Listen, do you want to know a secret...?

Well, now I can tell!  Manda, from Tree Fall Design has made an announcement this morning about her involvement in a brand new sewing magazine, 'Sew Hip'.  It is all very exciting and I'm chuffed to say that she has asked me, along with some other very illustrious crafters, to be involved.  Pop over to the magazine site and you can find out more of what it's all about, and when the first issue will be available, which will be including a Lucykate Crafts... softie pattern!.

To mix, or not to mix, that is the question...!

Sorry I disappeared for a while there, didn't I?!, We've been away for a few days visiting family in the Lake District.  I don't like to blog about going away until afterwards, otherwise, it feels like shouting 'Hey, our house is empty, come..., break in and steal stuff!'.

The school holidays are plodding along, and today I have been left asking the question, 'Why oh why have I never made home made play dough before?!'  It's so easy.  There are lots of recipes out there to choose from, I can't remember exactly where this version came but this is what we did...,

You will need  ::  2 cups of plain flour, 1 cup of salt, 2 cups of cold water, 4 tablespoons of vegetable oil, and 4 teaspoons of cream of tarter, food colouring (I used red, yellow, blue and green), a large saucepan, wooden spoon, whisk, airtight containers or zip lock bags to store it in and a stove.

Plonk all the ingredients (apart from the food colouring!) in a saucepan on the stove top, and stir.  Now, mine went lumpy at this point so I gave it a quick go with a whisk.  Then turn on the heat, a low heat is all that's needed, and keep stirring with a wooden spoon.  The mixture will gradually thicken, don't worry if more lumps appear at this stage, it will even out when it comes out the pan.  After a couple of minutes, the spoon will become harder and harder to move as it turns into a dough.  At this point, turn off the heat, and turn the dough out onto a work surface and allow to cool.  Then give it a quick kneed, and there you go, that's the cooking part done, now for the messy bit!

This recipe gives a fairly large quantity of playdough, so we split ours into 6, placed each on a glass chopping board, made a well in the centre then added a teaspoon of food colouring (the liquid kind), and kneeded and kneeded until the colour was evenly dispersed, adding more food colouring along the way if the colour was too pale.  We also mixed our colours to get orange and purple.

Luke's favorite is green!

Now the big question amongst us Mums.  Do you let your children mix up their playdough colours??, we have a difference of opinion in our house, I don't mind if they get mixed up to make a yukky brown, which is why all our colours are just chucked into a zip lock bag together.  My theory being by the time all the colours are mashed up, it's drying out and needs replacing anyway.  My husband disagrees, he hates seeing it all mixed up, it really grates on him!  

So, to mix or not to mix, that is the question?!

PS, Thank you for all the foxy feedback, fox number 2 is the out and out winner by far!  I shall be asking opinions on softie patterns more often, that was huge success!

2012 Sewing Calendar,

Last year, I was lucky enough to be included in the 2012 Sewing Calendar by Accord Publishing.  A feat which has been repeated again this year too, and earlier this week, my copies arrived.

As with last years calendar, this one has also been put together by Megan Smith, which is a huge task to undertake, as you can see in the picture above, it includes over 100 projects.  There are 5 projects from me, Valentine's Day love letter, Wristwatch pincushion, and the Christmas Robin are already available in the blog sidebar,

but the Chicken Softie and coordinating Chick Finger Puppet are new.

The projects are organised throughout the calendar to correspond to yearly events, such as Easter and Christmas, and the display box everything comes in is designed to fold back on itself so it can sit on a tabletop and be easily accessed.  Even though many of the included projects are available online, this calendar is a hugely valuable resource.  There is no need to print anything out as everything, including templates (thus avoiding any problems in getting the scale correct), needed for each project is included within each project page.

The 2012 Sewing Calendar is already available to buy now in both the USA and UK.

Noses...

I'm on a quest to find a new way of adding noses to the larger cat softies that I make, like this one here, which popped up on Softies Central this week.  After being unable to find suitable triangular shaped pink buttons, it was suggested to me to try polymer clay, and make my own...!

Well, I've given it a try.  Maybe the weather is too warm at the moment, I found it really hard to shape as the clay had gone a bit too squidgy or maybe the tools I was using were inappropriate (they were from the kids playdoh set!).  I will give it another go, has anyone made their own buttons before?  Any tips to share would be much appreciated.

PS, the tantrum free summer is going pretty well, there have been a few close calls but so far, so good! 

Spoons,

You may remember a while ago I posted a sneaky peek of something I'd been designing.  That something is spoons.  After collecting some ideas together on Pinterest, I began working on the first pattern for bringing the idea in my head to life...

The first attempt didn't quite work.  I made it using two layers of felted wool, with darts to achieve the spoon shape, but the whole thing was a bit on the flat side.  The idea then began to develop towards the idea of welsh love spoons.

This one is a bit more like what I am trying to sculpt.  

It's still a bit of a work in progress design wise,

but as a project, it's certainly fulfilling the desire to move away from the cute animals are try something a bit different.  Only problem is, they are hard to photograph without it looking,

...a little bit phallic!