3. Land of the Giants

Dream three, Out on a walk we came across a big group of US marines guarding the entrance to a wind farm. We convinced one of them to show us what they were protecting, and following his directions I snuck around the wind turbines and found a hidden town of tree-houses populated by giants. Most of the people I met were children and assumed I was a small child. The marines spotted me and began to chase me through the school, which was huge and even had a basketball court.
Square three has taken the longest of all the squares so far because of the level of detail, but because of the detail and the opportunity I had to use some left-over fabrics from my collection this is also the square I'm most proud of.

It's the second month of the dream quilt and progress is good. I've been crunching some numbers and I've had 20 dreams since I started keeping records of them and have rendered 3 into fabric. My aim is that the quilt should be made up of 121 squares (11x11) and to keep things going it would be nice if I could record 11 dreams a month, that way I'll have enough dreams to sew by the end of the year. Unfortunately I don't have much control over the frequency of my dreams! Even if I succeed in this it still takes about 2 weeks to complete each square, so it might be 60 months (5 years) before all the squares are done! Oh well... time to get dreaming!

Good luck! x x x

2. Dental Dream

Another square for the dream quilt. Dreamt 2nd February 2010.

I have a pain in my tooth and, looking in the mirror, I see that the cavities in my teeth have made them like swiss cheese.

Plastic Fantastic

Since my tutorial on weaving baskets from plastic bags went global last year I've been meaning to follow it up with other ways that plastic bags can be re-fashioned. Weaving baskets is a lot of fun, but for most people it requires learning a whole new set of skills, which I know can be a bit daunting. If you already knit or crochet then plastic bags can become another material to use, and with great effect.

To turn plastic bags into yarn I highly recommend the tutorial by gooseflesh. Other guides suggest complicated methods of cutting the bags to make a continuous thread, but the gooseflesh tutorial offers a simpler approach - cut the bags to create rings and then loop the rings together. using this method I was able to mix and match a selection of plastic bags and make a brightly-coloured variegated yarn.

A couple of days later I'd created a nice big ball of yarn, and it was time to get knitting! I found my set of 10mm needles, always perfect for knitting with chunky yarn, cast on 30 sts and knitted for 48 rows to create the body of the bag.



To create the handle I cast off 24 sts and then continued to knit with the remaining 6 sts for 36 rows. Folding the bag in half I joined it along the sides and then attached the loose end of the handle to the opposite side of the bag. It was very simple and only took a few days to complete.

Luckily in my collection of spare plastic bags I also came across some inspiration for some embellishment. One of the sturdier carrier bags had a beautiful pattern of blue and white stars. Inspired by the design I put together a pretty matryoshka doll (or Russian doll) design and sewed it into place on the front of the bag. The pretty carrier bag also had a logo which read 'RETAIN REUSE RECYCLE', so I carefully cut this out and sewed it onto the back of the bag. Perfect!


If you like the look of this bag I've decided to offer it for sale on my etsy shop. Thank you very much for looking,

Lots of love and luck! x

Introducing - The Dream Quilt

York is home to the UKs only quilt museum and gallery and a couple of years ago I had the pleasure of working there as a volunteer. Getting up close to the historical quilts was a real inspiration, especially one African pictoral quilt that showed scenes from the maker's life. Like a textural graphic novel each patchwork square had it's own story, from bathing to visiting the medicine man. I had an idea that I would like to make something similar, but with each square showing a different dream of mine.

I'm sad to say that since then I've shevled the idea. The enormity of the project intimidated me. Apart from the fact that I've never had any experience of quilt-making I have very strange and frequent dreams that I knew would be difficult to keep track of and depict. At the time I also lived in a very small shared house and didn't relish the idea of assembling a quilt in the tiny rooms. I noted the idea in a notebook and concentrated on other ideas instead.

Thankfully I'm no longer living in a very small shared house, but in a lovely little house with a lot more floor space. I still have no idea about the technicalities of assembling a quilt, but I've never a let inexperience in a craft stop me from trying it before. I've also worked out that if I just have a good system for drawing and recording all my dreams then I can happily transfer them to fabric in my own time. It might take all year before I have all the squares I need, but I'm really excited that I've finally started work on this huge project. So I'm happy to introduce the first square of the quilt.


1. The time-traveller's ring


Dreamt on the 1st Febuary 2010. This dream was about a ring I found that had the power to slow time for the wearer. A sinister figure was trying to take the ring from me, and while time rushed around me he sat and waited, ageing before my eyes.

I'll be posting the squares as I finish them, but I'm also working on plenty of other projects including more plastic bag-based crafts, so you'll be seeing a lot more of me very soon!

Lots of luck x x x

January Knits

December was a bit of a crazy month, and because I was making so many Christmas presents for my family lots of my craft projects had to be put off until the new year. Luckily 2010 has brought with it more spare time, so more time to get knitting!

