Friday Night Crafting

Last night I found myself surrounded by the skeletons of extinct beasts, bum operations and ickle babies in jars of formaldehyde amongst a crafty paradise.... a Stitch London night held at the Hunterian Museum.

Craftaholics from around the capital packed out the science themed museum run by the Royal College of Surgeons of England from 6-10pm.

It was a tight schedule! I signed up to four back to back session which were:

Suturing - the craft of stitching up wounds:

My friend Janine was cautious!

Eek! I've never had any stitches and have never made the connection between being stitched up in a hospital and sewing, but of course if it involves a needle and thread it has to be crafty! We were shown the craft by a 4th year medical student and had an arm each to try out two different stitching techniques, continuous and one with gaps.

The trick was you couldn't touch the needle with your fingers but had to use scissors and tweezers to do all the wrist movements........much respect due to surgeons, it was tricky and I sadly cut my thread by accident and left a sharp needle directly inside the wound.....thankfully it wasn't a real arm then!

Weaving on a card loom:

Who needs to spend five days setting up a loom when you can make a card loom in less than five minutes. This kind of weaving was far more 'me' than my previous experience and I ended up with a bookmark in less than 1/2 an hour!

Spinning:

This was my first ever attempt at spinning, as you can see my yarn remained rather lumpy, not quite suitable to knit with! I'm not sure what this kind of spinning is called, but it was done on a small hand apparatus. Which means if you want to make your own yarn, you don't need a giant spinning wheel in your home, you can do it anywhere.... well anywhere you can stretch your arms out.

Stitchy card making:
Loved this session, it was such a simple concept but very engrossing and involved stitching science themed collage pictures together to make greeting card. Defo going to do this again.

And finally of course I did some knitting! (I'm currently knitting some elbow warmers to protect against seasonal eczema.)

By the end of the night though me and Janine were not just crafted out, we needed to lie down....we made the mistake of buying a pot of olives and eating them whilst looking at dead things in formaldehyde, it was the wrong decision : ( In fact I took some photos of some of these scientific wonders to share with you but on the way home I felt so sick I deleted them from my camera. I have never known myself to be squeemish but maybe it's happening with age???!

Top night! Thanks Stitch London x