Creative Festival 2015 Day 4

The last day of the Creative Festival was on Saturday this year. It started early in the morning with a class on Needle tatting taught by Kim Beamish. This is the second time I've taken a class with Kim, last year I had taken her Autumn Leaves Needle Roll.

I'll say this, I'm really glad that my first experience with tatting was with Kim. I spoke with a lot of the ladies in the class and most of them have tried multiple times to learn both needle and shuttle tatting. All agreed that this is the first time it actually clicked. You can see my progression in the image below. Towards the end, we were pretty much all starting to stitch the ornament and able to follow the pattern.

In addition to the pattern for the tatted ornament, Kim also compiled a needle tatting booklet full of step by step images for us.

Oh and guess what! I now know how to do a cast on lol. It seems that in needle tatting, the double stitch (DS) is actually a cast on stitch. I'll have to play some more with my knitting to make sure.

After another quick lunch, back to the classroom I went for my very last class. I was looking forward to this class very much. I've been curious about this technique ever since I saw Susan Elliott's post on Playing with Needles. It's called Bead Weaving and was taught by Kelly Garland, but she was also assisted by two other teachers.

I wasn't a fan of the black and silver colors, but what the heck! It's a learning piece. Although I will admit I love the clasp. Unfortunately, that's not the clasp we got in the kit.

The first step was setting up our loom, which was really hard, but once we got started, away we went. There was even a lady who was able to finish hers before the class ended.

The class kit was pretty impressive. We each got our own loom, so I'll be able to try this again in the future. The loom even comes with instructions and pictures on how to set up the loom and start and finish a project. Just need to find a nice pattern and some pretty beads. I'll also need more time :P

When I unpacked everything Sunday morning, the first thing I did was complete my bracelet so that I would be able to put away the loom.

It looks pretty good, but one comment about the beads we were given; they were kind of stingy. We had exactly the amount of beads we needed to finish the piece, but I must have lost one because I wasn't able to add the last row of black beads. So my bracelet is one row short (good thing I have skinny wrists). Now I need to do the boring part: weave in all the threads.