Door wreath

This years door decoration is recycling the wreath I made years ago from the "tree" that tried to take root in our 5th floor balcony. Because Ireland is so fertile that you have to be careful of what will sprout from the dust caught between tiles and wall...

I have now decorated it with pine cones and several felt harts and stars made of few shades of white/cream and red felt.

It is very simple but I like it.

Advent calendar

I have created an advent calendar village.

The houses and the roofs are 2 separate pieces of cereal box over which I glued in the pages of an old book for walls and red packing paper for roofs.

They are glued together using hot glue. 

Tissue paper basket

I have been trying to find uses for the tissue paper I have spun in the last year. Some of it is in small quantities so I made a small basket.

The basket was crocheted around a length of spun newspaper. 

The crochet technique involving crocheting around another thread has a name but I could not remember it. I tried to find it and while looking I found this tutorial: http://makemydaycreative.com/2013/06/12/crochet-rope-basket/

I made the base crocheting back and forth a few times, I then widened the base increasing at the corners and after 3 rounds I stopped increasing the number of stitches. 

I started with a pale yellow and when I ran out of it moved to darker and darker shades.

I am now making a second basket with a narrower base and the same technique.

T-shirt recycling

At long last I have put to use the many old t-shirts I had saved in the past few years.

I have removed the seams and with the remaining fabric I made first strips that I then cut in sections of about 12-15 cm by about 5 cm. 

I have used an old towel as a base. I drew lines with a sharpie and stitched folded pieces of the t-shirts all along the lines.

The result is a thick nice bath mat. It is on the heavy side and should I do it again I would dye the towels a dark color as the orange sometimes peeks out from the pile.

Rice flour and gum Arabic resist

The first big bag has simply a large square of rice paste which cracked most attractively especially where the paste was thicker.

The second bag is a zen tangle. This one gave me some problems. I piped it using baking paper. I broke 2 of the piping bags and one of them "dissolved". I am not sure what caused it, the paste was the right consistency and then became more and more runny until I had to pour it out and add more flour.



After it dried I have realized that the initial consistency was to dense. It did not bond with the fabric. If I do this again I'll either wet the fabric first or make the paste runny.

I added gelatin to the paste and I am wondering whether the gelatin melted again with the heat of my hands squeezing the bag? Or maybe I involuntarily pushed the water upwards?

The last sample was made with a stencil made of fun foam. This would work well as a base for further design.









And these are the finished bags. Possible canvas for other techniques. 
Maybe couching design on the  top one?

Hand painted warp

This is a project spanning so many months I cannot even remember when I started it.

Ages ago I purchased in the Texere website a "very fine cotton" not realising that "very fine" equals to "insanely fine" in my classification.

The thread is soooo thin that I don't have enough heddles to use it by itself. I spent hours winding it into a warp and then I painted it using Procion MX dyes. The weft was died with the same type of dye in a solid turquoise.

I then left it in a bag waiting to be brave enough to warp all the heddles I own.

I am working it as a simple tabby. I should say that I choose this structure to show off the painted warp but actually I know that it is going to be hard enough without adding anything else.

I found that for some unknown reason one side of the warp is tighter than the other. On top of that, in the middle of the weaving, I had to move house and the castle of my table loom had to be folded. This requires all the tension to be removed from the warp. That -I am afraid- did not help any with the bad tensioning.

Origami wreath

I followed the directions from this blog post: How do you make that paper sun? but made them(yet again) with presents paper I could not bear to part with.