The Prize Squid!

Well, it has been a while. How are you both?
A number of things have happened to me while I've been away - I've been to see my grandmother in Dorset and taken some photos of her garden, which I may or may not post on this blog. I also got hooked on yet another new thing in addition to Homestuck and Tumblr - it was slightly alarming, even to me, to find myself watching something called 'My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic' and even more alarming to find that it's not only better than it sounds but I actually identify with someone whose given name is Twilight Sparkle. Either standards in children's animation are going up or I need my head read. Possibly both.
The third thing that happened - well, this happened LONG before the last post, but I just didn't tell you because I wanted to make a special post.

I completed the giant squid. The one that was mentioned way back in my first ever post on this blog. And wow, this thing is huge. It has taken a bit over four bags of stuffing and is about five feet long - I haven't measured it - and this picture here was taken with it hanging from the knocker of my front door, so you get an idea of scale.

Now, I was going to give it to my neice right away - it was about five months late, after all - but then my mother reminded me that the following weekend brought a local extravaganza called the Todmorden Agricultural Show. Now, this mostly focuses around horses, sheep, chickens, that sort of thing, but it does have a handicrafts tent. A competetive handicrafts tent.
I was reluctant to enter at first - I'd seen this thing before and it was all very traditional, but after a bit of thought I picked up an entry form and went in. Actually bringing the squid in was amusing - I had it slung over my shoulder and the man walking in front of me kept looking back, I could see him thinking 'I'm being followed by a woman in a horned hat carrying a squid...' but then, that's pretty normal in this town. We do have a community art college, after all.

I didn't really think it'd do very well, but I went back that afternoon, after the judging was over, and what do I see around the 'Open Class' table but a small crowd of people and, once I'd got through them, pinned to one of the tentacles...

Giant squid officially rule. The plan for next year is a steampunk ghost-catcher, among other things. Watch this space, I want more of these certificates.

The Golden Hands Encyclopedia of Crafts (part two)

Goodness, what a long time it's been since my last post! Life has been busy with a great many distractions - I have turned twenty-nine, been visited my my grandmother, been introduced to Homestuck and Tumblr in quick succession*, therefore I have lost a great deal of sleep and more projects than this have fallen by the wayside. Time to pick them up, methinks.

 
 And on that note, where was I? Oh, yes, reviewing the Golden Hands Craft Encyclopedia, published by Marshall Cavendish in 1975. Of course they're not on sale now but if you want to keep an eye out, there are the single magazines, and the white PVC binders, and as far as I've seen, most people who collected them managed to get at least one binder, so those are fairly common. Whether there are books other than the one I have I do not know.

I'll start with the magazines themselves, and I'm not going to review them all - that would be highly ambitious and very silly! I've picked out an issue from early in the series and one from late in the series so I can compare what the projects are like.

Issue 6 is not the earliest I have - in fact I have a binder with all the early issues of Crafts, as I have been used to calling it (the reason, as you see, is obvious), but this was the first issue I had with the cover still on, so this is the one you get.

And the cover is important, because each issue has on the back cover either 'Picture Making' or 'Junior Craft Cards' - we'll discuss the former in a minute, but this one has the latter, and says, in simple language with folksy seventies pictures, how to make a simple clothespin doll. A pretty standard craft card, although they did get pretty complex occasionally and at least one of them involved hacksaws (how to make a 'jolly paddle steamer', if you're wondering. Somewhere towards the middle of the series).

Inside the front cover, we have an imperial to metric conversion chart, the usual subscription, credits, etc, and the contents, which explains roughly what's going to be happening in each chapter - I wouldn't remark on it, except that a couple of these have a star beside them for a 'special money-saving, re-cycling chapter' and one has an exclamation mark for 'not suitable for children without adult supervision'. That means Marshall Cavendish think carpentry is suitable for children without adult supervision, because the only one to get this mark is the glass chapter. The chapters in this issue are Glass(!), Clay, Dyeing(*), Crochet, Patchwork(*), Carpentry, Beadwork, Pin Art and Design Know-How, the latter of which you get in, I think, every issue.
Before we get to those, though, we have Creative Ideas, which is also another thing that happens pretty much every issue, and means 'here's something we thought was cool but was too simple or random to actually make a chapter out of'. This one is painted bead necklaces, and it's one of those projects that looks just perfect for a rainy afternoon when there's really nothing better to do and no-one seems to be online.

