I was given the task (by my niece) of coming up with an art project (for my niece) for the bank holiday weekend - I chose these colourful recycled fish, and they went down a treat!

You'll need: cardboard about the thickness of a cereal box (I used empty packaging from work), colourful paper or pages from magazines and junk mail (you can get some cool textures and images from these) a hole punch, scissors, and ribbon or wool. Glue-wise, I used PVA but a glue stick will be just as good (and will be less messy if you're making these with children)




I started a couple of evenings earlier, and prepped by cutting out the fish shapes from a template I made, and then cutting strips from magazines in order to make the scales.

The first step is to glue a larger piece of paper to the tail, and then choosing the right colours for the strips of scales and gluing them on one by one, with a larger piece again, for the face. Now you can add eyes, fins, or any other decorations you'd like.

Once the fish is completely covered with paper, leave it to dry and move on to the next one! Once the glue is all dry, trim off the excess paper, so you get a fish that looks like this:

Now you can add eyes, fins, or any other decorations you'd like.

Make a hole with a hole punch and thread it with ribbon - now you have a gift tag, something decorative to hang up or give as a thank you card! My nieces chose to hang some of theirs up in the garden and others in their bedroom.

I used ribbons cut from clothing

I had lots of scales and little bits of card left over, so I made myself some round tags, which I'll probably use for gifts, or possibly price tags.

Something else I've enjoyed covering in bits of paper is the bottle collection I had stashed in my larder, thinking I'd fill them with oil or booze one day. Now they are purely decorative, and simply made me happy to make! I think the ones with flowers on have a barge-like feel. I glued the lids on, and am now thinking it might have made sense to weight them a bit, but they're big bottles, they're probably weighty enough. I used regular PVA and then did a final coat or two of mod podge to make them more hardwearing. Oh, also I painted the bases black (because I had some black paint), and then covered that with mod podge too. I'd forgotten I'd bought that mod podge, and finding it was what started all this covering things with paper, as it happens. I've now run out.

 My tip (if you wanted one) is to start from one end (ie the top or bottom) and work your way to the other. If you try to go up one side it'll be heavier and roll off to that side, ruining your work. Also you will definitely put your hand on the sticky part by mistake. Just trust me.

Oh and a friend who writes for a knitting magazine got me in there

 here I am with brighter hair

In the meantime, here's a picture of one of the many somethings I covered in little bits of paper! The mannequin had been stood, all forlorn and a little grubby in the corner of my bedroom, not being used for anything as I'm not sure what human it's based on but she ain't the same shape as me. I used paper ripped from magazines and regular PVA glue, then a couple of coats of mod podge on top. Now she's brightening up my living room and will hopefully be good for displaying jewellery and scarfs on if and when I start selling again (I hope it's not too busy...)

I posted three things, just under a year ago, so now I'm back... again? Since my last entry I have: continued with my new job, and split from my husband (but kept my bezzie mate)

I continued posting in the meantime on the Colourfool page on facebook, and haven't sold anything through Big Cartel.

What I have been doing is a lot of things with paper - I shall write up some proper posts and share the pictures here and @colourfooltextiles over the next few days.

How have you been doing? Yes, you, person I do not know who found this accidentally. I hope you're well.

Why this is Important to me (2015)

The world doesn't need any more stuff.

When it comes to clothes, buying anything new always makes me feel uncomfortable. I don't like not knowing for sure that the machine workers aren't being exploited, how much waste and pollution was created, or how far it's traveled. I don't like that, often, the stitching will break or the print will fade long before it should, and that the material is often too flimsy to be used for anything else once holes do start to appear, because the company was trying to churn out a cheap product. These clothes aren't meant to last a long time, and aren't meant to be repaired.

This is why I love buying clothes from charity shops (and am increasingly irked that their rails are filling up with more and more of the aforementioned cheap fashion which is no use to anyone). Older, better made clothes have already stood the test of time. They may have already been mended or altered by their previous owner, and I find these personal touches bring a lot of character to a piece of clothing.

There's also the fact that I feel that it's breaking a chain. By buying from charity shops (or small vintage stores) we're supporting a good cause, and getting good products without giving money to dubious companies.

Something I wrote in 2015 but didn't title

Welcome!

