I Heart Wall Art: Make a Noticeboard With Scarves

Now then, if like me, you prefer to make your life difficult via the means of:
a) Trying to not ever buy things new, unless they're full-on proper eco-friendly produced
b) Always wanting very pretentiously to do something a little bit 'different' but not actually having any ideas jump into your head easily
c) getting a bit cross and bothered and wishing you were a really creative 'blank canvas' person who just goes "Ooh, ooh, how about we twist some twigs into a giant pepperpot shape, interthread tin-can shards in it and then invent a whole new peg system made from old cotton reels and make a noticeboard that way!"

Yes, sound like you?  Then what the heck, my love - just steal this idea.  Honestly, do.  It looks awful purrdee and is a proper good scavenging project.  Plus of course, it's got hearts in it, and like it or lump it my good people, hearts are a nice shape, aren't they.

Deely-boppers. Key to our business. Ahem.

Stuff and Things You'll Need

• Scarves from t'charity shop.  Also good - silky tops you've kept to re-use for something.  Best is silky things because they will not be bulky and will insinuate themselves nicely through rings and round nails etc
• Rings - I found a bedillion inch diameter or so metal curtain rings in a charity shop once, and I used those.  Failing that, use whatever rings you can lay your hands on.  Can't find any?  Don't worry - leave 'em out!
• Magnets if your rings are metal - ideally little craft magnets (strong ones), but you could just round up all the magnets yer kids have abandoned
• Paper clips, curtain cafe clips, bulldog clips - anything clippy or hangy or holdy or grabby.  And yes, they are the proper technical terms.
• Hammer and Nails
• Tape measure, Pencil, Rubber

   
Ready?  Hop to it!

We gave our workroom wall a good clean to rid it of dust and, ahem, pencil drawings, and removed bits of blu-tack and sellotape.  A nice clean blank canvas for you to whack your scarf art onto.

Poke through, bring round, poke through again.

1. Tie/sew your scarves and silky bits together, and measure how long it is.  You'll need this figure in your head to give you an idea of how big or small your outline is going to be in the next step
2. Put the curtain rings, if you are using them, at regular intervals.  Simply poke through once, bring round and poke through again, as you can see here, so that the rings are 'caught' on the scarf.
3. Next you need to sketch your heart-shape on the wall (or hey - any shape, it doesn't matter!  Go crazy you creative loons, you) using your pencil.  Start lightly - it took us a while to get the heart shape

   

   The mighty dustpan and brush

   right, let me tell you, and involved lots of standing back and viewing it askance and squinty-eyed before we got it right, which in turn involved a lot of drawing, rubbing out and re-drawing.  
4. When you're happy with the shape, start hammering the nails in to the wall.  Now listen here - you have to angle them slightly, and the angle will differ depending on the shape the scarves will make.  For example, the downward 'dip point' at the top ofthe heart needs a nail which is angled downwards so that the scarves don't just slip off, upwards....think tent pegs and guy ropes and you'll know what I mean!  If in doubt, just hammer them in a little, so that you can manoeuvre them once the scarves are tied on.  You'll soon see what we mean.
5. Next - begin placing your scarves round the nails - if you're on your own, you may need to tie the first bit to a nail, or it'll keep slidin' awff.   Amanda and I were doing this together so one was holding the first bit in place while the other looped and curled the scarves into place.  If you found the whole nail angling thing tricky, you can always 'loop the loop' the scarves round each nail.

   

   Get cafe clips from curtain hardware suppliers

6. Tie the two scarf-length ends together when you've created your shape, or if you prefer, tie them to a nail. Don't worry if you have too much - just let it hang down, or cut it, or wind it round some more.  Don't get hung up with measuring, no, no.
7. Now's where you get busy hanging things off your hearts!  Now, I'll leave this to your imagination - we had all sorts of funny bits and bobs - we've got some things stuck on with two magnets, some things jammed into paperclips just hanging off scarves; we've got cafe clips holding stuff, and of course we used the nails too - see the dustpan and brush there?!  Basically, use whatever you think might work!

