Reginald - the CAE Portrait Prize for Softies

It's Sue here - hi!

I used to be the conveynor for the Brown Owls Melbourne 3000 CBD group, which the lovely Lee Turnley now takes very good care of. We still meet at Madame Brussels with the next date being the 28th January, do hope we'll see you there.

The reason for me dropping by is this.

When I'm not Brown Owl'ing and naturopathing I work at CAE, organising the arts and crafts short courses. This all came about because of Brown Owls actually, but that's a story for another day!

This year at CAE we are holding a very fabulous competition 'Reginald - the CAE Portrait prize for Softies'.

Reginald is a competition in which we are inviting participants to make a Softie Portrait of someone they admire/appreciate and want to replicate in soft toy form. Once its made, they'll send us a photo of their Softie Portrait, together with a photo of the person/pet that the portrait represents. We are expecting to receive entries from professional makers (several amazing people and my creative heroes have indicated they will - brilliant!) as well as complete Softie making novices.

I am very excited to say that one of the judges is our very own Pip Lincolne - yippee! Along with Cat Rabbit, nationally and internationally revered soft sculpture/textile artist, they will select 10 finalists who will then send us their actual softie portraits for a fabulous exhibition, to be held in the CAE info shop in central Melbourne.

In honour of the bestest judges ever, I immortalised them in Softie Portrait form - look! that's lil pip and lil cat up there at the top there. They were SO much fun to make.

The competition is supported by frankie magazine and brother and there are some rather wonderful prizes to be won. There'll also be a prize voted by the general public, the peoples prize and a special frankie magazine prize voted for by frankie's creative director, Lara Burke.

Deadline for entries is 7th March 2014 and you can find out more information here and download full details of entry (including entry form) here. If Instagram is your thing you could follow us @reginald_cae and we're encouraging uploads of 'reggies-in-the-making' via #reginald and #makingareggie

I'm so excited about it I just had to share it with you. Maybe you'd like to make Softie Portraits in your Brown Owls groups. That would be great! I can't wait to see what everyone makes.

And I'm really really proud that Pip agreed to be part of Reginald - she's one top lady, yes indeed!

Happy Softie making wonderful Owls!

sue x