Hey Blog! I hope you had a great Jubilee weekend – it’s not often we get to witness something like that! This week I want to talk about making projects, projects made with a few odds and ends, which can be super fun and inspiring!
Crafting is an amazing experience. It can be done with as little as masking tape, glue, sharpies, and bits and pieces found around the house. However, most people have a little more than that to make things out of. I’d like to share with you a few of the crafting projects I have been doing recently, starting with… Bunting!
A few weeks ago in Maths is Everywhere! I said I was starting bunting for my shed. Last Sunday I completed it, and hung it up. I needed to bang in four extra nails to hang it on, two in the middle and two at the ends. I had bought the fabric a few months ago, and cut out the pieces a month later, but I only got down to sewing it these last few weeks. It required cutting out two pieces for each triangle of bunting, then sewing them together, tying off the ends, trimming the point, turning them the right way out, ironing them, then sewing them on to specially bought bias binding tape, and tying it to the shed. It was hard work, and took a long time, but nowhere near as hard as if I’d had to do all of it by hand, as people used to before sewing machines! However, if you have a shed of your own (not that it’s any better than the Home Ed Shed, of course, unless it’s a multi-story treehouse with zip lines, fireman’s poles, mounted crossbows, and an internal slide going down to a secret underground bunker!) I recommend considering some fabric ornamentation similar!
Last Wednesday on our ‘Day out with friends’ we went to the White Peak Distillery, in Shining Cliff Woods. This is a business making gin and whiskey, and though the products are rather expensive, I have it on good authority that their gin is very good! They have also worked with the Wildlife Trusts; one such time was making a gin using the invasive species Himalayan Balsam, which helps to get rid of it. However, much as Mum would like, we were not making gin, rather going back to what the distillery building was used for in the past – it is an old wireworks! In this session, which was run by the first home-ed family we found when coming to the area, we were making wire leaves for an exhibit about the heritage of the area. It was really exciting, and I found that using craft wire to make things out of is a lot easier than using the heavy-duty garden wire I had used in the past! I made a sprig of seven rowan leaves, which will has been added to the ever-growing branch of various leaves and twigs. Wire like the stuff that I was using here costs a little more, but can be used for many things once bought.
I have also been using wire in another little project I have been doing. Last week I told you all about sailing, and so I thought I would make a model boat. However, Laser Picos (the type of dinghy I was sailing in) are a little different to the boat I am making, as they do not have halyards (ropes to raise the sail) as the sails are bound to the mast, not the boom. This is where the wire comes in – the halyards are put through loops of wire. The boat is to be made out of leftover balsa wood from another ship is made, but this project is not finished yet.
The final piece of work on craft I have done lately is not even started, but is worth mentioning. I am attending a craft group that is making puppets, and at the end we will perform a play with our puppets. The first session was all about doing several designs and choosing a design out of these. Hopefully at the end of the set of meetings I will have a finished puppet and be ready to show it to you!