Wednesday Love: Gromit Unleashed

Over the past couple of years we have spent our summers hunting for things. Two years ago there were 60 multicoloured gorilla statues dotted around Bristol which we searched out (well, some of them anyway). Last year we spent a great day in Wells looking for lots of beautiful swans. This year I was delighted to hear that there would be Gromits arriving in Bristol all summer - 80 in total. 

Gromit Unleashed is a trail of Gromit sculptures designed by a wide range of artists and celebrities to help raise money for Wallace and Gromit's Grand Appeal, the Bristol Children's hospital charity. We are having great fun looking for Gromits and have discovered some new places to visit that we haven't been to before, such as the Windmill Hill City Farm. We also found ourselves at the Bristol Museum on the day they were teaching the kids to do mono-printing - we had to join in and get inky!

  

The boy is loving the trail. He is particularly excited about going to see the Gromit Buzz Lightyear soon.

Sock animals

We are enjoying the lazy mornings of the summer holidays and we have started getting creative during the days. I bought a brilliant book called "Sock and Glove" by Miyako Kanamori about making soft toys with socks and gloves. It is beautifully written to show to kids as there is a little story about the animals coming into being at the front with instructions in the back. 

One very long stripey sock became a zebra, with the blonde one (aged 8) doing all the sewing - mostly by hand with a little go on the sewing machine too. The cat was made from two socks left over from a sock puppet craft kit we had a while ago. The ginger one (age 6) had a go at the simpler sewing with a little help from me to finish it off. The kids are so proud or their creations.

Wednesday Love: A new project

This week I am feeling very happy to be crocheting again. I have projects which I call my "Pick up, put down" projects and they can take years to finish. I am coming to the end of my last project like this which is a double bed quilt I am paper piecing by hand for my friend's wedding (4 and a half years ago - nearly there!). It is now so big that I can't easily carry it around with me when we go out so I have started my new project a little early. I have had four quilts to finish before I allowed myself to start anything new with knitting or crochet but I have had itchy fingers to get back to it for a while.

So here is my new blanket (in progress). My nephew, who's 3, was a little confused that I referred to a strip of 5 flowers as a blanket. The kids seemed to think it looked more like a hairband!

I found the pattern on Pinterest and here's the link to buying the pattern on Etsy. It's simple in that it really is just one flower repeated but the pattern also shows you how to crochet it together as you go so when I finish the last flower it won't be a case of having to start a huge sewing together job, it will be finished - hurray! I found this lovely yarn, which is a blend of cotton, cashmere and silk (Bella by Debbie Bliss) in a flash sale on the Black Sheep Wools website for just £1.99 a ball. I think it's being discontinued so I stocked up and we'll see how big this blanket turns out, depending on if I think I've had enough or I run out of yarn!

Washi tape feathers with added owls

So here is the page I made with my washi tape feathers from yesterday. I collected them up and placed them in the corner of the photo. My daughter saw this and said "Oooo Mummy, where did you get those feathers?"

My confession is that I made these feathers a little while ago and they sat on my desk with the photo and these patterned papers and I didn't know how to put them together. I took out a stamp and my watercolours and stamped all over the background, repeating the stamping without adding more paint so that it faded out, and suddenly the page felt back on track.

The bird outlines were cut out from a piece of patterned paper I've had for years. I'm glad I finally found a use for it.

Washi tape feathers

Feathers are trendy on scrapbooking pages at the moment and have been for a little while and so I wanted to have a go at making my own feather embellishments using washi tape. It was really simple.

I  placed a length of wire in the centre of a strip of washi tape and then stuck another strip over the top.

I cut the tape into a feather shape...

...and then snipped into the tape with scissors to create the feather.

For wider feathers I laid strips of tape horizontally on the work surface so they created a sheet of tape. I then placed in the wire and stuck down more strips over the top, before cutting out the feather.

I played around with different patterns of tape for different effects.

Come back tomorrow to see where they ended up on a scrapbook page.

Splash!

We have had a lot of use of our paddling pool over the past few weeks. This was a photo I took last year on the one day we got to use it , before it got filled up with rain.

I used a stencil for the background with a Versamark inkpad and my lovely neon blue embossing powder. I love the bright summer feel from the neon blue with the bright yellow of the patterned paper (from the Shoreline collection by American Crafts)

I added some lines of white stitching and then chucked in a few brads. I've had those brads for so long now I really have to use them up!

Wednesday Love: Going to the Air Tattoo

We had a great (hot) day out on Sunday at the Royal International Air Tattoo at RAF Fairford. 

We heard some very LOUD planes and saw some very smiley planes...

The Red Arrows put on a fantastic display (as well as the French and Swiss display teams)...

...and we had a lovely picnic in the sun.

And here's a little bit of Wednesday love, courtesy of the Red Arrows...