Empress Wu Designs with Wilma

En-tie-cing  Christmas tree  Advent Blog Day 19 : Accessorize Fashion Accessories ?  On Day 8 - What's Afoot  , Christmas trees made with shoes were featured. I felt I needed to give another day to these other accessories which have been used to create equally surprising Christmas trees.  Men's ties seem to be the right length and shape to create symmetrical Christmas trees in various colour combinations.   Christmas tie tree  Striped Tie Tree  You may have seen Christmas trees in hospitals made with rubber surgical gloves but what about mittens in those colder parts of the world? Green mittens tree  Woollen  Mittens  And if it rains.... Gold Umbrellas  Socks and handkerchieves  might be standard Christmas gifts, but what about trees? Women's sock tree  Sock Flowers tree  Neckerchief tree  Vintage handkerchief tree  Happy socks make h...

 I’m still catching up from the hectic but great time we enjoyed during my birthday “weeks” and family visits. Before my mother left, I finally finished the black bag I promised last Christmas.  I was finally happy with it, and I think it will be good for Mum when she goes out at night, as it is large enough to fit her folding walking stick. It is a “scrumbled” bag, and although I have now made quite a few, the last two – Ruth’s green bag and this one took ages. I started them both with great enthusiasm, and then came to a sudden standstill, just adding a tiny bit week by week without making any real progress, creative or otherwise!. Anyway both are now completed, and feature lots of bullion crochet, fluffy and sparkly yarns in various knitting and crochet stitches. I made this one on a base of tapestry mesh canvas, and I found it a better and firmer base for this kind of handbag than rug canvas. And a happy surprise - I accidentally found a fake suede “cord” which made perf...

It doesn't take long for a new interest to become an obsession. I was asked to demonstrate some embellishing on my new felting machine for a Dollies meeting this month, so I started to make some samples and have become more and more interested in needle felting, wet felting and "fulling". Here's a definition I found from a website http://www.fuzzygalore.biz/articles/fulling.shtml Fulling is the process of fluffing up an already woven or knitted piece of woollen cloth. It's to be distinguished from felting, which takes raw fleece and puts it through the same process without having any initial structure. Felting usually yields a fabric that's a lot stiffer than fulling, since it needs more felting to be able to hang together at all. It's hard to believe that this little red handbag was crocheted with a 6mm hook and was very big before I washed it with a pair of jeans in my washing machine. I loved the sample as soon as I saw it in Brisbane http://www.jennyki...