stitch and hobby show – Hours of Fun

One of my amazing friends Karen took me to the stiching, sewing and hobbycraft show at Event City this month and our ticket included access to Cake International.
When we walked through the door we were straight into the craft section with lots of stalls selling lots of wonderful crafty things along with mini workshops at some of the stalls where you can take part in a craft. We came across the Zentangle stall just as people were sitting down, so we decided to join them. It is advisable to book on these sessions ahead of the day, we were super lucky as they had two spaces free for the first session.
We then ventured into the world of Zentangle which neither of us had heard of before. In summary we best described it as professional doodling! We were given an overview of the craft and it was explained that a couple in America had come up with the concept and you can now by books and specific equipment for it.
We were all given a square piece of paper and asked to split the paper into four by drawing lines across it. We were then taken through four different designs including a quilted pattern, a spider’s web design, wiggly lines and straight lines. Once we had drawn these we were then shown how to shade them to create shadows and optical illusions using a pencil and smudging tool.

We all felt very relaxed from the session and some of the designs and art work that was on display on the stall were fantastic. There was a gorgeous map of the UK split into counties with each county having a different design. There were Christmas cards, a motorcycle helmet, pictures and photo frames all looking fantastic simply by decorating them using the Zentangle technique. With the right pen anybody can have a go and it’s a fantastic technique you can use to jazz up a plain object or create the perfect hand drawn picture for your wall.