Heart Felt

Heart felt love and best wishes to all those in Victoria, Australia suffering through the bush fire tragedies.

Hand made felt from Marino tops, silk tops, ribbon, scrim and Leicester curly tops - all hand dyed.

Recycling, Musing and Possibly Pigging Out.

The embellisher has made such a big difference to the making of Christmas cards this year. It's been great fun!

I want it to be Christmas all year really so that I can keep making them. Must start thinking Easter Eggs soon I suppose!

Am cogitating. Our Quilter's Guild is having a show in March and the theme is "recycling". Can I justify buying a big tin of Quality Streets so that I can recycle the wrappers into a work of art? Hmmmm. I'll need to ruminate on that one.

Snowy Tree Therapy

Some days don't run as according to plan as one would hope.

In the past 24 hours I have attempted to make a loaf of bread in the breadmaker without the stirring paddle inserted, which gave the house a delicious scent of rice pudding, but did not produce anything remotely resembling a loaf nor anything else at all edible.

I then put my blender wand in the cake mix instead of my electric hand whisk and wandered why I couldn't cream the butter and sugar very well.

I also had a less than satisfactory time at work for one reason and another (NOT this time due to my dippiness).

Anyway I have had some stitching therapy tonight and made another brooch which I enjoy doing. I wonder if I can sell them? Maybe I could just do this all day long and stay more sane instead of beckoning the early onset dimentia with quite the enthusiasm I did today...

Oh yes and then I played around with Photoshop (must get an instruction book) and sketched this tree. Must also get more blonde highlights because I can't remember how I did it.

Wearable Art?

So in the end I made my first brooch with this stitch / sketch / skitch?

I think I may play around a lot more with this idea...

Autumn days

It's a fabulous Autumn day and I have just enjoyed trimming a long lavender hedge in the garden - the smell was wonderful. All the clippings have gone in the compost so even that is fragrant!

Am a bit depressed though because my sewing machine has gone on strike as far as free machining goes so have just done the smoke on these trees by hand and they turned out quite nice really! It'll make a ditsy cushion.
Yesterday at Westhope I started this felt background for stitching at a later date and I've finished it for now. I NEED my machine to work. How frustrating. Well perhaps it will make me do a bit more gardening!






At Westhope a fellow student has been Kelly who makes fabulous roving and synthetic dreads and sells them online all over the world. Here she is and here's a link to her website http://www.thecutealternative.co.uk/










All of us have had fun felting over the 4 week course and here are some examples of what we have been taught by Stevie Walker the tutor.





The gardens are lovely there too and are a joy at lunchtime.

I felt the rain ...

As the rain beats down on the roof window of my little work room I can post the picture that I have created from some of the felts from 21st Century Yarns that I bought at the NEC Knitting and Stitching Fair in August.

The picture is based on the weather we experienced in Wales this "summer", the felts embellished on to linen and then stitched.

Last weekend we had a family trip to visit my great friend Linda Alton who is a jewellery maker / silversmith in Nottinghamshire. She gave me the long grey straight beads that remind me of the lead piping in Cleudo! They inspired me to get cracking and finish this off.

She proudly showed me her newly refurbed studio which makes me green with envy - I hope she does well at her Open Studio event this weekend - she makes fabulous pieces based on the wonder of nature. http://www.loupjewellery.co.uk/.

We had a great time. How a friendship like this remains so strong when we have a shared history is such a joy even when we meet up so rarely.

Here you can see what I mean by the Welsh colours - this sky at Llandanwg was quite dramatic.

... and now for something completely different ... this is a sketch I made tonight for a sort of cartoony cushion in calico, stitching and ditsy prints. Watch this space....

N.E.C. Knitting and Stitching Show

Well once again inspired and bamboozled by more loveliness at the Knitting and Stitching Exhibition. Started the day with Margaret Beale's workshop on heat bonding fabrics. For this we were givena selection of coloured organza squares, a glass square to work on, a fine tipped soldering iron and a metal ruler. We were shown how a slow drag of the soldering iron would cut the fabrics and a quicker one would bond them. The picture at the top shows how one can form a sort of patchwork piece with no stitching or gluing and the seond picture shows what I made in a sort of overlapping mosaic style.

The marks in the second sample were made by touching the soldering iron in different ways on to the fabric to make marks. I'm really looking forward to stitching both now and maybe adding some beads.

I was so thrilled with this that I bought Margaret's book and a soldering iron! It's quick, fun and liberating. These samples were completed in an hour!

Unfortunately my sewing machine packed up in the middle of a quilt today and it's gone to hospital for a week! It's been healthy for 13 years , never been serviced and never oiled so I suppose it deserves a rest!

So to cheer myself up tonight I got out a selection of bits and bobs which I bought off 21st Century Yarns stall at the show and laid them out and shuffled them around. They smell great! Anyway there are some pieces of felt, silk yarns and ribbon that I have an idea for, again inspired by the wet Wales holiday.

Watch this space to see where I go with this...it looks like hand stitching or use of the embellisher for now!

Welsh Inspiration

It has poured down here all day again. I may build an ark and gently sail away stitching as I go to a land of loveliness.

In fact I have finished this Welsh inspired piece which has been made from hand-dyed Colinette Yarns, felted to a piece of flannel using my embellisher and some left over bits of thread which I dyed in August.

It really is like painting in textiles. I added some sequins as a focal point representing the silvery glinting water of the estuary.

It reminds me of the road where we had to stop while I shooed a sheep back into a field from which he'd made an unintentional gettaway!

Memories of Summer

The weather is even cooler and the trees are just beginning to tinge. The children are now both back at school and small snatches of summer weather are a distant memory it seems.
The holly hock piece is finished now and serves as a reminder of a holiday spent in the warmer climes of the Charante Maritime area of France where this particular flower is abundant.

Buzzing and Quacking

My mind is racing and I wake up so early with a rush of ideas that I'm always up by 6am. This has been further stimulated by visiting the NEC Festival of Quilts in Birmingham. I went two days running and only saw half of what was there. The variety of work was stunning and there were so many textile stalls with inspirational bits and bobs and new products.


I ended up parting with serious money for an embellishing machine made by Babylock which has just come on the market and is basically a 12 needle felting machine. I opened it yesterday and straight away made these flowers and have roughly placed them here on a background that I have made this week of silk waste which I have embroidered together through disolvable film. The piece is inspired by the multitude of hollyhocks which were the regional plant in the area of France we stayed in this month. I'm working on the stems and more flowers today and then I can stitch it all together...



This is one of my favourite quilts at the NEC

It's very peaceful.






...and this one was in a winning category made by a group and was really vibrant.









A quick update on the mallard ducklings:

All seven remaining have been storming our house recently and I have often felt as if I'm in some kind of Alfred Hitchcock movie. They are nearly full grown and have eaten every slug and snail in the garden and have started to strip the plants. Yesterday we lured them into the rabbit carrier with seed and I transported them to a big lake nearby where they swam off together happily. They will have more food there and space to learn to fly without going through my greenhouse window!
The picture here shows marauding birds tapping incessantly on our window. One got through the cat flap!!