 cms) so a nice coffee-table book size.

Then inside I've got 43 pages of photos, in roughly chronological order from 2007 through until the end of 2012. I chose a slightly glossy paper which looks really nice (but does make it a bit tricky to photograph!)

I was a bit worried about how my photos would print out but - apart from a few pics which I knew would be a bit dark or blurry - they all came out pretty crisp and lovely and bright.

I tried to group similar types of photos together when I was making the collages, so some of the spreads are very busy with work-in-progress pictures and lots of colourful supplies...

... and others are more product-shot heavy with more white space...

... while others are full of tutorials, or my personal crafting projects like all the knitting I did last year. I like how the different pages look and breaking the pictures up into categories helped make the collage-making and the book-layout-planning go much more smoothly than it otherwise might have.

Overall I am thrilled with how it turned out. It was definitely worth the money and the time spent sorting and arranging all the photos. And luckily Blurb do lots of smaller book sizes too so I won't have to wait another six years before putting together a second book!

P.S. Sorry if this post has popped up in your inbox or blog feed twice - I hit the wrong button (oops).

An Exciting Parcel

Remember those mosaics I was making of my old crafting photos? Well, I finally finished putting them together and ordered my photobook and it arrived today:

I'm really pleased with how it turned out & I can't wait to show you guys some more snaps tomorrow :)

Much less excitingly, I've also finally finished working out the new postage rates for my shops and updating all my listings to reflect the Royal Mail's new prices. Goodness, what a chore! It feels great to have it ticked off my to do list though (phew!).

Things on my April To Do List

Remember my sky blanket? I had totally hoped to have it finished by the end of 2012 but I was so busy working on my new book that I just didn't have the time... and what with one thing and another suddenly it's April and it's still not finished! Tsk tsk.

So, finishing sewing on all these remaining squares is on the top of my "restful crafty things" to do list for this month. I've sewn a few on already, and have about thirty left to go...

Also on my April to do list: finishing organising the folders of press clippings I started putting together a couple of months ago.

I'm adding all my magazine clippings and printing out some nice blog mentions and interviews too, so I can have an easy to flick through archive instead of a stash of magazines & a bunch of bookmarked links. I've kept one magazine though - a lovely Chinese magazine that was my first ever press mention (super exciting!).

The magazine and my press folders live here along with my copies of the craft books my designs have been featured in. We jokingly refer to this shelf as my "ego shelf" :)

In other news, I have totally failed to calculate all the new shipping rates for my shop... so even though the Royal Mail's postage rates have now gone up you guys have a few more days to shop at the "old" prices before I finish my sums.

A Quiet Week

I've been doing some sketches / working on some proposals for a few new projects this week, which is always exciting (fingers crossed some of them get accepted!) but alas I can't tell you guys about any of that yet.

So, what can I tell you about? Well, to be honest things have been pretty quiet here this week as I've been slowly catching up with emails etc from my time off sick... and I've also been trying to take things easy so I can get back to feeling 100% again after this ongoing bug.

It can be quite tricky to do this when you're self-employed, as there's always a big pile of stuff that needs doing and work to catch up on and projects you're itching to get started with... but sometimes you just have to press pause and do some restful things instead!

One of the upsides to still feeling a bit worn out though is that jobs you'd usually find really really boring don't seem too bad. I've been having a mega filing session - gradually working through my archive of blog photos and product pics, getting them all neatly labelled and filed.

It's very dull, but long overdue and the perfect job for me to be working on at the moment!

I also have an extra bit of incentive, as I need to have my photos better organised so I can use them to make lots of mosaics for the fun scrapbook / photobook I'm planning as a record of all my crafting.

I'm getting there slowly!

Pssst - remember, you can get 25% off any orders from my Etsy shop or my Big Cartel shop this weekend with the discount code ILOVEFELT - and remember, postage will be going up next week thanks to the new Royal Mail parcel rates.

Making Mosaics

I've been thinking about making some sort of scrapbook (or maybe a fancy printed photo book?) to have a proper physical record of the crafty photos I've taken over the years.

So I've been playing around with some old photos and making a few mosaics to try out possible layouts...

... it's rather fun looking through all my old photos!

Scrapbooking

Sorting through pretty pictures I've saved to stick in my scrapbooks = the best kind of filing!

Crafty Evenings

I'm trying hard to switch off my laptop early in the evening and to properly relax, so that when I go to bed (hopefully nice and early) my brain is no longer buzzing with work stuff or interesting things I've read online, etc. And for me, relaxing = sitting on the sofa doing some simple, slightly mindless crafting.

So this week I've been knitting some blanket squares using some of my leftover sky blanket yarn...

... and also cutting out lots of doodles and sticking them in that ideas scrapbook I blogged about a couple of days ago. I'd take a photo of some of the pages but I don't want to give away all my secrets (!) so here are some of the leftover paper scraps instead:

I think that is possibly the most boring photograph I've ever shared on my blog, haha!

Pretty Paperwork

I'm working on more admin this week, but I took a break over the weekend to do some fun paperwork: cutting, sorting and sticking pictures to fill my scrapbooks.

I don't usually keep personal scrapbooks (although I've made some in the past, I'm normally happy with keeping bits of sentimental ephemera in boxes) ... but I am slightly obsessive about keeping "inspiration" scrapbooks, filled with all those images from magazines, etc, that are just too gorgeous and/or interesting to throw away.


I've been keeping these scrapbooks since my mid teens and I've filled quite a few exercise books over the years... here are just some of them:


... and you can see a few of the pages here if you're curious! I get so much of my visual inspiration online these days, the scrapbooks fill up much more slowly, but I have no plans to break the habit.

P.S. I'm still exploring my collection of mixtapes, although I have to admit that all the random memories they've been stirring up have been a teeny bit distracting when I've been working! (what is it about music that provokes such vivid memories?) Ah, being 16... *misty-eyed nostalgia*