Dimensions Daydreams Collection, Birds and Swirls

I picked this one up from 123stitch.com and finished it fairly soon after I received it.This design is from the same collection as the White Orchid I completed in June 2014. All the comments I made then regarding the ridiculous prose on the box remains unchanged. But the designs are nice and the kit has everything you need so it's forgiven for giving me the giggles every-time I think about its sales pitch. 

The kit contains thread and needle, fabric, glass pane, mat and backing board, 4 frame clips, and instructions. The total size is about 20x20cm. 

The stitching for this one was fairly straight forward. I had to do only minimal frogging and my only freak out was when I thought I'd lost one of the frame clips. (I had just fallen out in the the bag I was carrying the kit in.)

I do hated lazy daisies though. Every time I'd get one just right I'd set the kit down to check my chart for the next stitch and promptly yank the petal through. Did it so many times :( In the end I wasn’t happy with the daisies but I wasn't going to redo them either. They were good enough to live with.

The finished product:

Now living on my nan's mantelpiece across from the white orchid

The work in progress shots:

Bijoux Porcelain

I decided to do a couple of day courses at the  Centre for Adult Education (CAE) in Melbourne to explore some possible new hobbies. Some include photography with Terry Murphy, walking tours around the city and in this case some Bijoux pottery with Steven McClure. 

Bijoux Porcelain is Japanese Tissue Transfer decoration and is very straight forward and not at all difficult. You roll out your porcelain, cut your chosen shape and then wet down your chosen transfer paper onto the clay. And pretty much done. Unless you stick your transfer on upside down...which I did. But only once and in the end the design still showed up okay (it was the itty bitty rectangles you can see towards the bottom right of my picture.)

Definitely a nice day course to take for something a little different but still stress free. And at the end you have whatever you made to be turned into brooches, jewellery or decorations for yourself or for gifts. The class included a very brief history of porcelain, instructions about what to do and then we were let loose to do what we wanted with Steven watching on, giving tips and assistance as required. 

We could create as must as possible in out allotted time and the course fees were inclusive of all the materials we needed and the firing.

And behold my creations @@!

The buttons on the left are extreme rush jobs, I wanted to get as much out of the class as possible.They turned out okay though some of the button holes are a bit squished none are fully unusable.

My work and someone else’s; 

placed onto the firing tray ready to go in the kiln:

 

And a week later ready to be picked up.

I don't have a photo of mine (thought they looked much and much as the unfired pictures above just whiter) but here is some by other's in the class, really such a good idea for Christmas decorations. You can also make beads as shown below.

Pretty Colourful City Square

 

Lots-a photos here. Lots of talented people creating colour and pretties in our drab city square via wool and hard work. I just had to take lots and lots and lots of photos. It was worth it. :) Honestly makes me really want to get my act into gear to learn to crochet. And maybe knit.