Hobbycraft

I don’t know what to tell you about first!  I met so many lovely folk at the Hobbycraft show, it was delightful to meet customers and friends old and new.  Thanks for taking the time to come and say hello. 

All four days were very busy for me, there seemed to be no end of people wanting to know how to use their Frienldy Plastic.    Boy am I glad I made those DVDs, so many people have FP stashed away but don’t know or can’t remember what to do with it.  They see the demos at the shows, love the effects, buy the plastic, see twenty more demos on other things, buy loads more stuff, go home, and discover they cannot remember any of the critical details of how to do the FP techniques. then their plastic sits in the cupboard, a wasted investment.  Fortunately, many of those who visited me, went away with a class in their pocket in the form of a DVD, so I hope that there will be a growing number of FP addicts out there now.

Thanks too to the lovely folk at Origin Publishing who made me most welcome, and when they had two seconds, brought me cups of tea to sustain me.  Origin is the company who organise the fashion show at the November Hobbycraft show, besides publishing some well loved card-making, papercraft and needlecraft magazines.  Origin awarded my Borboleta costume (the one that was sent to the wrong address) the prize for being the Rio Carnival category winner.  Speaking of which, I am reliably told that the costume is on it’s way back to me at the right address as I type this in.

I did not have much time to look around the show, but I made a bee line for the Sewing For Pleasure hall where the Grasby Group of embroiderers had a lovely exhibition, beautiful work, beautifully crafted.  They don’t have a web page but they are often at the show, so catch them if you can.  I did not have my camera with me so I can’t show you any images unfortunately.

Besides chatting to many an old friend as I went around (perhaps that is why I had so little time to see anything!), I came across a lady called Ingrid de Vane and her daughter who were selling the most delightful necklaces made using an up to date version of a knitting nancy (french knitting tool), some beautiful yarns, and the most fabulous beads/adornments for the necklaces. 

 I was really taken with the idea of the tool and combining the resultant necklaces with Friendly Plastic adornments.  Take a look at her website and you will see some of her lovely pieces, she sells the knitting gizmos, and it took me 20 minutes on Sunday morning (6am) to make a passable but too long necklace which I then took to the show and made my own FP adornment for.  Because the FP is so light, it seems to be an obvious choice for these elegant and simple pieces.

Sorry that the image is not great, I had to scan this one in.  The clasp is magnetic, the end caps are made of FP, and I used a couple of my Oooze sample pieces back to back with a bit of organza ribbon to hang it from the knitted necklace.  Beware, if you do knit with the ladder yarn (and presumably a lot of other yarns too), they grow!  Mine started off just right, but a couple of hours later with the very light plastic on it, it had grown by about 50%.  It would have been good to read the instructions first I suppose!