A lot more interesting than a boring old noticeboard, eh?  We shove things we love, reminders, our sewing patterns all hole-punched and hanging on a nail, ready to whip down and use when we get orders; we stick receipts on nails, hang works in progress, even coat-hangers sometimes, with other things hanging off them.

Take part in some heart wall art!

What will you do?  Ooh, and what shapes are you thinking of using?  A cat? An owl?  Kisses?  Tell me!

Patterns in Space and Time

As if all that confectionery and bakingness weren't enough on the sticky front, I then decided to get up to my neck in self-adhesive tiles and glue and ribbons and fabric and buttons.  Don't get me wrong, I have no aversion to sticky messes; I'm not known for being a fastidious, clean-liking, anti-muck sort of person.  You ask my mother.  She has, I'm sure, very fond memories of mud-pies and me volunteering to black-pot all the pans after Guide Camp.  Pretty sure I was sent outside with a brillo pad and buckets of water and left to my own devices with that job.  And my father will tell you unpleasant tales of mould in mugs.  My assertions that this was how Louis Pasteur discovered penicillin were not welcomed, if I remember rightly. 

A n y w a y...so I don't usually mind 

a bit of muck.  

I was making a noticeboard in my sewing room.  I like to see things - sketches, plans, pictures, fabrics, notes, ideas and so on, or I simply forget what I'm doing.  I have come to the conclusion that this is largely because I do not have a good memory.  Alternatively, it might be because I have about 87 ideas all cramming themselves into my head at any one time.  And I forget what I'm doing.  Also, I have very limited time in which to do them, what with the fact that I'm actually meant to be looking after two small children, so it is difficult to build up any momentum.  Right now, for example one of the children is blowing a whistle very loudly in the other one's ear, one is taking its vest and shoes off, and another is walking round the house with an umbrella up.  Hang on, that's three, and I've only got two.  One must have been doing two of those things.

Not really focussing on the task at hand am I?

And I'm not actually terribly good at multi-tasking.  I would be if I could wear a clipboard round my neck and keep a note of everything I was doing all at once, but it really would get in the way.

For the last hour, the clipboard would read:

• Sort out bag of clothes for freecycle lady to pick up
  
• Cut Isla's fringe
• Cut Hetty's too, because she'll want to do the same as Isla
• Find coins for them to pay me with at the salon
• Play Humpty Dumpty on the ipod
• Put Isla's jumper back on
• Supervise a poo
• Try to make a nice cup of tea
• Supervise another poo
• Unload dishwasher
• Load dishwasher
• Try again to make a nice cup of tea
• Unload washing machine
• Load washing machine
• Unload tumble dryer
• Load tumble dryer
• Get really bored of loading and unloading things and decide to make labels for all the toy trays
• Try once more to make a nice cup of tea
• Wish I had a laminator for the toy tray labels
• Explain to Hetty that her tights don't have pockets for her hairdresser money
• Remind myself to call my mother and ask her how the devil I'm going to unpick two accidental overdoses of cable stitch in my knitting 
• Really wish I could get round to making a cup of tea

It's a bit scatterbrained, but that's what life is like with little ones.

The noticeboard looks very nice from not too close up - get too close and you'll see some shoddy fabric-sticking and distinctly glue-sodden ribbons (which I picked up for 20p each in a charity shop, although at that point they were not sodden), but it is exactly what I wanted.

First thing I shall pin up there: my attempts to design a pattern for a hairband - you can see my four failed attempts pinned on it.  Four.  I mean, that is ridiculous.  My hairbands are a comedy of errors.  I like to stick the evidence of my constant inability to get the maths right in view, to spur me on, and in the hope that some random person will have just the right sized bonkers head to put one of them on.  Either bizarrely small, or in the case of one - man-sized tennis player size.  I'm pretty sure quantum mechanics is involved, on account of the use of elastic, elastic being an odd, warping, bending sort of substance, much like time and space and atoms and worm-holes, and other particle-type things of which I know very little.  

I'd better brush up on my physics.