Link love digest: week 5

A day late, for which I apologise, but I was occupied on site at Grace and Favours all day yesterday (more of that anon).

So let's take a look at my link love shares from last week. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

On a side note, a few weeks ago, one of my link love shares caught the eye of a friend, and that crafter is a now a supplier to the friend's shop. You never know where the ripples may spread to...

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Papercrane Studios

Papercrane Studios

I don't actually know the name of this crafter, but I love the steampunk pieces s/he creates.

Papercrane Studios is the product of a Theatre Design degree and a whole lot of travelling. We try to combine a traditional jewelry aesthetic, with industrial sensibilities- nature and machine; old and new; salvaged goodies & found treasures from the world over. The pieces we make are unique, and will never be reproduced. They’ve already lived a past life, and now come to you ready to live a new adventure!

Roz Legge
Orchard Felts

Believing I was totally without artistic or creative talent all my life I followed a scientific career until a few years ago when I stumbled into crafting quite by accident and became hooked. Initially all and any craft would do but then I discovered felting and became addicted.

Roz Legge

I love working with wool fibres. Being able to create such a vast range of items from the humble fibre fascinates me and I am always on the look out for new ideas and techniques.

I use lots of felting techniques in my work, needle felting, wet felting, nuno felting and resist felting, to make a wide range of items. My main focus has always been my nuno felted scarves which I adore due to their super soft and lightweight nature, but I love to experiment and other items are always popping into my head and therefore my shop.

Gorgeously soft merino wool is used for my scarves, which in the case of nuno felt is felted onto a silk or cotton base, with other fibres, both natural and synthetic, being used for decorative effect. Other breeds of wool are sometimes used for other items.

I have recently given up my full time job allowing me to dedicate more time to my felting.

Jacqueline Jean
Hip and Clavicle

Jacqueline Jean

Hip and Clavicle is an expression of my adoration for nature, the heady perfume of whimsy, magic and romance that surrounds any investigation into the awe-inspiring parade of forms that millions and billions of years have worked... what better source of inspiration could an artist draw from?

A tomboy at heart, I find artmaking akin to exploring underneath rocks in the garden. There are common themes but each discovery is unique. I take the greatest pleasure in exploring new materials and revising designs. When I'm not busy designing and paper-sculpting my favorite creatures, I can be found outdoors with a camera in my hands.

A couple of themes I repeatedly find myself returning to:

•Bringing the outdoors in and the indoors out.

•Exploring the way ordinary objects and processes come together with human sense and memory in moments that transcend their everyday existence. I am drawn to capture and recreate those moments that spontaneously fill me with wide-eyed reflection and contemplation.

I find inspiration in dark woods, moss-covered bark and wild fields. I daydream constantly and long to live in a treehouse. If I were a piece of music, the instrumentation would include a piano and a harpsichord, and at least a peppering of something broken or long out of tune. ;)

Corinne Thorne
iamjewellery4u

I am a single mum to a toddler I love him and jewellery! I design and create every piece you see in my shop from scratch. Each piece is handmade in my home from silver, copper and glass. I also create Memorial jewellery.

Corinne Thorne

I make handmade one of a kind pieces of jewellery using silver, glass and sometimes copper. Created from design to the finished piece. I also fuse the glass myself so everything is unique.
I bought a piece of glass from America and loved it so much I wanted to know how it was made. I had a read, bought a small kiln, supplies and had a go. I've been making fused glass jewellery for a while now and the glass is amazing. Find me on Instagram corrinet1974 for some small videos. 

I started encasing ashes in glass for people a few years later and this has evolved. I wanted to learn silver jewellery making to enable me to make the memorial jewellery extra special. I did a 12 week course and after week 2 is bought basic tools and again had a go. Now I create one of a kind pieces of handmade jewellery at home. My blog Greyhairedmummy.co.uk (memorial jewellery) gives more of an insight into why I do this.

I love knowing that no one else in the world is wearing the same piece of jewellery. It's as individual as you.

Andrei Voronin
Woodworks

I've not been able to learn anything about Andrei, other than that he lives in Belarus. His website is in Cyrillic, and there doesn't seem to be an 'about' section. So let's let his work speak for him, shall we?

Andrei Voronin

Sue Trevor
Sue Trevor

All my items are handmade and ready to post to you via 1st class royal mail, often arriving through your letterbox the very next day, with the exception of my overseas customers where the items take a little longer to arrive....

All come neatly packaged in tissue paper or with an organza bag. Each and every piece of my work is individually handmade then photographed before I list it for sale in my Folksy shop. Some items will be similar, but no two are the same.

Sue Trevor

I trained at Loughborough College of Art and design. My current body of work started about 12 years ago when I mastered the art of free machine embroidery. Today a lot of my work is based on the botanical world. I layer up my fabrics which are usually hand dyed Egyptian cottons and I often incorporate silk too, as it gives a wonderful sheen. Then I free machine embroider over all the layers to create quite a stiff fabric before I cut, sew, fold and manipulate the fabric into shape, often 3 dimensional, resulting in little treasure like containers.

I have had a love of badges since a very young age and I'm pleased to be able to incorporate these in my current work.

I also love making my own glass beads, known as glass lampworking, this too can be seen occasionally in my work.

Anne Honeyman
Chocolate Frog

Anne Honeyman

I’m Anne Honeyman, a full time textile artist living and working on the beautiful Isle of Skye (UK).

I revel in the visual and tactile effects unique to my medium – from sumptuous textures to delicate lacy structures. With a background in environmental science (PhD in palaeo-ecology), the natural environment is an endless source of inspiration for my work.

I specialise in machine embroidery, but also enjoy hand stitch, dyeing, crochet, and using an embellisher. My designs tend to combine precision and repetition with an element of serendipity!

