Christmas is coming so it is time to make another glitter house

For the last 7 years I have made a glitter house a year, the patterns were all freely available on this website http://www.littleglitterhouses.com/ This is a picture of last years house in progress. This became the dark house on the right hand side in the following picture.

It is made of grey board. Traditionally they are made of cereal packets, but I wanted them to be more robust. Cereal packets would have been so so much easier to cut. However they are sturdy.

This is the village, each house is a different year and at the bottom of each house I write the key events of the year. They get wrapped up with the christmas decorations and put away every year, so when we take them out again it is really lovely to read what has happened. It is time to make a new house! Only problem is that I am running out of space. 

Ah no!! the village has been invaded by many rudolph's. 

Our latest SCA medieval re-enactment outfits, Viking (plus bonus picture of flemish garb I made many moons ago)

The red tunic was made by RovingAnarchist in a recent craftster swap www.craftster.org It needed a little adjustment.

To create complete outfits, I made some white tunics to go underneath, A Viking hat , trousers and a tunic for the Mister. And the piece de resistance a fully reversible wool coat for me.

A long time ago when I lives in the kingdom of Lochac. I made a 15Century flemish outfit. Dusted off, it looks like this.

Harry Potter bag

The fabric for this is a linen mix, I cut a stencil from an Ireland Quidditch logo that I found online, to make the front. The bag is lined with recycled fabric that I had tie-dyed and over printed with a lino cut of the golden snitch. Go Ireland!

Boro Bag- so many stitches

Boro is a Japanese repair and decoration technique. Many many tiny stitches. I used the technique to make this bag out of scrap, the bag fabric is made of squares glued down and long lines of parallel stitching secures all the patches. I did some cross stitching for decoration and then cut the fabric into a bag.

Recycling sweaters

This is the second 'sweater quilt' Here in Ireland we call them jumpers. I cut approx 12 inch (30cm) squares, keeping any interesting features, especially pockets.

All the squares are sewn together and the top is backed with fleecy blanket that is wrapped around the raw edge of the quilt and sewn down. The entire quilt is tied together at the corners of each square, with ties. I love recycling!

Some of the books that I have made recently

I love this flamingo fabric, so I had to make a book. I also added some random papers inside of the covers, as I like something interesting to pop up occasionally.

The book is stitched signatures, with fabric covering the greyboard covers. Stuck with PVA

I have also been volunteering to teach a craft class to a local group of refugees, the organisation does not have much money, so I am trying to supply all the materials, and scrounge what I can. We made these books last week, the covers are leftover boat cover materials, the pages are photocopy paper and the whole lot is stitched together with strong thread and a button as a closure. All done in 2 hours

Summer tie dyeing

Tie Dyeing makes me so happy, first sign of sunshine and we go mad. All of these fabrics end up getting used in one way or another, mostly as backgrounds for printmaking.


The following prints have all been printed onto tie dyed fabrics, some are commercial rubber stamps, the bees and daleks are my lino cuts.

Such a neglected blog. Here are a few things that I have made in the last while.

Some printed fabrics

This is a simple dalek print, A lino cut onto some tie-dyed fabric, The strips of fabric were inserted into a pair of pillowcases. For Dr, Who dreams. The same fabric was used to make a christmas stocking. The tardis stocking was appliqued, as a matching set. 

napkins printed with a martlet, for medieval re-enactment

Celtic knotwork crow. Corvids are amazing, this was another lino cut onto fabric, strips inserted into a pair of pillowcases

The ground fabric has been tie-dyed and overprinted with a fairly simple lino cut. Celtic knotwork

yay, best of craftster 2013...printing with the car was worth the hard work!

I'm a Craftster Best of 2013 Winner!

Read more: http://www.craftster.org/forum/index.php?action=best-of-2013#ixzz2s5zYbQNB

printing with a car, instead of a printing press!!..yes you did read that correctly.

The lake scene linocut was bothering me, for two reasons, The image needed tidying up as I wasn't keen on how the sky looked, but the bigger issue was that I don't have a printing press and burnishing an image of this size just wasn't working out...

I have spent all morning googling making printing presses, they are all too large for the space that I have available and a bit too big of an undertaking when I would only use it once in a blue moon, In the back of my head I had remembered something about printing with a car, there is a good youtube video of this (which I now cannot find!), but using what looks like a woodcut, rather than a lino cut...

nothing ventured, nothing gained, I have a car, I don't have a printing press. So it was time to cobble something together..

I glued the lino block onto a thin piece of ply, but that exhausted the supply of ply, scratching my head, I found an old plastic chopping board, thick and robust.

 To (try and) make sure that the paper didn't shift while it was printing, I made a hinge out of duct-tape (are you thinking McGyver yet?)

 The stack for printing went board+linocut, paper, two blankets to pad it out a little, these were cut from an old woolen blanket, I tried with both one and two layers and it didn't make much difference.

 And then under the front wheel of the car, with the hinge towards the wheel, to miminise movement.

 This was the first attempt, I realised that either I need fatter tyres on the car, or I needed to reposition the stack and go over it a few times.

This is the final print, for this one I ran the car over six times, three times across the width X 2.

If you look really closely at the print, there was a little movement of the image, but I am very happy with this.

The side had a little bit of ink 'missing, so I did a little bit of touching up here and there.

Linocut Cygnus and lough derg

So I wanted to try somethign a little more elaborate and I was out of inspiration for any repeats, so i had a go at a picture, i was inspired by some of the work that I saw online, but wanted to do one of the lake near my house.

The linocut was a slightly different design as it had a swan flying across, but I didn't like it and took it out, just left the constellation cygnus instead. I tried working with block printing medium and oil paints and it just served to remind me that

• I really need a press for working on paper
• I hate using anything that is not water soluable.

So I went back to fabric, and printed up a couple of tee-shirts, all of this work is a first attempt, there are plenty of problems to iron out, and I need to mount the lino cut onto a block of wood as it is bending back on itself, which makes printing a bugger. For the tee-shirts I put the block down face up and tee on top, which made it a bit messy..but for an initial attempt, i am happy with them..

 the next two were initial proofs on paper, but it gives a clearer idea of what is going on..

 sky in this one was tidied up a bit, the fuzzy edges will definitely be cleaned up when I mount the block onto wood.

Feathers, lino cut, fabric printing

So this today's work, feathers this time, I cut 5 different sizes of feather, again all individually so I could play around with the arrangements, I don't love these as much as the mushrooms, but I am pretty happy with them.

 this is on a fairly coarse piece of fabric, so there is a lot of texture with the prints

 This is on yet another piece of fabric that I tie-dyed about 9 years ago...

 Dense print on a fabric that someone gave me, the colour doesn't 'read' very well on screen, it is a kind of lilac

 Close up of the same print

 A totally different arrangement, fading out to grey for the smaller prints (ink was running out!!)