The Bowl That Inspired The Necklace

Back in January, I blogged about an offering bowl which inspired my new "Dream Weaver" necklace series.  In the throws of creative energy, I had stopped working on the offering bowl and jumped straight into making the pendant for the necklace.  Here it is below:

I was terribly unsure if it was too outside of the box, however, reassurance came in the way of a tremendous amount of positive feedback and the above piece sold straight away, which totally floored me!  

So after what feels like yet another week from hell, where absolutely everything that could go wrong does go wrong, I needed to calm my mind with some meditative creating and ended up finishing the offering bowl last night.  I love the way it sits in the hand, tightly coiled with splashes of colour, with its warmth permeating the fibre.  The only downside to it being a bowl is the fact it's so difficult to photograph hahah so here it is top down:

It's almost the weekend (yayyyyy) so enjoy every minute whatever you choose to do :)

Coming Up For Air

Woooh, life is still hectic ... nothing much has changed since my last post.  I am, however, feeling very blessed to be as busy as we've been since Christmas.  We started 2016 with a bang and we haven't stopped since 😊.  The downside is my lack of spare time continues.  And I'm finally cool with that.  

I finally finished my colour vase ....

... and immediately started another. So it took a month to complete but I was so pleased when I finished my second pot.  I get this wave of excitement when I find a craft that just "fits"... it just feels right.  One aspect I love so much about being creative is the freestyling stage, as I call it.  The opportunity to just create with no pre-planning, I find, is creatively freeing.  All I knew is I wanted to use paper raffia and inlay an embroidered design on the front.  The design is supposed to be an abstract flower of sorts as the top of the pot looks like it has petals.  It's wonky and not quite right (pre-planning certainly has its upsides) but it's quirky and gives me a visual lesson to improve on for next time. 

So here she is  ....

Have a great rest of your weekend!

New To Basket Weaving

Instagram is a wonderful medium for inspiration.  Recently, I came across a wonderful Australian lass known as @string_harvest who sells some glorious fibres.  I then came to learn she had posted a tutorial about beginners' basket weaving on YouTube.  I had some naturalish looking raffia rope from my packaging materials and a swathe of embroidery cotton and off I went.

After playing around with the raffia,  I wanted to upgrade to some rope which I had bought initially for making mixed media portions for my necklace designs.  Pulling out an array of colours of embroidery cottons, I entered the mesmerising world of basket weaving. Using just rope, embroidery cotton, a needle and my hands to create a vessel of sorts is so deep-in-your-belly-type-artistic-satisfaction, a feeling which only comes to me from time to time.  Around and around in a spiral like motion whilst slowly building a tangible object has whet my appetite to try many different designs and techniques.

Here is the start of the base.  I need to cover up the white centre once done.  The outside colour has shown up in the pic quite salmon-like whereas it's more of a cherry red in real life.

And here it is slowly building showing the inside:

And outside:

I'm finding this much slower to achieve an end result than some of my other crafts, however, I'm thoroughly enjoying the meditative nature of this one.  I'm so excited to see how it turns out!!!  I'm still unsure whether it'll be a large bowl or a vase, but have plans to make a small collection of plates to add with it for our place.  Will post pics up once it's done :)

Enjoy the rest of your week!

Work in Progress and New Online Platform

Happy Sunday (and also Happy Valentine's Day ❤️) everyone!

After an extremely hectic couple of weeks (with more to come until March) in the day job, I've been pretty spent energy wise to do anything other than work, sleep, work, sleep.  Unfortunately this means, for me, not much block time to work on some of my larger projects. 

Instead, to keep the creative flame slowly burning, I've been steadily working on these two projects: teaching myself basket weaving.  This is my first attempt so very rough:

...  and sketching a design to turn into a much larger painting for our home:

Also, I've been to-ing and fro-ing trying to decide between multiple online platforms to share my work and blog.  As you know, last year, I began listing up some of my older work on here but found there was a .com issue meaning some of my followers were unable to view it online so I occasionally shared individual pieces to my Facebook page as well.  However, with Facebook, the views haven't been as many as I had hoped without having to pay for "paid likes", which, in my opinion, aren't really genuine likes.

Until such time as I can hold another market stall or two, I thought why not try another online platform.  I'm unhappy with how Etsy has changed from being an online handmade marketplace to now being one similar to that of eBay, and Madeit.com.au doesn't seem to get a lot of traffic (in my personal experience), so I decided to give a free trial of Indiemade a go.  What you'll see there is the same you've seen before here on Blogger and Facebook (which I'm running in conjunction with Indiemade) until I'm able to upload new work.

Here's the link if you want to check it out: http://highlystrungcreations.indiemade.com

So if all goes to plan, I'm going to have lots of new and unique pieces for you this year:

- woven items (ie boho bags, journal covers etc)

- necklace series and designs

- handmade components

- paintings and prints

- handmade handicrafts 

Enjoy your week ahead 🌻