Finally caught up.........

How do I see myself?

I have thought about this quite often this month, but always come to the same conclusion, I am a seeker, a searcher. The drawback is that I am not quite sure what I am seeking.

I am a butterfly, as soon as I discover a new technique, a new product or a new book I fly to it, sometimes convinced that I have found what I am looking for but most times as soon as the acquisition has been made,the technique fathomed, I am already pursuing something else. In other words I am a Jill of all trades, master of none, a dabbler who occasionally strikes lucky and produces a passable piece to work.

I would never call myself an artist,yes, I am artistic (I am certainly not a scientist, 6% in my first Chemistry exam proved that) but for me an artist is someone who produces work which touches something inside of me. Paintings have made me cry, pieces of sculpture have made me marvel how anyone could make such a thing from stone and textile pieces have made me yearn to reach out an touch them.

Maybe one day I will find what I am seeking and I will produce a piece of work which will prompt others to call me Artist but until then I will keep looking…………..and having a ball.

I give you my TIF piece for May illustrating my mind.....well I followed the colour scheme!!!!!



Actually it looks better on Teddy

Still catching up.....

Yesterday I posted my Calendar Girl 2008 postcard to Dianne. I had made three cards this month but Dianne chose the one that I made particularly with her in mind.

The fairy was painted with transfer paints and ironed on to dupioni. The flower and the heart was picked out with stitching and a few irridescent sequins were scattered around to suggest a little magic.

The other two cards were

flower made free hand on the embellisher and another fairy

stamped onto organza this time and applied to black felt with old lace. The hearts refer to the text on the calendar

A coffee, a tea and a hot chocolate.......

I had another good day on Saturday, when I met up with Lynda and Sharon from Calendar Girls 2008. We met at Sharon's exhibition at the Frensham Rural Life Cantre. For me, conversation with two people who's work I admire was a great treat, here we are
. This photograph was taken by Sharon's husband Mike who had some wonderful wildlife photographs on show,you can see more here, take a look in his gallery and watch out for my favourite, the sheep.
You can't have a day out without goodies, this is one of Sharon's beautiful art cards

and this is a card from Shirley who was showing her beautiful lino cuts.She is under persuasion to start a blog.

It was a good day, I look forward to the next time we can meet and hopefully some of the other CGs will be able to make it too.

Catching up....

Thursday was the day our little group got together. At Christmas Val gave us some very pretty hearts and she showed us how she made them from shrink plastic using acrylic paint and embossing powders. One she had made looked like rust and this was just what I needed to add to my Fay Maxwell panel. so instead of hearts I made these.





A long way to go yet but it is beginning to take shape.

What a week...

One of those weeks that held enough delights to last a month. Released by Maggie I spent a lot of time on Sunday playing with Paint Shop Pro and this is one of the transformations I achieved, I would like to think that I might be able to use it as a base for something textile.

This was the original photograph and this

is what I finished with.

On Wednesday I played hookey from my usual golf game and went to London for the day. First visit was the Royal Academy for the Cranach Exhibition I had never really heard about this artist but saw that is was on on when I went to the From Russia. I was so pleased that I did. Initially I went in without an audio guide but I soon returned to the desk to get one. One of Cranach strengths was his attention to detail of costume and the audio guide highlighted some of these like the slashing on a knuckles of a pauir of gloves.
Very little costume here.... but just look at the veil. Magic!!


I had a lovely wander after the exhibition (probably walked twice as far as on my golf game) and then to end the day I went to see The Jersey Boys

Great night out, not just the music and it was amazing just how many you knew but also the way is is presented you learn so much about the individuals who made up the Four Seasons. If you like musicals this is a good site to get some tasters.

Marvellous Maggie.......

the weather was horrible today, persistent heavy rain interspersed with even more persistent drizzle....not a day for driving but drive I did for about an hour to visit the East Kent EG near Canterbury to hear a talk by Maggie Grey.. It was worth every minute of the journey.

Maggie based her talk on her new book which comes out in two weeks "From Image to Stitch". With the help of husband Clive and a wonderful combination of laptop and digital projector Maggie demonstrated how she uses Paint Shop Pro as a design tool and then went on to discuss methods by which the designs can be transformed into testile pieces.

She made it look so easy and the results brought gasps of suprise and admiration from the audience but for me something really important happened. I have enjoyed using Paint Shop Pro for some years but I have always had a vague feeling that somehow I was cheating, that design should be done with a pencil and paper. Today Maggie banished that feeling, she made me realise that the way you use the tools in PSP is as much your expression as being able to draw. Neither is better than the other if it is right for you.

At the end she apologised for over-running...I could have happily sat there for the rest of the day. Thanks Maggie and Clive.

This is just a quick snap of one of the tables They don't do it justice, it's just a reminder for me.

Useful blog....

I came across this useful blog,I'm sorry I can't remember who pointed me to it. Many links to techniques from embellishing to usingg Tyvek,Textile Arts Resouce Guide

Bits and pieces.

Memos for me....and perhaps for you... still worried about losing things again. The only stuff I have is what I had on the web.


The first rose of summer(though summer seems to have disappeared again), colour is just about right on my monitor. If anyone has any idea what this one is called I would be grateful to know. We must have bought it but neither of us can remember where or when. This is its second year.

