Busy Needles Revisited Project – An Overview

A quick introduction to what I’m planning to do, how I’m going to attempt to do and why.

Firstly, a little bit about the Busy Needles part work.

Busy Needles was a part work produced and published by Marshall Cavendish in the early 1980′s and consisted of 98 weekly issues; issue 98 was an index issue. As with all part works it was to build into an invaluable resource on the topic at hand and the tag line was What to make How to Make it.

Each issue follows the same general structure, covering the following in a single issue:

Pattern Library

This section would cover various disciplines from knitting to stitching, thread craft etc. Around two to three would be featured in an issue each with a project and patterns to encourage adding some personal variation to your execution of the project.

Ideas

Using your new and developing skills to jazz up your existing wardrone

Step by Step

Looking at a single technique in closer detail

Needlewoman’s Notebook

Information about tools and materials, handy tips etc.

Gallery

The back page feature, which generally looked at the history of a technique explored in the issue. This was one of my favourite aspects of the partwork as a child. I’ll be covering each of the gallery items.

My intention is, starting with the earliest issue I have on hand, to, over the course of two weeks, give an overview of what each issue covers and work on some little project based on it. For reasons of copyright I will not be reproducing verbatim the text �of the issue or the patterns for the projects, instead I’ll give a description of the project. I will give instructions for the techniques.

If you feel like following along with me please feel free to post images of work you’ve done based on what I cover to the Craftopia Flickr group, tagging your images as ‘busy needles’. I’ll be featuring a round up of work as part of the project.