Lady in Waiting.........

..............No, I haven't been called to higher things it was just I spent a couple of days watching for the post to bring me this little wonder from Seth. It is called "Whispers"

It is one of his Art Deck Series   I love it, there are so many layers and even little marks of gold .
The little squares are fabric to it is lovely to touch as well and the bonus is I now need a trip to London to Muji to buy the clear perspex frame to show it off.

I tried some layering myself, about seven or eight, I think, on one of those 7x5 canvas boards.

 I finished if off with Seth's Vintage Beeswax embossing powder.  I decided it need some definition round the sides so I added  border of  Deep Sea. Being me I had to go just one step further and added one more layer of Vintage Beeswax and then that's when the magic happened. The "border" of blue slid away from the side and I accidentally touched the middle of the right side and it "tore" through to a couple of layers below.  The dark blue is part of the wrapping of my Easter egg. Nothing wasted see.

  
On Sunday I developed a sore throat so having no energy I sat and followed a blog hop from DeeDee Catron 
and was inspired by this  video from Kiss My Creative.
Here is my version.

Sunday was also the day of the London Marathon for people with more energy than me. Because we were having an unseasonable warm sunny day the helicopter shots of London were wonderful so I used my ipad and captured some..

 The city

 Buckingham Palace(lower left) and Horse Guards (middle right)

 The Tower  

Big Ben in scaffolding, the London Eye , St Paul's and the City.

Just saying.......

...........I don't want to get into a list of superlatives but if you ever get even half a chance to take a workshop with Seth Apter.....grab it.

Yesterday was such a treat. The workshop was called A Book of Moments and it was organised by The Birds in the Barn, near Colchester Essex. .It was one of the most well organised workshops I have ever attended. The attention to detail was faultless. Every table was covered and had a waste bag attached, on the table were baby wipes, kitchen towel, a box of things that might come in handy and at each place a gift or cards and a goody bag.

Another table was full of items that might be useful; during the day, collage papers, brads, string, everything you can think of.

So generous, there was even a box of old books. There was a pop up shop of very tempting supplies, tea and coffee available all day and lunch was delish as was the lemon drizzle cake which appeared in the afternoon.
There were a lot of us too,  so it must have taken a lot of hard work to organise. 

Seth taught how to deconstruct a book so that you can use the covers and then how to build a new, different kind of spine to hold the pages. My book was already in pieces

A Rochester junk shop find from a while ago.
When the spine was in we started on the pages and Seth told us he thinks there are two kinds of people who collage, the Auditioner and the Committer and urged us to try identify which one we are and try the opposite.He is a Committer,  I am definitely an Auditioner, freeing up is hard. 
Seth in demo mode.

The time went so fast but this is what I had at the end of the day.
 The cover, not quite finished

The pages are not attached yet as I will complete all and arrange at the end. The background on this one ancient gelli plate papers

The background on the right is an Citrasolve experiment 

 This background is town paper collage

The photograph  is the one of me the family call Keep Death of the Road.

And finally, my present to me my own tiny piece of original Seth Apter. It is called September. Scan doesn't do it justice.

  

A superlative day.

Something to play with.......

.... I have a lot of toys and some I haven't played with for a while.  With last weeks Sunday papers there  was a supplement which had great fashion pictures on a rather nice paper and I suddenly wondered if Citra-solve would work. Haven't even thought about it since this post  in 2011. To my delight it worked

Then I wondered what would happen if I put it through a stencil?

That worked too.  I thought they would make good backgrounds so I scanned them in and then I played a bit more. I combined them digitally in  Paintshop Pro..

this one used one of Seth Apter's stencils.

Here are the stencil masks I used. Please feel free to use.

Now I want to incorporate them into some kind of book pages. We'll see.

Week 11 in 1 Year of Stitches and my little clump of trees looks like this.

I have prepared things for the exhibition, a bit of a chore,  I love making, not too keen on finishing off.

Some time ago I made these art prompts

Wanting to play with paint I drew out three, funnily enough they turned out to be March,Rain and Peeling Paint

Here it is tidied.  The tree is made from a technique I learned from the late Renate Keeping, on memorable visit to ~The Keeping Gallery.

 

This has gone in my "Because I Felt Like It" book..

Time is agin me......

....Week 9 of this year already and not many of those plans I have been planning have been acheived yet.
The trees are slowly beginning to emege.

