A mechanical cake

It was Darn it and Stitch's birthday recently. Darn it and Stitch is Oxford's only haberdashery and one of my favorite places on earth. They had a cake competition where we were asked to create a stitched cake for display in the window during their celebrations. My first love is textiles and always will be, but I was heavy into my final weeks of college and didn't have time to drop everything and start a new stitchy project. Luckily inspiration came to me in a very different form. At college I have gotten really interested in mechanical toys (a.k.a automata) and thought that a mechanical cake would be perfectly quirky for this back street bit of heaven.

 The cake is a mixed media piece, a wire cake outline was created using spot welded steel wire, behind which is a paper collage of cake images and the cake is then topped off with a moving flag which appears when the handle is turned.

Because the joy of automata is in the movement here is a quick peek of what it looks like when it's in the move:

Then I packed it up and sent it off, I couldn't take it in myself as I was still at college but my lovely husband dropped it in for me, where it was received in much excitement. This is the first automata piece that I have made as a gift and I was very nervous that it wouldn't be received well but so far I have had nothing but amazed delight in terms of feedback. Phew. 

Not only was this the first automata gift I'd made it was also the first time I have ever entered a piece of craft into any sort of competition so I just had to go and visit it in it's window. I'm now waiting nervously for the results of the public vote.....

A new point of view

When I started this blog I was a frustrated crafter who was desperate to be all the amazing women I saw online who had made crafting their lives. I felt cut off from the creative world and had no confidence in the things I made, and little or no sense of my point of view in life. So I started this blog in an attempt to record my crafty life and take one step towards being like the people I admired so much. But my chronic lack of craft confidence led to little or no posting and now I am coming back to this blog in a completely different place in my life.

I am an art student.

A proper one. At an independent art school (one of only four left in the UK) where I study Contemporary Applied Arts which is a crafts based course. Me, doing a degree in crafting. In fact not just doing, I have just this very day finished my first year.

So here I am, much more confident in my creative point of view and so I am now going to take my first steps into joining the online crafting community through this blog, and sharing some of the things I have made this year and the things that I continue to make over the summer holidays and beyond.