I craft therefore I am

I have leapt from one crafty project to another over the last few months. My underlying interest came from  10 fabric printing tutorials in this link from Babble.
 It has inspired me to investigate as many fabric printing and dyeing methods as I can and then use my favourites in some home furnishing and clothes.

In my quest so far I have explored screen printing, rubber stamp carving and printing, and shibori fabric dyeing. 

But all this has not distracted me from my recycled knitwear projects. I have been lucky to receive bundles of jumpers from Jenny and Jo recently - so a shout out to my thrifting friends.

The pom pom blanket is my latest sustainable sewing project. It is made from only the softest old knitwear. I warm wash the jumpers to slightly felt them and then cut them into squares, sew them together, blanket stitch the edge and add some labour intensive giant pom poms. Great fun!

 Aren't giant pom poms just delicious?

I can hear you wondering - how do you make pom poms this big?
Well... buy some very chunky wool. Wind it around your four fingers (held in the salute position) about 30 times, slide it off your fingers and place the bundle on a 20cm length of the wool, tie it up around the middle, snip the loops at either end,  leaving your tie ends long. Trim with scissors into a perfect ball shape. Then grab a wire brush to tease the fibres out a bit to achieve the fuzzy ball of pom pom goodness we all know and love.
There is a great pom pom tutorial here.

And maybe you are wondering how to make this recycled jumper blanket - well have a look at my tutorial here.

Leave me a comment if you like.... I'd love to hear from you.

The next exciting adventure - shibori

My fabric printing adventures continued this weekend with a shibori class at Harvest Textiles in Melbourne town. 

We used the traditional indigo dye with different blocks for the resist - string, children's stacking blocks, clamps and even split peas. Much fun was had and by the look of our finger nails it appeared we had cyanosis by the end of the class. 

Show and tell...

 

A sunny day in wintery Melbourne was perfect for drying our samplers and warming us up over lunch. It was quite surreal to sit  at the lunch table chatting about life with our indigo and white fabrics strung like a Japanese market all around us.