Book Review - Crafting With Cat Hair

Review - Crafting With Cat Hair: Cute Handicrafts To Make With You Cat by Koari Tsutaya, Translated from the Japanese by Amy Hirschman, Published by Quirk Books 2011

(Cover Photo Copyright Quirk Books)

So have you ever crafted with cat hair? Well, we get Angora jumpers from rabbit hair, Mohair scarves from goats and woollen mittens from sheep, so why not crafty makes from cat hair? Why not indeed? Well, if you fancy it, Crafting With Cat Hair has everything you need to get you started with Cat Hair crafting.

Crafting With Cat Hair was written, originally in Japanese, by cat-obsessed writer Kaori Tsutaya and then translated into English by crafter and translator Amy Hirschman. It is in a neat 19 cm by 20 cm paperback format and is packed to the brim with cute kitty photos - which you would expect of course but being another cat obsessive, it is fun seeing a craft book dedicated to kitty cats!

The book is based around felting techniques with the cat hair. There are ten projects and most of them use needle felting to decorate a felt or woollen item with an image of a cat. A couple of them, such as making a cat hair finger puppet and the project where you apply the finger puppet to a felt box, use a wet felting technique. You get help and instruction for both these techniques, although you may need some previous experience of felting with fur or at least some crafty common sense as some of the instructions are a little short. 

As Kaori herself points out, cat hair isn't quite like sheep wool so it is good for decorating projects but you would not be able to make a usable bag from it for example. Some of the projects include a decorated coin purse, some really cute kitty badges and kitty cat portraits, and some great scarf, hat and glove decorations. All projects come with step-by-step instructions and some come with pictures to help you with some of the stages. 

The book's greatest strength is in the details of how to groom and care for your cat with an aim to collect cat hair and have a happy, well-groomed cat of course! It answers some of your catty questions from what to do about pests, when the best time to harvest cat hair is and to how to look after the projects you have decorated with the cat hair.

There are patterns, materials lists and handy tips throughout. I loved the section where you get to meet the cat hair contributors - cute touch! There is also a great section on grooming brushes but most of the links are for Japanese stockists, apart from one American stockist, so I don't know how readily available these brushes are for the UK and European markets, although a quick internet search did point to similar products being available in the UK.

I loved this book for its kitty pictures and great tips on looking after your cat, but as a serious craft project book I felt that you might be disappointed with the effort you put in and the end product when you finish. I think it would be perfect for a teenager who loves cats and has a crafty side, or for a cat-obsessed felt crafter who is looking for something different to felt with! You can find it over at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com.

(Just so you know – this book was sent to me by Quirk books to review. My views are honest, unbiased and unpaid, well other than a free copy of the book that is!)

Kuretake ZIG Art And Graphic Twin Pens Review

Review time! - Or perhaps I should say 'my thoughts and experiments with...ZIG Art and Graphic Twin Pens'. 

Some of you might have noticed a new design logo in my sidebar. I'm totally thrilled to say that for the last couple of months I've been one of the bloggers lucky enough to have been doing some work for Kuretake.

Kuretake have a huge (and I mean HUGE!) range of pens and markers but they also do papercraft products such as paper punches, embossing powders, embellishments and lots more, perfect for us crafters!

I've been putting some of the Kuretake art and craft products through their paces and I thought you might find it helpful if I shared some of my experiments and thoughts on what the products I've tried do.

This week I'm going to start with the ZIG Art and Graphic Twin pens.

The ZIG Art and Graphic Twin pens are twin tipped, as the name suggests, with a brush tip at one end and a 0.8 mm point tip at the other. As far as I know there are 80 colours in the range and ink is water-based, xylene free and odourless. They make perfect pens for many watercolour techniques and stamping techniques, but I shall show you some examples of these later!

I have to show you this next picture, which is from Kuretake themselves, because I think it really shows how gorgeously juicy and wonderfully flexible the brush tips are, yep they really do look like that when you do that - I've tried it!

 The brush tips are made from rubber instead of fibre, which for me does make a big difference for this style of pen. Like many of you I've tried a number of watercolour pens in the past and I think they have all been fibre tipped and not very juicy or flexible. 

Ok so why is this important to me? Well first off it means that colouring directly onto stamps with the pens is a lot easier, you get really good coverage with the good ink flow and the flexible tip means it really does work like a brush, and I have an example of a make where I've coloured the stamp with the ZIG Art and Graphic pens before stamping. 

But that isn't all you can do with these pens, a lot of different techniques are open to you and the more you experiment with them the more you will find! For instance the pens are great for colouring images either directly, as in the example below:

or by using a brush or a ZIG water colour brusH20 as in the next example:

So by now you can tell that I am enamoured of these pens and not just because I am designing for Kuretake, I promise!

Before I go I wanted to share some of my other experiments using these pens, the first I scribbled the ZIG Art and Graphic pens onto my craft mat and spritzed with water then laid the background down on the ink to pick up the colour. The rubber tip makes scribbling on the craft mat very easy.

My next sample shows you the results of a watercolour technique where you add texture by using salt to 'change' the movement of the water on the paper. This time it is the 'juicy-ness' of the tip that makes this a great technique to use with these pens! Notice the mottled effect on her dress below:

I hope that this has whetted your appetite for the ZIG Art and Graphic pens, and if you have them already I hope that you will feel inspired to get them out and experiment with them some more - I would love to see what you have been up to with them!

For more inspiration pop along to the Kuretake Facebook page to see some lovely work that people are doing with the Kuretake products.

Have a lovely Friday you all.

Kim

Prismacolor® Premier Illustration Markers

Hey all, hope you are all having a good Friday and that you guys in the US had a lovely Thanksgiving Holiday and are enjoying Black Friday. I have something here that you might want to pop into those shopping baskets.

I was very lucky last week to have been sent some new pens to try out and review. Now you know how I LOVE Prismacolor® Pencils? Well I was sent a couple of packets of the new Prismacolor® Premier Illustration Markers and I've been playing with them ever since.

I've used a number of different illustration marker pens in my time, as I'm sure you have too and although they have been sufficient for the job this is the first set of pens that actually made me want to use them for everything I could get my hands on.


First of all let me run through what they are. They are nontoxic, lightfast, acid free, archival quality illustration marker pens. I've tried them out on various different weights of paper and card, with Copic pens and Sansodor and they did not bleed or smear and kept their intensity of colour, which is fabulous.

They come in a range of tip shapes and sizes - brush tips; chisel tips; bullet tips extra fine 005, 01, 03, 05, to the more chunky 08. They also come in a range of colours and you can see the red, green, blue and black here but you can also find them in purple, orange, brown and sepia.


I was finding all sorts of things to do with these pens, perfect for my artistic and papercrafting needs, great for illustration, sketching, journaling, calligraphy.

This card was made using the 05 and 08 bullet point pens for the faux stitching, the chisel tip pen for the sentiment and the 08 bullet point pen to draw the holly leaves which I then distressed with inks.


I even tried some calligraphy, not something I do that often as you can see. LOL! But something that these lovely pens have inspired me to do more of! That and drawing - these pens are perfect for sketching, the ink flow is so smooth they are a joy to use.


You can find them in art/stationery stores. They are widely available in the US but as they are new they are just starting to appear in the UK so keep your eyes out for them.

I think you can tell I loved using them? If I was pushed to find a negative about them that would be that the lids are just a touch tight to get on and off at first but really that is not a big deal.

The suggested retail price is $3 (approx £1.90) for a single marker and $20 (£12.20) for a pack of 8. Well worth it in my opinion.