Woollie Creations and a little of my home town....

For some time I have been making felt by knitting with Lopi yarn from Iceland and then using that yarn to make a variety of felted objects, from clouds to wolves and now birdhouses.

I used 3 different colours of felt and hand stitched the walls, floors and roof tiles together.... I had seen birdhouses on a number of blogs of late and so inspired by that and my favourite little ditty from They Might be Giants I decided to create my own. One day perhaps a little felted bird will be very happy living there.....

In other crafty carrying on I have been busy with some needle felting, deciding to use my pre-felt as the background to some felted pictures of trees, in a sort of reverse of the baby blankets I have been making which have been mostly embroidered trees on felt, now I am making felt trees with a little embroidery  - I am even going to make some small brooches....

It's a pretty straight-forward technique, placing some fibre on the pre-felt and taking the felting-needle and stabbing the fibre repeatedly. 

The weekend was spent in various pursuits, which included shopping in Glasgow, followed by dinner with friends at a Russian restaurant, Cafe Cossachok and unlike our preconceived ideas, there wasn't any cabbage in sight, although we did spy some beetroot! It was a good evening, celebrating birthdays with friends.

Sunday morning I ran to the Falkirk Wheel. When I told all my colleagues at work this, they looked at me amazed until I told them that I was in Falkirk at the time....not quite as impressive, the 4 miles I did run, compared to the 75 it would have been had I run from Dundee. 

The Wheel is really the most amazing piece of engineering,  created as part of an £85M project to reconnect Scotland's canals, so that pleasure boats can sail from the Atlantic Ocean, across the central belt of Scotland, to the North Sea, via the Forth & Clyde and Union canals. 

One of the key challenges to this project was the 115 ft height difference between the Forth & Clyde and Union canals at Falkirk, that had once been joined by a step of 11 locks over a 1.5km stretch. The solution, the world's first rotating boat lift. The cleverest element is that the giant boat lift operates on Archimedes' principal of displacement, assisted by a series of cogs and therefore requires very little energy (enough to make 16 slices of toast) to turn and lift boats from the basin, over 90 ft to the acquaduct above.

My mum is the chairperson of the local branch of the Seagull Trust, which provides canal cruising for disabled people, so is always giving talks on the canals and the redevelopment. The next phase of the project, the Helix Project, will create a massive sculpture of two kelpies (mythical Scottish water horses) which will displace water creating a second boat lift. It's going to be an exciting development.