Where does it go?

59 years since these were taken, Coronation Day, June 2nd 1953.

Me and my little brother, the dress had was white with red and whie piping, I loved the collar. 

Happy Jubilee weekend to one and all.  (I told you I would play with those flags).

Journals online......

We are used to seeing pictures of people "journals", the modern painted kind but today they have announced that Queen Victoria's Journals are now on line.   Here .  I have read excerpts in the past and am now looking forward to being able to dip in and out at will.  I thought is would be interesting to link it with some of the dates on my family tree.
As a blog post isn't complete without a photo, this was in Regent Street, London yesterday. (I intend to play with this some, feel free to do same)

Still addicted to the Olympic Relay coverage. Here  Love listening to the snippets of conversation that are caught, from delighted "Here it is" to one bored male voice "Is that it?". So many happy, smiling people, lovely.

The right way......

I find Blogger has a thing about photographs taken in portarit mode.  It refuses to post them the right way up.  My solution is to go into My Pictures and rotate them to the left, Blogger will them reporduce them the right way up.  Weird but true.  Of course I then have to remember to turn them back again in MP otherwise they are wrong in slide shows.

 Original

 Turned to left.

That's it......

I am addicted.... to the Olympic Flame Relay.  I never have the TV on in a morning but realised this morning they were showing the start of the relay.  Two hours later I'm still there.  Watching the mixture of nervousness, pride and happiness  in the faces as each bearer takes the flame.  Magic. I have found that the whole thing is on the old analogue channel, no annoyingly,  banal commentators, just watching it all happen. You can follow it's progress here.

I am loving the guy who unlocks the torches, the super fit discreet police escort but most of all the happy cheering crowds.  The politicians and the press tell us the future is grim and I feel it may very well be but for the moment let us revel in our British way of doing things and enjoy the Jubilee and the Olympics when it comes.  We can go back to being gloomy afterwards...

Pebbles....

I was going to title this "Stoned" but thought it might bring some unwanted attention.  Continuing the Feather Project Jude wanted to include stones, see her explanation here so these will be on their way soon.

I have been working slowly on my Earth Cloth (Space is still waiting to be finished).  This is a detail of the swirl when first applied.

and this a little later (about two months) with the stitching added.

and you can see why I am "stoned"

Fun day....

The blog of Lynda Monk popped up on my reader today and that was funny because, unknown to her, I had plucked up courage to brave the M25 in  my new car to go to Art Van Go to see what she was up to on her Artist in Residence day. It was really good to see the things she has illustrated on her blog for real.  She really is a very clever lady, Her technique for making Lutradur resemble beautifully rusted metal.is fascinating. I have had Lynda's new book "Fabulous Surfaces" a few week, time to try some of the techniques I think.

Of course being in Art Van go I had to have a little shop.  I bought some of their extra fine calico which I love and some interesting rubbing plates and some of the new Koh i Noor Brilliant watercolours, mainly because there were four yellows and I always run out of yellow first. Came away with fingers itching.  Good feeling.

More good feeling, I have heard this piece of music many times but it has never brought a tear to my eye until this.

Let me tell you a story.....

Some years ago I started researching my family tree, after reaching dead ends that could only be passed by money and travel I gave up the search. In 2003 I had posted a query for information on an ancestry site and having no luck at the time had forgotten about it. On Tuesday for some reason I woke with the name of my Gt Gt Grandfather in my head. I looked at my old query and there were replies. The strange thing is one reply had been posted in 2010 but  most of the replies had only been posted last weekend and I find, what I had always suspected, that I have Cousins. Amazing. We are now having fun exchanging snippets of our joint history.

                                                          Nana and Granpa Parramore.

Seagulls....

 "Does my bum look big in this?" was my daughter's caption for this. 

and I am liking this.

and this handsome pair.

Happy Easter,everyone, has anyone noticed how it has rained every day since the hose pipe ban came in? 

The things you see on a beach........

 After 24hours of battling with SAGA insurance's terrible service I am in need of a laugh. Things we saw last week.

Cornwall

We have just spent a very pleasant week in St Ives in Cornwall. This was the view from our apartment.

The tide came in and out of the little beach right below our window. We woke to sound of the waves. Tempted?  This is where we found it,  a lovely welcome and in no time at all were settled in.
This was right outside our door.

We ate Cornish Pasties, of course,  but this was our favourite eatery making the best sandwiches I have ever tasted. 
 We saw some of these,

One of these,

 and a lot of these

But above all some stunning scenery.

 Only another 500 photographs to go..........

Moments of sadness

For my friends.

Rocks in my head.......

I was reminded of this.....Sue Lawty's World Beach Project

and this

Stones.....

This morning Jude said something in the Magic Diaries that set my mind racing,  She said "....stones are sort of scraps of something bigger".   Like many other people I have a habit of picking up a small stone or pebble from places I have visited, they become a symbol of the place,  a souvenir.  But this is something bigger.  At school, Physical Geography was my absolute favourite subject, I have marvelled at The Grand Canyon, been excited  by the magnificence of the Alps and loved the beauty of our own Lake District but until today I had never consciously thought that the pebble I pick up is just a scrap and once belonged to something much, much bigger and when I hold it I am holing a piece of the Universe in my hand.   Is that what we are?