First on the list was a spiderman scarf for my lovely boyfriend. All the scarves I've knitted in the past have been made with super-chunky yarn, so knitting with a relatively fine yarn took a lot longer than I expected! I used spiderman's signature colours, red and blue, before adding decorative touches - the spiderman logo appliqued in felt and a spiderweb embroidered in wool.


As you can see it was very happily received!

When the scarf was finally finished I decided I wanted to knit something for the house, so I decided to make something sweet-smelling for the bathroom. I was really inspired by the knitted toybox blog and decided to use their sweet little bird pattern. It was really easy to follow and great fun to knit. Rather than just using stuffing I partly filled the bird's body with a scented bundle made with lime zest, ginger and bicarbonate of soda. He now sits in our bathroom giving out a lovely citrus-y smell. I call him the bathroom birdy.


That's all for now, but I'll be posting again soon with a bigger project if all goes to plan. I hope 2010 is lucky for you too!

x x x

Handmade Holiday Book

When I was younger I was obsessed with documenting family holidays. I made scrapbooks, kept diaries and, on one memorable holiday to the South of Ireland, I even put together a little holiday newspaper with glued-in photos and headlines about days out. Well it turns I haven't changed very much after all these years, so that while my boyfriend and I were getting excited planning our first real holiday together I was also getting really excited about the prospect of making something to document the experience. I would be going back to Ireland, but rather than making another newspaper I decided to take some inspiration from my recent book-making exploits and make a holiday book.

My first step was to gather together lots of different kinds of paper. I had an idea that the holiday book should look like a bundle of scraps, so I packed a variety of papers to write on. Some lined, some plain, papers of differnt colours and sizes. I also took along 3 or 4 empty envelopes to keep smaller objects and scraps in. These were of different colours too! Very importantly I also made sure to prepare each sheet and envelope for binding before-hand by marking each one with a 2cm margin on the left-hand side. This only took a few minutes with a ruler and pencil and ensured that nothing I wrote or drew on holiday would be hidden from view inside the binding of the final result. I put all the papers in a freezer-bag along with pens, paper and paper-clips and they were packed along with the rest of our luggage.

Every day of the holiday I was making notes and drawing sketches while my boyfriend took photos. I was also careful to keep hold of bus, train and plane tickets and to pick up plenty of leaflets and postcards that I knew would look great in the book. The paper-clips were useful to hold notes and leaflets from the same day all together. By the end of the holiday I had a big bundle of papers covering every aspect of our holiday. All there was left to do was to make a book!

In fact the bundle was so thick (it included a fair amount of card as well as lots of paper) that I couldn't bind it all at once. Instead I devided the pile up into three and bound them together with needle and thread in just the same way that I have made notebooks in the past. I then glued the three smaller bundles together along the spines. All my scraps were together, I just had to make a cover that would do the holiday justice. My final design is a map of our holiday destination, Cape Clear. The design was virtually sew-free, with the exception of the buttons everthing you see on the front was glued into place.



Both covers are made from thick card covered in cotton, again just glued into place. On the back I attached our festval tickets with a few small stitches. I had hoped to sew the covers into place, but I didn't have the necessary tools to bind through the thick card as well as the large bundle of papers, so in the end I glued the covers into place. The binding effect on the outside is just for effect because I had my heart set on how it should look!


My final touch was a ribbon to hold the book closed, two short legths of spare ribbon, one sewn onto the inside of each cover.

It was so much fun to make this holiday book that I'm hoping to make another next year. With any luck it will be a completely different holiday that will inspire a completely different end result. We already had a visual record of the good time we had in the form of our holiday photos, but I think a holiday book compliments the photos really nicely.

If anyone has anything similar they've made I'd love to see it, any handmade albums or scrapbooks. In the meantime I think I'll have a flick through the holiday book again, just remind myself that it wasn't so long ago! Thanks again for reading, stay lucky

The Lucky Ladybird
x x x

Yorkshire Tea Bag

Those of you who read my previous post on recycled notebooks may have noticed my fondness for Yorkshire Tea. I love to drink it, but I also love to reuse the colourful packaging. Imagine my delight then when the cafe where I work started buying Yorkshire Tea in bulk, bags of 480 at a time. I couldn't resist the chance to repurpose the colourful bags, and this is what I made with one.
This project was a fun bit of opportunistic crafting. I waited several weeks for the cafe to sell enough tea before I could take the bag home!

The bag itself is quite sturdy, but I wanted to make sure that the weight of anything inside would be carried by the fabric rather than the plastic. For this reason the bag has two linings - one of cotton and one of my favourite polka-dot fabric.

As you can see the handles are also lined with polka-dot fabric and I added buttons and a bow to give it little bit of flair. I also included a small pocket for my mobile phone.

Lots of people have been asking my about the possibility of making more of these bags, but I'm afraid the bags are too few and far between, even I couldn't use 480 teabgs on a regular basis, so for now this is just a one-off.

Thanks for reading, stay lucky

x x x