I had the chance to meet with a practitioner who is really passionate about making small craft items, from hand-woven cozies to clay sculpting and miniature figure making. As such, the tools used were wide and varying. Some of the tools I captured were as follows —
Tools:
- Clay
- Sculpting tools
- Brushes
- Moulds
- Different coloured thread
- Weaving patterns
- Tape
- Scissors
- Penknife
- Glue
Since I had no experience with these crafts, we decided to start with a more simple craft — cozies for customising pens. Because of the small size of these crafts, a simple table would function as worksite.
Worksite — Crafts table
She began by demonstrating to me one personalised pen cozy she was already working on, with her friend’s name on it. First, she cut out sections of coloured thread to be interwoven with black thread.
By looping black thread around a section of a pen covered in double sided tape, she was then able interweaving pieces of differently coloured thread together. The pattern within which they would be interwoven would be based on the existing weaving pattern samples provided on a piece of paper.
Once she was done with one iteration, she let me try completing the rest of the letters. While I fumbled at first and had to refer to the samples provided a lot, I was able to get the hang of it in the end.
The final step to sealing the cozy up was to apply some glue and wind the sticky thread around the pen and leave it to dry. Unfortunately, my handling of the glue was rather poor and it left some marks on the final product.
Some of the difficulties faced were as follows —
- Many implements and tools needed, such as scissors, penknife, glue, string, tape, pens.
- One required a place to store all these items.
- A classification system would be needed as well.