Knitted Flowers

My current focus is on knitting and crocheting flowers to make arrangements and individual display pieces with the view to knit all the flowers for my own wedding!

Here are a few examples on what I have been working on:

If you are interested in having a bespoke bouquet or pet you can message me or come and meet me in person on April the 2nd at the twickenham craft fare
https://www.facebook.com/TwickenhamCraftFairs/?fref=nf&pnref=story

Also Joining me at the craft fare is my very good friend Natalie who creats amazing origami greetings cards like this yummy cake one here:

So why not pop along and come and say hi to us!

knitted Louis

Recently I found a cat version of knitting patterns, and with that I created Louis.
Louis is owned by my oldest friend Natalie Bayley and I made her this tribute to her beloved cat for her birthday.

she sent me these pictures as reference:

not great for detail...
but I tried my best and here is what I came out with:

I'm not 100% happy on the proportions, but I am told that I got his markings pretty close.

Knitted Leo

For my Mums birthday I decided to make something really personal for her. So I made a knitted portrait of the family dog Leo.

Leo is a crossbreed we rescued as a puppy from the dogs trust. They said his mother was a golden retriever and they think his dad was a leonburger, a big mountain dog, and hense his name leo.
He is a big gentle giant with an amazing temprement, who loves swimming.
I found a book with some really good patterns in them. It had a golden retriever pattern which I thought was the closest match to leo's body type.
The hardest challenge was matching his colouring.

Here is how he turned out.

The Woollies

This is a project I worked on last year for a potential childrens book for Oxford University Press.
There would be a group of characters that used their knitting skills and imagination to help overcome obsticals and challenges.
I was given a brief for each character and asked to visualize them and make a model of 2 of them.

There were 4 Woollies all together:
Baby woollie
Sporty Woollie
Clever Woollie
and Creative/arty Woollie

heres what I came up with:

 

 We agreed that creative woollie looked too much like an old lady/ house wife, but the other 3 were greatly recieved.

So we decided to go ahead and make a model for Sporty and Clever Woollie.

I started with a polystyrene ball and wraped the wool round to get the ball of wool style effect.

Then using things like felt, buttons for eyes and sculpting their feet from sculpy I added little details.

 

 

Lend with care models

Here are some close up shots of the models I customised for the lend with care ad.

Surface Pattern Design

I have decided to embark on a personal project that will make me use existing skills and learn new ones.
I am in love with surface pattern design at the moment. I kind of wish I had taken it at uni because theirs was always my favourite part of the end of year degree show.
It seemed to encompass so many things, from wall paper to net curtains, their designs were inspired by things as varied as cityscapes and woodland nature.
I am currently inspired by fair ground art and more especially carousels.
Keeping in mind that I actually have a great dislike for horses in the real world, I find the beauty, colours and detail of the carved ones quite enchanting.
I have set my self a fictional brief:
I am an art worker for the awesome stationers Paperchase and they have commisioned me to design a set with the theme fair ground.
The set is to include:
a note book cover X2
a 2016 diary cover
a birthday greeting card.

I want to create a repeat pattern that can be used for the background, as well as art work that can be used on their own or as part of a bigger picture.
This will encourage me to get back to my roots with good old fashioned pencil and paper. Then it will stretch me to sharpen my digital skills which I have been neglecting recently.

My first stop was the library, I found a book on William Morris and thought he would be great inspiration for the repeat pattern I wanted to create. But there was no book for fair ground art, that was wishful thinking, I did however find a book about riding and pony care which will be great reffrence for drawing horses.

So my secound stop was Pinterest, a great resource for obscurer subjects and I have started a board for my project http://www.pinterest.com/myrainbow06/surface-pattern-merry-go-round/

Here is my first attempt at drawing a carousel horse:

My plan is to play with this with colour and techniques.
Watch this space for more updates.

Amazing Morph Update

On Wednesday 10th Dec I attended a talk at the Watershed in Bristol. It was a retrospect of the lipsync work made by Aardman 25 years ago. Weird because I'm 25 and it still looks as good today as it did back then, which is more than I can say about myself....
Anyway, I saw this as an opportunity to gift my knitted Morph to none other than Peter Lord himself, Co founder of Aardman Animations and creater Morph.
His reaction couldn't of been better, he even bought me a pint!
Peter shared a photo we had taken on twitter and a couple of pics of Morph and my work has been getting some major exposure from it, which is awesome. I am very greatful.
The night itself was a wonderful event and I got to catch up with my mentor Barry Purves which was lovely and I also made some new friends. I had seen all the films before on my Aardman classic DVD (which I originally had on VHS) but it was great to see them on the big screen.