The Binding Thread - Nine, Ten My Felt Hen

In honour of all the Green Patch hens and their lovely eggs we have been making little stuffed hens and little hen bags with Carole and Phiona both at The Green Patch and Grange Place. You can see more photos here

If you live in the Avondale / Grange ward do join us again

for our next Threads and Chatter session 

12th April 3.15 - 5.15

The Resource Centre, 

9 Grange Place, Kettering. 

NN16 0NT

The sessions are free.

Threads and Chatter - Squares With Flair Part 2 and 3

Artist Phiona Richards is a firm believer in taking time to pass on skills and cleverly broke down making our Squares With Flair into three compact sessions.

We had drawn our designs and they 

had been ironed onto the calico.

Our next task was to design and 

cut out hands and feet from felt.

Our characters would also need 

eyes, nose and mouths

Choices, choices - so many decisions, 

many threads and much chatter!

In week three Phiona brought her beloved

hand-crank sewing machine Jones

and we had great fun learning how to sew 

our seams together before adding the filling.

As you can see our Squares With Flair

have bundles of personality, just like our group!

 See all of the images from this project here

If you live in the Avondale / Grange ward do join us again

for our next Threads and Chatter session 

1st of March 3.30 - 5.15

The Resource Centre, 

9 Grange Place, Kettering. 

NN16 0NT

The sessions are free.

Shelagh's Morsbag Pod

After The Green Patch Open Day our lovely Shelagh was so inspired by the Morsbags that were given away she decided to set up her own Grange Pod.  Morsbags help us to use up materials that may be languishing in a cupboard and help to create shopping bags that are a joy to use and don't add to the problems created by environmentally harmful plastic bags.

Carole popped along to donate some material for the venture.

Here are some of Shelagh's first bags

made following the Morsbag pattern

You can watch a How To video here

What a great idea!

Later, at The Green Patch 

we made peppermint creams

and our gift bag project continued!

Threads and Chatter at KBA With Phiona Richards

A lovely box of threads, a room full of chatter

during our May session at KBA

where artist Phiona Richards had the group 

in stitches as she showed participants

 how to design and make

a beautiful felt bookmark.

You can read Phiona's lovely Blog about the session here

and view the whole photo set here.

Image above courtesy of Phiona Rhichards

Up-cyling in Corby

Up-cycling is part of the Remake Remodel strand of our current A4A project and over the past few weeks we've been raiding our fabric stashes and artifacts from previous projects to create new things with our lovely members who also attend Stevie Way Art Group.

Tea towels from the Invisible Threads Project

have been reworked as cushions

old degraded screens with images from our New Vistas Wider Horizons project were used to overprint left over fabric from the same project.  We also used some fabric letter stamps to jazz up our designs

 by Ann Leonard

Giving a new lease of life to old items = happiness!

You can see more photos here

Fabulous Fabrication Day in Litchborough

As part of “Marking Our Tracks - Wellbeing Walks Further Afield” Remake Remodel strand, members of Back To Books worked with artist Carole Miles at Licthborough Village Hall, rifling through old fabrics and lace trims and generally having a lovely time.

Some tea towels and other pieces from Invisible Threads came to light and were given a new lease of life by entirely new owners! We spent the day using recycled materials to sew cushion covers, hats and bags.

There is always such good conversation, so much laughter, lots of news, life stories and a great sense of community spirit amongst the participants whenever we bring the project out to this side of the county! It may have been cold, grey and wet outside but inside the room was buzzing with life and energy!

On The Right Track Upcycling Projects October / November

Recycled fabrics were used for this sweet little project with Year 4 children who created Christmas inspired stencils to screen print onto vintage Horrocks flannelette fabric. There is a different image on each side, which has been embellished with sequins, sewn together and given a ribbon tie in order to make a gift bag. The bags are going to be filled with something home made and will be given to members of the audience when the children sing carols at a home for the elderly. The fabric had been given to Carole by a friend's mother, there is always something satisfying about giving something someone might have thrown away a new lease of life and fabrics have such a power to connect us with people, time and place.

Another winter project was to create a story sack inspired by the The Very Hungry Caterpillar book by Eric Carle, once again most of the fabrics were recycled - Carole has a lot of tiny scraps of fabric kept for projects like these and the calico bags were from a local scrap recycling store. They have printing on one side but applying a fabric panel over this soon disappears the problem areas. As some people had no experience with textiles and were worried about using pins at home with small children around, Carole suggested using small dots of fabric glue to keep things in place before sewing. Once the bags were completed participants could find other online resources to use in conjunction with their Very Hungry Caterpillar books. Link 1 , Link 2, Link 3, Link4, Link 5

,