Fibre Art Swap and a new Tutorial

Over on The Felting and Fiber Forum, we're having our first Holiday Fibre Art swap. My partner was Heather Woollove. This week, I received this gorgeous snowperson from Heather.

It's so beautifully made, and if you click to see the photo bigger you can see it has great texture with gorgeous shiny locks of wool (or maybe mohair?) I'm going to try to get an LED tea-light to put inside, so it glows at night like a huge snowman vessel :)  Ruth and Judy were each others' partners and they've both received their swaps and posted about them on their blogs. Ruth: http://ruthsfiberphotos.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/holiday-fiber-exchange.html  Judy: http://judysfiberart.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/felting-and-fiber-art-studio.html

I posted a tutorial on the Felting and Fiber Studio site today on how to Batch Edit photos using Photoshop. I don't know about you, but I spend too much time editing photos as it is, so this is a great way for editing a whole load of photos all at once. I'll also post a link in my Free Tutorials page at the top of this blog. If anyone has any ideas for tutorials, anything felting or fibre related, including Photoshop etc, please let us know either in comments here or on the studio site :)

Catch Up 2

I feel terrible for neglecting this blog so much lately. It seems like the past couple of months have been filled with endless phone calls to people in government agencies trying to get on a scheme to become self employed. It's like trying to do a jigsaw when you don't know what the picture is meant to be, it seems that  everyone I speak to knows just a very small part and doesn't really know who else I should speak to, but the bits are starting to fit together, finally! Hopefully all the hard work I've been putting into my fabrics and fibres project will amount to something worthwhile.

I haven't really had time for much felting, but I did get a sewing machine off my mum and have played around on that a few times. I started just by practising straight lines on a spare piece of nuno felt, then attached a few shapes with zig-zag stitch. I then folded the piece and stitched along the sides to make a small bag/pouch.

 

I also did some zig-zag borders on some felt offcuts to make bookmarks. I added a few felt offcuts to some of these too.

Recently I decided I needed to sort out all my felt scraps. I had two huge boxes of them, roughly sorted, but hadn't really kept up with keeping them separated or neat. I tried to organise them into lots of different piles, depending on length and width, and got some old margerine tubs and labelled them to encourage me to keep them neat!

Once they were all sorted, I went through and chose some nice pieces to make myself a collage notebook cover. I cut a piece of craft felt a bit bigger than the size I needed, then added strips and pieces of felt offcuts to it and zig-zag stitched them in place. I really like the way it came out :)

 What do you do with all your felt or fabric offcuts?