handmade haven.

What a week! After a silly amount of spent indoors sewing while the sun shone, I had my first stall at Glasgow Craft Mafia's 'Handmade Haven' yesterday. I couldn't believe I'd agreed to spend the hottest day this year in a darkened night club, but I was excited all the same.
The event was held over three floors full of stalls decorated with some of the best makes I've seen. I had a booth with my name on it (literally!) on the top floor which, I'd come to realise, was the hottest floor. This is how my booth ended up looking:



The quality of the photos aren't very good due to the lighting not being too good in the Buff Club. A lot of the photos I took turned out to be a blur because I was a bit shaky.



Here are four of my finished cross stitch portraits which I hung from the top of the booth. You can also see the knitted slice of cake with working LED candle I made for the Maker Faire in March. Portraits from left to right: Mark E Smith, Albert Camus, Grucho Marx, Woody Allen.

The stall was a joint one between Rachel and I. Rachel made all the bakes: two large cakes in the shape of balls of wool with knitting needles, two small thread bobbin cakes and lots of cupcakes with tooled shapes such as jumpers, socks and scarves.

I made the cross stitch portraits, book marks and cross stitch buttons



The market was pretty quiet yesterday but this gave me the chance to have a wee wander round everyone else's stalls and I got to meet some really great people. I get a lot out of hearing about what other people have been making and seeing people working away at something new behind their booth. Most of all I came away yesterday wanting to be more adventurous with what I make and wanting to become more involved in the monthly stalls.

handmade haven

I have my first stall at the Handmade Haven event which is being run by the Glasgow Craft Mafia. It's on Saturday 30th May, 1pm-6pm @ The Buff Club (enter through Butterfly & Pig).
Please come along and say hello =)

a birthday stitch

A friend of mine turned 30 last week and was having a 70's themed birthday party. I was racking my brains trying to think of what to get her for a present. Laura is a really big fan or Russell Brand and, since I had just finished making my series of x-stitch portraits, I decided to make one for her too.



I've never really liked Russell Brand and so I watched one of his stand ups while I was making this in an effort to understand what all the fuss was about. I still don't get it but I really like how this turned out.

portraits

Around a month ago I started messing around with PCStitch Pro 9, one of many cross stitch software programmes I've tried out. PCStitch Pro 9 is really easy to use and has one thing that the others lacked: common sense.
The first thing that I made was a Woody Allen portrait using the photograph transfer tool. I've seen a fair few cross stitch portraits online and I thought they looked really great. I'd tried a few portraits before I settled on the Woody Allen, all of which were in colour and would've been really expensive to do. This one was perfect because it was in black and white.


I enjoyed doing this portrait a lot and, as a result, have ended up going on to do a little series of them. I haven't had a chance to photograph them all yet as I'm considering composition etc. As soon as I have, I'll upload them.