Crocus Love

Hello........... This year the Crocuses have been just fabulous here at the Summerhouse, they may have come up a little later than usual, but boy have they been beautiful.

It all started with just one or two, the cream and white kind always seem to come up first.

Then we had the clumping together kind

of some many lovely colours.

The dainty kind

that seem almost ethereal

just look at the colours when they open up to the sun, so magical.

We've also had the growing up through the grass under the tree kind, 

Lovely to see them popping they're heads up through the grass

and just look at those stripes.

Don't you just love the stripy kind? ............

Me well, I love them all

Clare xx

Pine Cone Fairies

Hello........... I have a fun make to share with you today, one of the themes for our craft club exhibition is Fairies and I just could'nt resist having a go at making some from pine cones.

The idea kind of mushroomed from the Magic wool fairies book I have by Christine Schafer, I made my first felted fairy 'here' last summer and since then with relapses I've not really got any further with felting, but when I found some pine cones in the Christmas box inspiration hit, Pine cone fairies !!!! I just needed to make some,  I  had some wooden heads, pipe cleaners and sequins in my stash and a idea what more could I need.....

Well the answer to that it turns out is lots and lots of different glues, as I discovered it really hard to get things to stick to pine cones after a lots of trail and error I finally used lock tight super glue and even then some fairy decapitations still happened eek !!!!

Once the head was on I made some pine cleaner arms and added pretty beads to each end for my fairies hands.

The arms were much easier to attach as you can just bend them around and through the cones and they stay in place.  I then used pva to glue some felt hair to my fairies head, I knotted it in the middle using baker twine to make a hanging loop, now you really have to wait quite a while for the glue to dry at this stage, if not you risk a bald headless fairy situation. !!!

I then added a pretty flower to cover the knot in the bakers twine and set about styling my fairies hair

Next up I used some leaf sequins to make some sparkly wings I used glue dots to gradually build up the wings, then I had the same old problem of what sticks to a pine cone ? as the surface is so uneven, this time I used sticky foam pads to build up a flat surface.

and thankfully that was enough to hold the wings in place.

Ta-Dah

Fairy number one 

I then decided to make a male fairy giving him a wizard like beard and pointy felt hat

I made him a larger set of wings and this time I wrapped the pipe cleaner arms in some silver sparkly yarn.

Ta-Dah

Isn't he a cutie, I love how much personality these little fairies have.

Last up I made a purple fairy, this time I made her some pretty paper wings with added sparkles I also wrapped some ribbon around the cone and added extra sparkles.

These fairies really are a lot of fun to make, after a bit of hairstyling my final fairy was ready.

Ta-Dah

So all my fairies are now on display in the local library and I was pleased to discover today that they all still have there heads, I did a bit of head testing at home before hand as I was a bit worried that the heads might come off and scare the children I envisaged going into the library and finding 3 severed fairy heads hanging on the branches and all the bodies fallen to the ground yikes............

But it was all OK, here they all are safe and sound hanging out with some woodland friends.

Happy Crafting

Clare xx

Woodland Flowers Mandala Ta-Dah

Hello......... It's Ta-Dah time today for this make which I started way back in May last year, you can read my first post about this mandala 'here'

but basically this mandala it's supposed to represent a year round woodland walk. I made the mandala to go on exhibition in the local library for our Craft Club.

So when I last posted the mandala was up too here and I was wondering about how to display it maybe a cushion, but I had fallen a little bit love with all the hula hoop mandala's that were about last year and so just had to have a go myself.

So  in order to fit in a hoop I needed to grow my mandala on a little bit, for the first part of the mandala I used  this pattern  but for the last few rounds I just winged it.

So I added a pale pink sparkle row, to represent frost on blossom followed by pale blues skies, blues skies and pink blossom really are a wonderful combination.

I then added a few more blue bells 

before my final round in  stylecraft special dk  Aspen.

I'm really loving the colours, as my mandala grew I kept measuring it up against the small hula hoop I bought, until it was big enough yippee.

  

The next problem was how to fix the mandala into the hoop ???

Thankfully Lucy over at Attic24 came to my rescue here as she has shared a wonderful tutorial showing just that, you can find it 'here'

 So following along with Lucy's tutorial I made a double outer round to secure my mandala, then it was just a matter of stitching it into the hoop.

 I was feeling poorly at the time so my lovely sister kindly stepped in at this point and stitched my mandala into the hoop as I was struggling to hold the hoop with my achy noodle arms.

Ta-Dah

One Woodland themed Mandala.

How the colours make my heart sing, my mandala is mostly made from stylecraft special DK with a bit of added sparkle yarn and is currently to be found hanging out on the library wall.

Happy Crafting

Clare xx