felt hair clip

Just after Christmas I started sketching ideas for more little things to make with felt. I came up with this little sketch of a cherry blossom and a leaf, thinking of making it into a little felt hair clip. Now I finally put it together. This is a rough draft, I want to refine it a bit, and then maybe make a pattern / tutorial.

inspiration and learning

One of the main focuses of my blog is to share things I learn (for instance through the tutorials I post) and places where I find inspiration for designs.

I love to browse through the library, picking up books about design, artists, knitting, gardening, cooking etc. When I have a bit of time at home I leaf through the books, get inspired and learn new things.
I love design reference books and have recently started analysing how designs are put together by sketching elements of the design. Actually putting a pencil to paper helps me to see better how the design works.

In the bottom picture there is a book I borrowed about the history of Morden and Merton. The house in the picture is where liberty fabric used to be printed. After looking that up I came across Merton Abbey Mills, close to where we live and a place I'd like to visit some time!

tea towel calendar

I posted earlier about my tea towel calendar design for 2015. Since I gave a few tea towels as christmas gifts, I didn't want to post photos in December. Here is a picture of the finished tea towel. I ordered the linen cotton canvas and hemmed the edges. The fabric is now available for sale in my shop.

inkscape tutorial - create a union of different objects

When I work in inkscape it's often helpful to create a union of different objects. This is similar to grouping them, but rather than creating a group of different objects, a union functions as one object. This is useful if you have many small objects in a design like the dots on my rosehips below.

Inkscape seems to be a bit buggy when it comes to very large files with many groups of objects. Reducing the number of groups helps when working with large designs.

Step 1: Decide which objects you want to create a union with. All the little dots on the rosehips are single objects. I want to be able to manipulate the colours more quickly, and want lines of dots to function as single objects so that I can more easily change colours and move the dots around.
Step 2: Select all the objects.
Step 3: Under path click on union. Or use the keyboard shortcut CMD +
Step 4: The row of dots now functions as one object. Change the colour, or move the object to a different position.

ps. do you like the pattern? Its one I've been working on the last few weeks. I'll share more when its done.

baby booties

Happy new year! I hope you all had a lovely break. I'm back in London after two weeks in Germany and the Netherlands.

In a burst of "finish old projects at the beginning of a new year" I finally finished these little booties yesterday. Thankfully they're still a little bit too big, so its okay that they sat around for over a year waiting for the second button.

Now lets see how long the "finish old projects" feeling lasts...

ps. I posted details about the booties on ravelry. If you knit and are on ravelry, feel free to connect!