Finally we get to the actual chapters, and first is Glass 1: Glass Etching Made Simple. After gaining the only danger mark in the whole index, one of the first things the author of the article says is that too many people don't try this because they think glass is dangerous and what silly people they are.** It gives a short history of acid etching and outlines first what the pros use for this - then tells you what you, the amatuer, should be using so you can have fun and get a decent result at the end. There are photos of the finished product, but all the instructional images in this chapter are felt tip drawings - throughout the series, the actual instructional images tend to use a mixture of drawings and photos, but they are always very clear. After discussing everything for about a page, then you get to the actual instructions, which are bullet-pointed step by step instructions and, since I haven't tried glass etching, I can't say how clear the ones in this chapter are, but if they don't make perfect sense upon careful reading, they are definitely the exception. The chapter finishes with a bunch of safety tips, which I would think should come first, but I think the editors assumed you were going to read the whole chapter before starting.

That's a pretty standard chapter layout, but the next chapter, Clay 4, is pretty pedestrian by comparison, and you get 'First Steps in Modelling', with unfired clay. I think the previous clay chapter was about picture tiles, and Crafts has a lot to say about clay. You get to build your own kiln later on and everything.
The next chapter will show you that the index lied to you and 'Dyeing' is actually 'Colour - Dyeing 1'. This one is pretty much entirely theory, and tells you what dyes are, about different types of commercial dyes, special dyes, special problems with dyes and a bit of colour theory. Crochet moves you on from granny squares to circles, Patchwork offers machined squares and rectangles, and Carpentry teaches you how to make 'perfect picture frames'. Any child can do it! Beadwork shows you, basically, how to string seed beads, and was the reason I was very confused when I came to buy seed beads for the first time, because the magazine calls them rocailles, and the bigger ones rotelles. 'Yarn - Pin Art 1' of course shows you how to do those delightfully retro geometric string and pin designs, Design Know-How gives a simple geometry lesson on straight lines, and then finally, in the back cover, you get an addition to your Motif Collection, which this issue is a selection of spiffy tribal-esque African designs.

Issue 95 is again, not the last I have, but issue 98 is actually the index, and the latest issue before that has a Junior Craft Card on the back. This one has a Picture Making piece, which is another 'hey, we thought this was cool' item like Creative Ideas, only generally a lot less practical.
The Creative Ideas this issue basically involves making a painted picture frame to hold your cookie cutters - I can't explain it any better than that.

 But it does show that the reader is expected to have improved a lot over the series. We are presented with Flowers and Plants, in which you can make fantasy flowers out of dried flowers and leaves; Carpentry (chapter 32, this was another popular one) - introduction to wood turning; Leather, which shows you how to make stitched gloves; and Shellcraft (chapter 6, Crafts didn't have much to say about this, clearly), piercing and threading shells. In Beadwork we're still with rocailles (I just like the word) but it's teaching you bead weaving, Basketry has you doing hedgerow work - that is, using undyed materials from hedgerows, Cloth - Upholstery teaches you how to renovate a chaise longue which looks exactly like the one my mum has, only pink. There's no design know-how chapter in this one - presumably by this point you know all the necessary how of design. But there is a section of a Kurdish rug for the motif collection, which reminds me that I really much go through all these and trace the motifs...

 Aaaand that's about it. I'm not going to review the book, it's pretty much the same as the magazines only in bound form. If you can get some of these, do so, they're instructional and inspiring and I can nearly guarantee you'll learn something, maybe find a new hobby. Possibly most importantly in my life, they meant that I wasn't trying to limit myself to just one craft, I had this stack of everything - the chapters I've mentioned here are not half of what was on offer - and so I chose what looked fun.
Sometimes the best thing you can give a budding artist of, oh, twelve years old is a stack of miscellaneous instructional books, a big box of random supplies and permission to see where she goes from there.

* - I am not going to link my Tumblr here, since it's my personal Tumblr and it's already shown a distressing tendency to accumilate, er, alarming Homestuck fanart. What can I say, once a fangirl always a fangirl, even pushing thirty...
** - I may be guilty of hyperbole here, but you get the idea.

