The Rewards of Rubble clearing

Rescued from the skip! The fabric is a nice size for patchwork or sample stitching, the wallpaper book will do nicely in design work and papercraft.

Oh Blow!

A long cycle ride was planned - it was reasonably long but was cut short, when M over inflated the 2nd (& last) replacement inner tube and it blew up. His bike was the cantankerous one today - 2 flats and a broken chain. I was rewarded for having such a well behaved bicycle by M requisitioning it and pedaling off into the distance to go get the car. That left me by the roadside for an indeterminate period of time. With not a huge amount of juice left in my phone battery I had to think of a way to amuse myself.....



I counted the number of times the green tractor went back and forth.... and was musing on the magic way the silage tank on the back kept on changing colour until I realised it was 2 green tractors. doh!

I marvelled at the North Hampshire countryside


and looked at fungi which looked like smooth animal poo:

and stared ahead...


and down the road, waiting for the bike thief to return with the car


He arrived about and hour and half later - pretty good going considering he did get lost and is rather bad at directions. Many thanks also go to G who I reported in to at half hourly intervals and provided much needed moral support.

3rd rate daughter

Somebody should have received this in the post yesterday for today. It is still on my work table this morning - oops. Happy Mothering Sunday.....

Not much stitching

Not doing a lot of stitching at present as I seem to be dragged out cycling most weekends. Got a bit of vacation leave coming up so hoping to catch up then, although I suspect the garden and allotment will be requiring some attention. This photo was snapped whilst contemplating the rather steep hill (well it was to me) that I had to cycle down. The cycle ride was 21 miles - not very long you might think, but all of it was technical off road.

Quote of the month:
Friends are God's apology for relatives.
-- Hugh Kingsmill

More Metal

This one was a struggle, mainly because I was so pleased with the background fabric that I did not want to sully it with stitching. I created the background by painting with silk paints and water soluble crayons. I used the salt technique on the blue section. Once that was all dry I used mending powder (powdered fusible webbing / Bondaweb) and fabric glue applied with a sunflower rubber stamp to transfer foil some areas. At this point the fabric looked pretty fab.

The purpose of this sample though, was to experiment with metallic thread techniques using free machine embroidery. I decided to get a full range of materials included and also played around with some of the soft metal coils that I had bought from Hobbycrafts Christmas range, threw in some bits of hand dyed and crystal organza and finally came up with the above.

Two birds, one stone

A month back we finally did some silk painting in class. I thoroughly enjoyed this as this is the reason I got into textile art in the first place. The design work that I have recently been working on suggested that it would make an interesting design, if enlarged, for silk painting using the gutta technique. I think this piece would be best hemmed and used as a scarf to go with the other pieces derived from this design study.

Late Night Shopping

Busy getting on with stuff at the moment, which has also meant a few bits of shopping for the necessary supplies. I decided I needed some slightly larger flat sequins and my friends at college pointed me to Simply Sequins. This site is fabulous it does exactly what it says on the tin: sequins. Needless to say these caught my fancy as well as these. I was sorely tempted by these, but didn't have a sufficiently good excuse to buy so will have to save that purchase for another day.

Another purchase came out of a brief flurry of designing during class. We have moved onto playing with velvet (more on this to follow) and I needed to put together a quick design for a 'mini project'. Though this is not to be confused with a finished piece - its just an exercise in sampling techniques but our tutor is encouraging us by making things more interesting. I started off with this quick sketch of a Roman gladiator helmet:

After this I then thought - "how is this going to transfer into a design?". As the brief was for a small bag, cushion or panel, I wasn't sure. Then I noticed the faux buckle on the bottom collar of the helmet. I then looked at the sketch upside down, and came up with this:

This design just screamed at me to use a purse frame so I quickly packed up shop and went home to do a little shopping. It may have been 9pm on a Thursday but nothing was going to stop me from shopping. After a little searching I found a wonderful site dedicated to the making of bags: u-handbag.com. If it wasn't for the fact that they also sell sample bags, this site would get G sewing for sure. Anyway, after adding the purse frame (pictured in top photo) I couldn't resist adding in a couple of patterns by Amy Butler. I won't have the time to make anything from them for some time but I can dream! I expect it would only take an afternoon to make the top or bag (no I am not in the pudding club - I just want a bag with lots of internal pockets) but I have to concentrate on all my other UnFinished Objects.

One other site recommended to me at class was Smithfield Gallery where they sell all kinds of coloured craft wires and metals. I didn't succumb this time (no lime green metal foil) but I am sure its only a question of time. especially as I now have the link logged in m'blog! Another useful site which did have some useful sticky bits was stix2, they sell quite a lot of glue and tape related craft materials - stocked in large craft shops (you know the one I am always rude about in private) but also available online at very reasonable prices.

I was really impressed with both the sequins and bag sites as I ordered late Thursday evening and everything arrived this morning. Would have liked to stayed in and played but had to go out and help shovel horse poo. Yep, you read correctly - horse poo. It was well rotted and didn't smell and is now dug in (thanks to the efforts of M, P & G) to our allotment. I don't have any photos of this but will leave you with some of my handiwork from a few weeks back: