A shrine to effort

Sometimes it can be difficult to find the motivation and focus necessary to do crafty work. Lately I've been struggling with focusing enough to try and turn some of my ideas into reality.

So I've spent a lot of time looking for inspiration, for something to leap out and say "you must make me!" Luckily I ran across craftster which is a treasure trove of interesting craft work with lots of how to and instructions as well.

The posts on shrines inspired me to get to it straight away:

This is my shrine to the sea, it isn't finished yet, I think it needs fish now but haven't quite figured our how to do those. It started out as an old bottle container and the coral inside is wire and papermache.

The other way I found that gets me crafting something is just to do something that I know I can use later. As I was almost out of marbled paper I grabbed the marbling ink and made nearly 40 pages of marbled goodness!


Marbling is a super fast way to create pretty patterned paper for backgrounds/envelopes/decoupage etc and you don't need any special skills. There is a nice simple how to on show me (tip. as the inks are normally oil based do this outside or somewhere well ventilated as they do smell.)

From one thing to another

The part of crafty I often find tricky is finding and keeping inspiration. What should I make? How should I make it? I have lots of different methods I use to try and overcome this common stumbling block one of the simplist is to look at something I have or have made and translate it to a different material.


So for instance this weekend I have been thinking about fireworks. I love fireworks with the noise and the colours and the way they last for only moments. Last time I went to a fireworks show I came back with over 200 pictures! So I had plenty of inspiration to draw from.


Taking a few of my favourite pictures like this one I thought I would see what I could do with a fabric version. So far I have felted the base for the picture with main firework outlines. I think the next step will be to embroider some further details.

Really I'm ever so crafty

Welcome to my blog on all the crafty bits of life. I thought that a nice way to say hello would be to show you my crafty workspace. My crafting is mainly confined to the one corner of my room.



You can tell that I'm not the most organised crafter although I'm slowly getting the hang of the idea of making things accessible.

The wall decorations are my wall of inspirations. There is even more stuff up there since the photos were taken, photos, leaflets, objects anything I find interesting goes up as a reminder of the things that make me want to create.

It has taken me a long time to admit that my crafting is important enough to me that it should have it own space and so as chaotic and small as it is my space is remarkably important to me.

In a way this blog is an extension of that; a space for my crafting life both in my head, in my time and in my online world.