Technology...".

This is to test whether I realy can update with my iPad. This was my Christmas gift from DH. A complete surprise. Adding pictures is obviously book 2,

The Artist

I did enjoy  this film.  So clever. I was completely absorbed the whole way through and came out feeling very good. Give yourself a treat.

It is a well known fact that I am not an artist but I do love messing around with paint.  This is a little bit of collage, "stitched" together digitally.

 

Here they are mounted in the beautiful giant Moleskin my son bought for me.

 Things have to be auditioned to go in here.  It has taken me over a year to put anything on its beautiful pristine pages.  As the years roll on, so quickly it seems now, I must learn to use all those things I have been hoarding for so long.

Disappointing weekend......

Just about recovering from the match.  Don't think it is at all fair to heap all the blame on Wes there were lots of other mistakes.  If that wasn't bad enough we found we had missed the boat on our Wembley tickets so will have to make so with the Fan Day and watch it on TV. 
The other disappointment was the Creative Stitches show at Bluewater.  How can you organise a show with that name and not ensure you have at least one person selling threads. I didn't see so much as a skein of DMC .

So time to turn my hand (and head) to something new.  I have been working on making the backing cloth for "Earth" for some weeks, working on the idea in my head in the meanwhile. Today I have pinned the "spin" in place around the centre ball of  molten rock. It is slightly smaller than Space which is waiting for it's backing. I am still deciding exactly how I want that to happen.

Hyperventilating......

Game Day (or in our case night)

 

  Photo from NFL No copyright breach intended,

I'll be there with my duvet. 

And then....

I played some more.

Thanks to the Graphics Fairy for the clip art.

Insy winsy spider......

I do hope  I have the opportunity to see the Golden Spider Silk Cape at the V& A, there till June so I might make it but in the meanwhile you can watch here. Just amazing. Thank you to Mary Corbet for the heads up. I always hate it if I have to break a web, you know when they build one right across the path. This one was caught when the greenhouse heater backfired.

I played a bit

and then a bit more.....

Christmas.....

.....was a little late(or early) this year.  Because our daughter was working in Canada we waited until she was able to join us (our son's idea), so for us Friday 13th was Christmas Day and a jolly good day it was.  Well worth waiting for. I was too late for Fortnum and Mason's Christmas windows but at the moment they are going with a show girl theme.  I didn't have my camera with me but I took this on my i Pod and then I played.

Daughter is off on her travels again so now, unfortunately,  I have no excuse for putting off all those jobs I have been thinking about. Tidy workroom,....... turn out some cupboards, .....watch the NFL playoff games.....start new cloth......start new fabric book.....play with new toys......decisions, decisions.

Freedom...

Today was the first session of the Magic Diaries it was full of the excitement of new beginnings.  At one point Jude took a pen and drew directly onto a corner of the cloth, it made me gasp but then I realised that this is Jude's gift.  She gives freedom.  I shed many tears and not a little blood in my Domestic Science lessons at school, I never seemed to be able to do anything to the satisfaction of the teacher.  I have been patronised because I haven't done my City and Guilds Embroidery (only by one person but in such a way as to make me feel inadequate ) and then Jude takes a Sharpie(no less)  to a cloth made of interwoven pieces which I watched her make and when someone commented she replied "it's only cloth". Brilliant. Today I'm growing.

Cloth book

For ages I have admired the cloth journals  made by Ro Bruhn.  I don't aspire to even match her journals but I really had the best time making this. I am trying to justify the amount of "stuff" in my workroom. This seemed like an ideal way to use papers, UFO's and other experiments and basically anything that came to hand.

 The back, I made it with a sort of left handed fastener.  Loops from front to back.!

So happy that part 2 of Jude's Magic Diaries has begun.  It has become so much a part of my daily life.

Two posts in two days.  It must be New Year.  Have a good one.

Time.....

I had a reminder that I was contributing to Sandy's Ideas of Inspiration blog and had fallen by the wayside, as indeed I seem to have done here. So full of resolve (not resolutions) when I saw the first idea of this new year "Time".  I was immediately reminded of the clock we had seen in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.  The Peacock clock.

This is a close up of the peacock,

because of the light it was difficult to photograph.  You Tube to the rescue.
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/-q0FAYE0_1Y" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen>iframe>
I apologise for the cross posting but I wanted the video here.

Space update...

This morning I spent some time clearing  my blog list of blogs which hadn't been updated in some months, then I realised that someone was probably doing the same to me.  So here is the present state of Space.

I found this commercial fabric at the Knit and Stitch show and though it ideal for my space animals.  So this is the great bear and the little bear between Jupiter and Saturn.  Astonomically incorrect I am sure but that is were they wanted to be.  I learned how to the star "maps" in the "Sun, Moon and Stars" workshop with Jude. Some of them are real constellations reversed and some are just pure invention.

More animals, the southern hemisphere seems to have a more interesting collection that we do, living on the edge of London it is very difficult to see stars at all. So here they are swirling around.  I may rest this cloth for a little while as working on the dark cloth is difficult in electric light but I know it has a long way to go.

Jude is to talk about eyes, I had already added one to the whale(apologies for fuzzy photograph) but I am sure the other animals will benefit.

A friend sent me this.