Sunday, July 26, 2009

Taking Hoarding to new levels...and Electric Picnic stuff of course!

I knew I was a hoarder, but it's only until now I realised the level of hoarding I got up to. I have been doing a big tidy up of the stuff room, as my son calls it, the spare room/studio. I know you say, you are eternally cleaning that room, but this time I really mean it!

I have been preparing my workshops for the Electric Picnic, and the first workshop is....

Guerrilla Embroidery: Release Your Inner Hoarder:
You can use any materials you like from our Big Box of Bits. A hoard of beads, bits and bling the Vikings would be proud of…

I've been organising the box of bling, sorting out beads, fancy string, fabric remnants I could use, when I finally decided to tackle the Bag of Eternal Bits...It's a bag of knotted wool, fluff, fibre, sample hyperbolic pieces, etc... It was a mess. I decided to tackle the bag. It's been growing in size steadily over the years, and I don't know what made me do it now. The search for a usable piece of shiny string perhaps....It's real tidy up time, so I have spent the last 30 hours (literally, I couldn't sleep...) sorting it all out ..

There were usable small balls of yarn, some very small bits of yarn, and some totally unusable small bits of yarn, and bits of well, stuff, samples of crochet, knitting, felt, etc. So, I divided them into the 5 categories.
  1. The usable wool went into a basket, to bring to the EP with me.
  2. The very small bits of 100% wool yarn were crocheted together and became a crochet/felting experiment.
  3. The totally unusable bits of yarn got bagged to become a unusable bits/felting experiment
  4. All synthetics not covered by no.1 were binned.
  5. All the sem-made bits got turned into mutant flowers for display on the stand.
The Crochet/Felting Experiment - I crocheted all the longer bits together than stuck it into a pillow case, in the machine for a 60 degree wash. It felted alright, but not to the degree I though it would.

Same thing but Knit!
The Felt/Felting experiment - I had scraps of felt left-over, long and uneven strips. I rolled these then tacked them together before going into the washing machine. they came out great! Although the spiral has been lost a bit, they are totally felted, solid. they would make great buttons...



Mutant Flowers

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