Handmade Wellington 2012

This weekend just been was a long weekend (for Queens Birthday) and I've decided to take an extra day off giving me a delightful FOUR DAY weekend! I feel like I really need it too - life has been so busy lately.

This last weekend I took part in a couple of courses at Handmade Wellington, which is a festival of all things handmade. Over the weekend there are numerous courses and lectures you can attend. Whilst I would have liked to have gotten the full ticket (8 classes over 2 days) time/money wouldn't really allow for it and I was also a little unsure what I was really getting myself into, so I decided to do two course, one on Saturday and one on Sunday to see what I thought of it and if I'd like to do a full programme in 2013.

The two courses I did were Turkish marbeling paper and hand carved stamps and printing. I chose these two as they are both things I have wanted to try for a while, but have always felt a bit anxious about trying them on my own.

On Saturday I did Turkish marbeling, it didn't start out well as the tutor had been expecting about 4 students and there were 16 student so she felt a bit flustered and worried that she did not have enough stuff for everyone (which I think was understandable).

Overall it was a pretty fun class, but it was a pretty messy process and I'm not sure if teaching it on the ground on a tarpaulin was the best idea as people seemed to be climbing over each other and we didn't really have enough space to dry our work. It was fun, but I really do like order so it was a little chaotic for me.

The final results were pretty amazing though - I only ended up with two pieces of marbling I was happy with, so those were the two I took home with me.

I do think I'd like to try marbeling paper again, but I think it will have to wait until we visit either my or Rich's parents as its messy and you need a lot of space - we just don't have the space in our one bedroom apartment. Maybe we can do it sometime during the Christmas break.

On the Sunday I did a class in hand-carved stamps and printing, I enjoyed this class a lot more, although the tutor again nearly ran out of supplies as there were many more people in the class than she was expecting! I think its really bad planning by the organizers of the event and really bad for those teaching as they can't prepare the right amount of supplies for their classes - I can imagine that would be so frustrating!

The stamp carving turned out to be much more simple than I imagined and I can't wait to do more, I've already ordered some fabric safe ink off the internet. Here's my first stamp, prior to the carving.

Then here it is all cut out - we just cut the stamp out of an eraser, but I am planning on buying some rubber blocks on the internet to do more carving. At $1.50 per eraser, the cost can soon add up so I decided seen as I enjoy it so much I may as well just bite the bullet and get a large rubber block so I can make loads.

The ink that the tutor had could be stamped on paper or fabric - so I decided to stamp both both! First up is the paper stamping.

Second is the fabric stamping, I have decided I want to make a little pouch out of this fabric, I really love the idea of printing my own fabric.

Finally, I had time to make one more stamp, so I decided to make a little buttercup stamp as well.

Overall I really did enjoy my classes and next year I will sign up for a few more I think and try some new crafty things. But I do think that the organizers need to finalise the class numbers a little earlier on so that the tutors can prepare for the correct number of people - it would be kind of horrible expecting to teach 4 people and end up teaching 16.