For many years I have been fascinated by charity shops, vintage markets and carboot sales. I blame this on my mum, who as a single parent was always very clever with money when we were growing up. She's also a bit of a hoarder, which I have inherited too (this is ideal as when I was a teenager I got to wear the clothes she'd kept from the '60s and 70's, and now I can pass on my bang-on trend '90s clothes to my stepdaughter).

Not many of the things in my house are new. I love buying secondhand, when something has had a whole life before coming to me, and finding or inheriting other useful pieces.

A lot of my success with living this way is based on luck, for example I was able to furnish one flat entirely using furniture found left in the street. This is a lot easier if you live in a student-y area - where people are moving in and out of buildings and discarding their belongings fairly frequently - and where there is a culture of street furniture. There is also hard work involved, what with actually making the things.

I like working and being busy, but am not really motivated by money. I realised this while knitting a scarf, which took several hours - I wouldn't be able to earn enough (in a "proper" job) in the same amount of time to buy a hand knitted scarf of this quality. Unfortunately the world doesn't really function without a certain amount of cash, so hopefully the things I come up with can help stretch out what you do earn.

In this blog I intend to share some of my projects (where I take things which would otherwise be thrown away and make them useful again) and hope to inspire others to make and mend their own things too. I want to do reviews of charity shops and will post photos of my best/favourite finds, and will also be asking some  friends to write guest posts.
 
While these projects will be thrifty, I am mainly driven by recycling - bringing things right back from the brink of being thrown away.

I realise there are already lots of blogs with this sort of thing in them, so I will try to only post if I think I have something special to share. I will not post content just to have content.

Thank you for reading!

Hello!

I posted once, three years ago, and now I am back.

I've had several jobs in the meantime and am now at the start of a proper career. I got married to my bezzie mate. I'm still making something out of nothing.

Here's my Big Cartel store, which is currently filled only with dreams since I intend to make things for you, to order.

https://samssister.bigcartel.com/

and here's my updated Facebook page where I share colourful things

https://www.facebook.com/colourfooltextiles/

I'm also going to re-read some drafts I wrote but never published when I started this blog, and post them now...

Thanks for looking!

emma

Luxury scarves for Children

After moving house recently and seeing just how much I'd been hoiking around with me in terms of makings, I have promised myself I will not buy any more wool/yarn until I have used up what I have here.

Scarves are simple and enjoyable to make, as it's just a great big oblong and you can use different combinations of stitches to get different textures*. I've specified this as a child's scarf because when I started I didn't want to aim too big and end up with some half finished nonsense, and also because I know some children who I will probably give these scarves to. You can scale this up however you see fit, but be aware you'll need a LOT more wool than you might first think.



This project is ideal for using up leftover balls of wool. You will need at least 100g in smaller pieces, plus 100g of a (continuous) finer yarn to hold it all together. I had a couple of big cones of wool which I got from charity shops so will be using these up, along with all the offcuts.




Start off by sorting the wool out into piles which match or clash in ways that are pleasing to you. Consider whether you want the final pattern to be random, neatly striped, perhaps in a rainbow. I went with "random". You will want to get colours which will all go well with your fine yarn.

TIP!
It's a good idea to use wools and yarns which are made of similar fibres so that they'll all shrink at the same rate in the wash. One way of getting around this is to pre-shrink the yarn by washing it in the washing machine (put the balls in a mesh bag to stop them getting too tangled up with themselves and your other washing), or you can check whether a label-less yarn is synthetic or real wool by taking a small amount and (safely) burning it. If the yarn melts, it's most likely acrylic or some kind of artificial blend; if it burns and smokes, it's a natural fibre.



Now cast on, with your first small ball of wool doubled up with your continuous piece. I used ribbing stitch (knit one, purl one) with 20 stitches on 6 mm needles. And then I just knitted, for ages (for a decent scarf you'll want it to be at least 1.5m long). At the end of each of the smaller balls, I would leave around 3 inches of the new colour dangling on the reverse side, and then pick it up into the knitting on the way back. This makes the colour change more gradual as well as spreading the bulk around so the scarf isn't full of lumps.










After casting off and sewing in the loose ends, give your scarf to a child (or keep knitting then give it to an adult - the one pictured here has already been claimed by my partner...) Or keep it for yourself and post a photo in the comments!








*I am not going to attempt to teach anyone how to knit here, mainly because I'm self taught and wouldn't want to pass on any of my bad habits. There are some great tutorials on youtube and elsewhere that would do a much better job.