On the sewing front this week it was Mayland Textile Group.  We are getting ready for our exhibition next month and yesterday I dashed to Otford to catch the frame man who comes on the first Saturday of the month.  Piles of mounts and frames to choose from and of course, they will custom frame if you wish. I hope I have chosen wisely, trouble is you never know if it is right until you hang it.
My little world is also being framed. I took it to Craft Frames in Dartford because they are expert at mounting and framing embroidery and my piece, having evolved the way it did , was not exactly a standard fit.

I have been following Carolyn Saxby's beautiful blog and was wondering where she was taking the Surface Treatment Workshop that she references,  Doh! I realised it is a book I have had for some time and she is working through each tutorial.

 

 I started a similar exercise back in 2014 with another book Mixed Media Master Class 

Two of my favourite pages, 

wax crayon resist through Seth Apter stencil

 grunge paste and rubber stamps.

I also found FIVE unfinished art journals

Favourite TV this week has been the Sky Arts Portait Artist of the Year competition.  My goodness those people are amazing and my absolute favourite at the moment The Great Pottery Throw Down

Both of these knockout competions with interesting contestants  and without soul destroying judges. Now please BBC can we have the Great British Sewing Bee back?

I complained. Bluewater shopping centre  has several shops where the in-store music is so loud it spill out into the aisles.  Now Bluewater management  "in response to guest feedback" has started playing music in the aisles as well.  .I know I am not the only one to complain and their solution and standard reply to this is"the volume of music will slowly increase from the low level 1 before opening time, level 2 at opening time and the level 3 at our busy times".  Why would you need lound music when it is busy and there is so much noise from the "guests". Why would you need music at all.
 Hurrah for John Lewis, M&S, WH Smith ,Lakeland who do not play music.  I am not a guest, I have been shopping at Bluewater since it opened and I have never been given jelly or cake.

Mobile again......

... thank goodness.  Coffee with a friend, cat sitting for my son and a few doc's visits for DH, a printer which died just after I had replaced the cartridges (why does that happen) and the week flew by.  I have. though brought my 1 year of stitches piece nearly to an end.    So easy to completely ruin a piece by bad framing so it is probably going to take a while. Here is the piece as is.

This week I added the sun, much needed around here.  I learned how to make suns (and moons) from Jude Hill of Spirit Cloth . I started to make a little bit of the border. I can't do much more until I have decided on the mounting and framing.  So easy to completely ruin a piece with the wrong frame. I have done a little digital auditioning, what do you think?

I have spent a lot of time this week trying to make a book.   I was going to make a scrap journal with some old gelli prints but somewhere along the line  it turned into a book on a holiday we spent in St Ives a few years back.

One of the first things I did was make a cottage.

and the this piece of paper reminded me of the harbour so I added a couple of boats.

Loving the process.
Tomorrow we are off to do the laundry, in other words we are going to the cinema. I may be repeating myself here but to clarify, when we found that OAP's can have reduced rates at our local cinema on a Monday morning  it seemed like a good idea and we agreed that we were so much more fortunate than our grandmothers who spent their Mondays standing over a copper or a dolly tub doing the washing . Tomorrow's laundry is "Hidden Figures".
I think I have mentioned this before but Seth Apter has a new feature on his blog called  The Sunday Papers
Well worth following, it has links to some very interesting sites. Last week this had me wanting one of these, even if it was just a little piece.
https://youtu.be/PeMGRMwarKI

And then two come along at once...........

... I decided has been far too long since I played with paint and paper. At the beginning of the year Seth Apter suggested a prject for 2017. It is called Artifacts. 
"". This would be a no rules collaboration. Just find or make some sort of artist book, planner, scrapbook, 3-ring-binder, folder, or other container to document your creative experiences, whether they be in art, craft, or anything else. Then get to documenting in any way to style that works for you.""
That sounded like something I could do.  Loose enought not to become a millstone round your
Then Seth started to preview all the new stamps, stencils etc.  he has new for this year. Finger itchingly good.  That sent me to Paperarsty as I know they stock many of Seth's products and lo and behold they had just issued a challenge for January,to create using Pink and Orange so.......
a journal spread, using distress inks, sari silk, Treasure Gold , metal findings and a homemade tassel.

  Difficult to photograph. This is a scan.

 And here is one I made earlier,  more textile orientated.