Ed’s note: Please welcome Vanessa to Craftblog, our jewellery and lampwork expert! She creates some of the most beautiful beads I have ever seen and will hopefully be sharing many more of her tips and tricks in future posts. Did you know that Australia produces 97% of the world’s opal? When we think of opals, we usually associate them with sparkling little gems with colours coming in from different directions of light. Naturally, it came to my surprise when I [...]

Every week Arounna Khounnoraj posts a craft walkthrough on Bloesem Kids, they’re generally very kid focused and excellent for introducing different mediums to younger children. My son isn’t quite at a level to be able to do this yet, so this was entirely done by myself – I think I need to get my niece and nephew round for a day of art so I can thoroughly test all of the child related tuts that I have on my “to [...]

Ahh, more adventures in felting/fulling on CraftBlog! Previously I wrote about how to hand felt your projects, now I’ll speak about the far less manual version of just chucking it in the washing machine aka “time to ignore everything the laundry label tells you to do”! Machine felting works great for larger pieces, you lose the control that you have with hand felting, but it also allows you to sit down and have a cup of tea whilst your washing [...]

This is a great quickie project to gift to a sewer or needlecraft junkie! It takes hardly any time to throw together (the main time waster is waiting for the glue to dry!) and you can customise it to your hearts desire with cool fabrics, ric rac, buttons etc. I love how they look like little cupcake pincushions. You Need: Something tubular – for the small one I used a toilet roll, for the larger ones I used the tube [...]

If I had to describe myself in two words, it would probably be ‘easily amused’, it doesn’t take much to make me chuckle, and one of the things that definitely hits the spot is making “meta softies”, so far I have a zebra made from zebra fabric, an elephant made from blue elephant fabric and as soon as I spotted this pattern I knew exactly what fabric was destined to be used. The Purl Frog Pattern is from The Purl [...]

AKA Pimp My Machine I recently took my Brother in for a service and was berated for the large amount of dust inside of her, of course there was a dust cover in the box when I bought it, but it just isn’t pretty, and I’d far rather be looking at my machine that a big pvc covered blob sitting on my desk. So, after feeling suitably guilty for not looking after her, I decided to treat my sewing machine [...]

This week’s tut is fairly simplistic, I have the headache to end all headaches so I haven’t been able to put as much time into it as I would normally, as far as I’m aware I haven’t missed any massive steps, but let me know if there’s something that I’ve let slip As mentioned previously I’ve been working on my craft room in my spare time, I’ve been meaning to make an inspiration board for ages, but I’ve been waiting [...]