Nostalgia Time - The Golden Hands Craft Encyclopedia (part one)

Did everyone have a lovely Easter? Lots of chocolate consumed, I hope? I spent the weekend with my Dad's family, and there was a massive family outing to Bolton Abbey, the kind which requires multiple carloads of people, several bags of food and at least one dog (my brother's girlfriend's dog, Lola, obliged). I spent most of the time being towed around at high speed by my six-year-old neice and debating the possible reasons for fountains (don't ask, kid-logic is incredible). The weather has been lovely and a good time has been had by all.

You can make absolutely everything here.

But today's post is about something nice that happened to me before Easter. You see, my town has the best flea market for miles around, and while I was hunting around its many and varied stalls (seriously, you can pick up anything from a WWII army jacket to an old Gameboy, this place rocks), I found this. For £2. Two pounds, people, that is ridiculously cheap.

Does anyone remember the Golden Hands Craft Encyclopedia? I won't be surprised if you don't, it was published by Marshall Cavendish in 1975 and is therefore older than me - it was first published as a 98-part partwork and my mother collected, oh, let's say three quarters of it. I'd say about a quarter of the finished product is in this book - unfortunately not all the bits I'm missing, since my collection is missing parts throughout and this book just seems to have the first quarter. But it does have several things I didn't have, and a few pieces of information I'd been looking for for some time. Like, for example, a beginner's guide to crewel embroidery, a whole sheet of motifs that I'd had but had been ripped out of the relavent magazine and gone missing, seaweed marbling - which is that ultra-controlled marbling you see in the endpapers of expensive books, working with Japanese handmade papers - oh, yeah, and especially this.

It doesn't teach you how to make a *real* Faberge egg like the one in the picture. But close.

The collection of magazines I have shows various egg-dying and painting techniques, but this one shows egg-cutting, which was the information I was missing. For one thing, it honestly wouldn't have occurred to me to keep the contents of the egg in the shell while cutting it - now I know. But this book shows you everything from single-window cuts to those multiple-panel cuts that make the egg open up like a flower. Hmm, this will, obviously, take practice. Maybe I'll have something to show you by next Easter - the museBOT is thinking maybe we can get hold of a dremel and make a FrankenEgg.

Since I have a lot of GH Crafts magazines and their derivatives, I'm going to leave an actual review for later. In the meantime, how was your Easter? Did you do any egg-dying - or anything more complicated? Tell me in the comments!

Giveaway at Creature Comforts!

Yes, that's right, we have a giveaway - unfortunately not my giveaway, you have to go over to the lovely Ez at Creature Comforts and see. Jill Bliss is giving away this fantastic Drawing Nature journal, and naturally I am entering the competition - you should too.

Rules for Entry (PLEASE READ ALL RULES BEFORE ENTERING):

• For your entry, please leave a comment at Creature Comforts telling Ez why you'd love to win a copy of Drawing Nature (if you plan to give it as a gift to someone, she'd love to know who the lucky person will be).

• BONUS ENTRY is available if you blog or tweet about this giveaway with a link back to this post.  Be sure to leave your regular entry comment PLUS a second comment with the link to your post or caption of your tweet (including your twitter username).

• All entrants, please be sure to include your first name AND last initial plus a VALID email address when commenting or Ez will not be able to include you in the final drawing when selecting the winner.
• One comment per reader unless you have been given a second entry by posting about this contest. (Ez does use IP tracking)
• Contest open to everyone - US and International entrants welcomed.

• This contest will end Tuesday, April 26th and the winner will be announced here on Wednesday, April 27th. 

Aaaand that's it! Good luck to you! And yes, naturally I posted it here because I wanted an extra entry, but I also wanted to spread the word. Don't hold it against me, please...

Bats and finished things!

Firstly, what I'd like to say is: FINALLY! All the work I was doing for the Help Japan charity auction is finished. The keyrings are finished. The weather is crummy, so the photo leaves much to be desired, but they ARE finally finished.

The second bat is also finished. And both bats are off to their destinations. The keyrings are part of a bigger parcel so they have yet to go, but I have no more actual work to do on them.

I do have plans to make more bats shortly - a friend has commissioned another bat from me, and I want to make several hanging from a couple of sticks (a bat-mobile, of course - thankyou, I'll be here all night), but this is the last for a while, until its back to the squid.

But I have another bat to show you. Remember when I said I'd bought a bat netsuke from the antiques shop in town? Well, I photographed it for you - not a good photo, but I eventually lost patience and thought I had a better picture than I did. It's far too late at night for me to go down and try again, my hands are shaking like anything, it'd only be worse. So here you are - one more bat, with a very cute face:

Sleep tight!