Since completing City and Guilds Creative Embroidery in 2000 I’ve exhibited throughout the UK in art shows and contemporary craft galleries. I’ve also had over 40 projects published in “Classic Stitches” magazine and have work featured in “Fiberarts Design Book 7”.

Oh, and my two other favourite things are frogs and chocolate! (I didn't even know about the Harry Potter thing when I chose this name!) 

 
Website  
Blog
Facebook

Ask the audience

The title of this post is drawn from a popular TV quiz programme in which contestants have the option to ask the studio audience how they would answer the current question. Contestants then have the right to go with the flow, or ignore popular opinion and choose a different answer. A lot money rides on getting it right.

==oOo==

It is said (in a widely contested quote) that if Henry Ford had canvassed people on whether he should build a motor car, they would have said they needed a faster horse.

It seems to me that large corporations spend a lot of money finding out what customers want, and then an even larger sum of money convincing them that they desperately need a product that the corporation produces.

So how much is about listening to your market, and how much is about leading it? If you only listen, you'll produce things that people are already somewhat familiar with. If you allow your creativity free rein and produce something completely innovative and different, you might never persuade people to buy it.

Now I'm not a corporation. I'm just me. As a result, I'm even more directly dependent on people liking the stuff I make enough to buy it. And I don't have a massive budget to spend on market research. I am restricted to straw polls, and reactions to the products I have already made. I am also under some pressure to produce something different and/or original, because I can't compete on price with the mass produced output of the larger corporations.

It's a fine line: it has to be desirable and different, but still mainstream enough to attract a buyer.

Flowering chive

I recently completed a cross stitch of a flowering chive. I had bought the kit from a charity shop (I have a weakness for botanical art). It was far more complex than any of the other cross stitches I have done recently (see below), so it took quite a while to complete. Then came the challenging question: what to do with it?

People don't tend to buy framed tapestries/cross stitch panels any more. I know this, because I have bought several discarded ones from charity shops, with a view to upcycling them. They are currently quite popular upcycled as cushions, bags, clothing, seat covers, etc.

So I posted a picture of the completed panel on my Facebook page and asked my followers what they would like to see done with it. There were some creative suggestions that I would really have liked to try, but I had to be conscious of what would find a buyer.

The most popular suggestion was a cushion cover. So I decided to go with that, but I avoided the obvious approach and went with something asymmetrical with just a touch of the bohemian about it.

Completed cushion cover

Of course, now comes the real litmus test. Will it find a buyer? Did I make the right decision in listening to the audience?

I have bought several miniature cross stitch kits, as well as already completed tapestries and cross stitches, as I mentioned, and I'm having fun turning them into useful items. I haven't yet gone with an item of clothing, but I think that might be next on the agenda.

Jute carrier bag

Cotton book bag

Tea cosy (commissioned item)

Craft bag

I'd be interested to hear from other independent makers, artisans and crafters how they manage the balancing act. Have you found the magic silver bullet?

Note: at the time of writing, some of the items pictured in this post are still for sale. Please contact the author with any enquiries.

The creative umm err OR from hmm to tada

Madeleine's collar

For an eclectic collection of reasons, ranging from practical to deeply personal, I have been away from my workshop for the past week or so, working from home in my studio.

This has meant a shift from power tools to fine handwork. I guess my sewing machine is a power tool, so I haven't been entirely without them.

It has also meant a shift in output from items made of wood and metal to items made of fabric, thread and beads.

The immersion in a different set of skills with different materials has resulted in some new ideas, which I hope will see the light of day soon. I've found myself rethinking my plans for some of the items in my workshop. Some bits of work were going to become one thing and will now (probably) become another. Just because of the shift in focus.

I haven't deliberately been thinking about this or that piece of wood. It's just that while one part of my mind is focused on the task (quite literally) at hand, another part of my mind wanders off of its own accord. There is no guarantee that it won't come back empty handed. In fact, there's no guarantee that it will come back at all, but that's another story.

I was recently asked to describe my creative process for a feature in a magazine (more of that anon). I have to say I felt like an utter fraud. I don't think my journey from hmm to tada really deserves the word 'process'. That sounds altogether too organised.

The sort of work I do at home is far more likely to have a process behind it, because it often involves patterns. I'll think of a piece of fabric in my stash and ferret out a pattern that will be suitable. Or I'll come across a beading/cross stitch pattern and dig out the materials I'll need to complete it. Following the pattern is like following a process. Of course, I deviate. A lot. Because that's just kind of who I am.

For example, I bought a series of Mouseloft cross stitch miniatures. Once I had completed them all, I turned them into a sort of patchwork carrier bag.

Mouseloft miniatures carrier bag

I liked the finished result, so I took a couple of MJ Hummel cross stitch panels, and turned them into a carrier bag, too.

MJ Hummel carrier bag

Skirt tote bag

But that's not always how it works. I came across a skirt I have (ahem) outgrown. It has a beautiful applique design on it, and I wondered if I could turn that into a bag, too, since I seemed to be on a bit of a roll with bags. I could and I did.

Sometimes it's just a case of needs must. Some time ago, I was making a necklace for my son's fiancee to wear for the wedding (which, in the end, never took place, but that's beside the point). But it transpired, she didn't want to wear necklace for perfectly acceptable reasons of her own. So I set the piece aside.

A few days ago, I came across the various bits of it that had been completed, and thought I might as well finish it. Sadly, somehow, I had lost some of the beads called for in the pattern. So I had to innovate. The finished product (at the top of this post) looks somewhat different from the original design, but I like to think it works.

Do you have a creative process? Do you plot and plan? Or do you fly a bit more by the seat of your pants?