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.

Play day.....

Yesterday was fun.  Inspired by this , Painting in the Round on Ro Bruhn's blog we decided to have a little go yesterday.  Just so we didn't get carried away we decided on a few rules, the shape would be circles and we would each only use two colours.    We painted for ten minutes and then moved round.  This is the first round.

A bite of lunch while it they dried off and then we added black for a bit of drama.

 It was very interesting how the first marks inspired the second and how different they all were.  Sparked loads of ideas for "next time" .Thanks girls.

Ro Bruhn is proving to be a bit of an inspiration  at the moment and hopefully assiting me to reduce the ridiculous amounts of "stuff" I have aquired over the last 20 years.but more of that later.

"Space" is coming along nicely and I will post soon, delighted that Jude is going to continue the Magic Diaries next year.

I was really thown in my blogging routine by the loss of Slide.  Still searching for an alternative.

But will it stay in place,,,,

I need to wear a scarf when it turns chilly, so when I was fascinated when I saw this saw this on Michelle Ward's blog .

Now which version will stay put best?