Promises, promises...

So the good news is that this blog is now ten days old and I haven't run out of ideas yet, not anywhere close. Oh, no, there are many things planned for this little spot of netspace.
The bad news is that I'm still working exclusively on the Help Japan bat and keyrings, so I can't actually put any of these plans into motion until they're finished. Working on it, I promise. However! Today I'm going to tell you what I have planned. Aside from finally finishing that bloody squid.

First of all, this place needs a banner, a proper one. One made in cloth and stitches by me, so I'll be designing and making that, and putting it in place.

Second, Sara at The Split Stitch has a lovely little easter sampler which you can download for free and which I certainly will - as you can see from this WIP picture, it is most egg-sellent (pause to be pelted with rotten eggs) and versetile. I am thinking of doing it in appliqué and embroidery, with plenty of nice glittery beads and sequins to set it off with.

Sara's work, not mine. My french knots aren't anywhere near this neat.

Also, I should be showing you Stuff That's Been Inspiring Me Lately - I could do that now, except that I think we need a day for it, maybe Thursdays, for no other reason than that's flea market day here in my town and that makes it a fitting day in my mind to throw a bunch of links and pictures at my readers, plus you get to hear me gush about what bizarre thing I found on the flea market/at the antique shop/wherever. So there.*

I almost forgot! There will be tutorials on this site in future. Free charts, patterns, all that kind of thing - I'm not going to give up the Psychotoy pattern but frankly, that one is so unbelievably simple that I'm stunned nobody's worked it out themselves yet. But there will be other animal toys, and dolls, and cross stitch charts, and other embroidery charts - all kinds of cool stuff, as well as the reviews of magazines, books and craft equipment that I mentioned before. One thing you're going to have to bear with me on, though, is that my computer graphics skills are minimal at best and I don't have a charting program, so these will mostly be hand-drawn. I will test them myself and if they are not clear they won't be here.

Is that everything? Pretty much, I think. Glorious June weather here in England - funny really, since it's only April...

* - Today it was a bat netsuke. It's got a very cute face and it's made so that when it's attached to a string, it naturally hangs upside-down. I'd squee, but I'd die of shame.

Spring has POUNCED!

The town I live in is a very pretty town, always full of flowers in the spring and summer, very brightly-coloured in autumn and in winter, stark in that picturesque Christmas-card fashion that tends to involve snow and robins and sheep and occasionally Shetland ponies. It is, all in all, a very inspiring place to be and it's no wonder that we have, at my last count, six galleries and a community art college across the same half-mile stretch of ground.

Only right now? I am far too busy for this.
Spring has sprung like a well-aimed mantrap, offering me bright flowers in all directions. There are planters, memorial gardens and instances of guerrilla gardening all over the place, all of them bursting riotously into bloom and I am up to my neck in Things I Really Should Be Doing, so there is no way I can drop everything and start embroidering pointless bits of cloth in frivolous pastels.

But it is at least a beautiful day out there, so the daffodils look sunnier than ever, and there are thousands of them. The Patmos war memorial garden in the centre of town has so many, and they bloom all down the sides of the train track - if I wasn't so busy with ofther things I'd be making yellow satin stumpwork daffodils right now. Or maybe forget-me-nots.

Forget-me-nots are possibly my all-time favourite flower, like a little scrap of sky with a sun in it, and they're abundant round here, too - and in a few of the communal beds, someone's made them grow in white and hot pink and navy blue as well. Incredible.

But the bloom that is reminding me of my duty projects and making me really happy that I'm doing them is this. The cherry blossom, or as they call it in Japan, the sakura. There's a lot of these in my town - they're just starting to really come into flower now, in a couple of weeks these and the apple trees will be in full flower and the air will be full of whirling blossoms like something out of a Japanese film. Before I came here I thought the showers of blossoms blowing in the wind in romance scenes was just a special effect but it really does happen just like that - at the end of my road, at the right time of year, you can stand under the cherry tree and feel like a romantic film star as the petals swirl around you and get caught in your hair.

So how much have I been motivated? Well, I had two Psychobats and two keyrings to make, and yesterday afternoon I was at this stage:

Today, I've done a little more on that second keyring and the turquoise bat - oh! and the blue and fuchsia bat is finished and ready to post! Here he is!

I call that progress, don't you?