First of all, Susan has launched a new round of Cyber Fyber for people who missed out last time.
Incidentally one of the things I lost was my picture of the postcard I sent to Cyber Fyber, I didn't publish it because I wanted to be sure Susan liked it enough to use it before I put it on my blog.

Just look at the designs Beth Robinson has created doodling with circles.

Thanks to The Embroideress I have just found this great colour site.

Sharon has been at it again, she has created a site Stichin' Fingers where we can meet and discussto our hearts content.

A couple of questions for you.....

Why are the mens clothes in M&S prettier colours than the womens?

How many "bags for life" do you own? At the last count I had 17, most of which are on the back seat of the car when I get to the checkout!!!

Good morning....

The sun is shining and the birds are singing and I am seated in my freshly painted and carpeted living room in front of my new computer, Hurrah! And it just gets better you can see the carpet in my workroom which I have not been able to see for the last four weeks. I removed eight boxes to be re-cycled at the tip and st the charity shop so I am feeling very smug. Now all I have to do is re-cycle my stash by getting creative again.

Thank you for the messages of sympathy in my self inflicted predicament. They are still working on the files.
One of my losses, if that is what it turns out to be, are the dozens of photographs I took at the Three Emperors Exhibition at the RA. I was reminded of them when I caught the end of the programme on the Forbidden City on BBC2 last night. (Yes, I was watching the Nancy's)

This is from the RA's site, painted on silk....can you imagine?

Last year I did a workshop at the EG with Fay Maxwell based on her work in her book Crewel and Unusual, I have to confess the piece from this workshop became a UFO but I jumped at the chance to take another workshop when she visited us again. Her workshops hardwork because she keeps you at it but great fun. Half the room wanted to do the modern take on Crewel work we did last time and the other half, including me, wanted to do the much freer canvas work.

We had to paint a piece of canvas before hand, having done that Fay then said we could ignore the painting as we were going to cover the canvas to within an inch of it's life. I was just a way of getting over staring at a blank piece of white canvas. I have been fascinated by the rust pieces that Lynda of Purple Missus has been doing, so I pinched her colour scheme of Quinacridone Nickel Azo Gold and Paynes Grey and I added a little Iridescent Gold. I painted the canvas and also a piece of velvet and some threads. I was fascinating to see how the different materials took the paint in different ways. I forgot to take photographs as we went along but this is the piece to far




The lace is only being auditioned at the moment and I want it to look more distressed, loads of work to be done but this is going to be a great "pick up and do a bit piece" for the summer.

Off to enjoy the day just in case this fine weather spell turns out to be "summer".

There's good news....

and there's bad news.......for me anyway. I have a new computer, with a wonderful 19 inch screen so that I can stop peering at a tiny screen. I had it built by a local firm Matrix and I am so happy with the service I received. The bad news is that they are having difficulty retrieving the data from my old machine but they have promised that they will keep on trying so I won't give up all hope for the moment.
The moral of this story is BACK UP, BACK UP, BACK UP. I was always promising myself to do it and I do have some things on disk but it is going to take me ages to do re-load it all. I have bought a USB Flash disk and promised myself that I will do it regularly but for the moment "My Picture" is completely empty...weird sensation.

Hopefully I can now play catch up, the decorating is finished and the new carpet is down, I have already said that I have whimped out and this is my April challenge for Sharon. Change!!! There is still my room to do, as this became the repository of anything I couldn't decide whether I wanted to keep or throw out.

Calendar Girls and Take it Further are calling me so hopefully by next week I will be up an running.

Changes......

I think I have nearly fulfilled Sharon's challenge this month and have come to the conclusion that though I might like the results of change, I most certainly do not like the process!! I am offering the changes that have occured in this house this month.
The house is still in chaos, the actual decorating is finished and I think I like it but until the carpet is fitted on Thursday we won't know for sure. Then starts the long process of replacing the furniture, books, onaments etc. So about another week of unsettled living which we, not to mention the cat, have found stressful.
Just to add to the fun I broke my computer. Not quite sure what happened, I know I pulled out the wrong plug (thought I was dismantling lights) when it was switched on but apparently I have damaged the motherboard. Fingers crossed they can transfer some of the stuff but I won't know until the new one arrives next Friday (didn't want it until we are straight). Just some old holiday photos on this machine but you can't have a post without a picture so here is a foretaste of summer (I hope)

In the nick of time.......

I had arranged to meet my daughter to go to the theatre on Thursday, so I thought I'd just check to see if there was anything else I could do to (escape from decoratind!!!!). What luck, I hadn't realised that the "From Russia" exhibition was to end so soon. On Friday in fact. I queued for 45 minutes in the bitter cold but it was worth every minute. From among the many gems this was my favourite it just drew me across the room.

No copyright breach intended.
Our theatre visit was to "Hairspray".. What fun. I have had the CD for about three years and was a bit disappointed in the film so I was looking forward to this with mixed feelings. It was great. Michael Ball was terrific. The performance we saw was being signed for the deaf. What a woonderful skill this is. Not only did she sign but she sang all the words and did all the facial expressions as well. She had a resounding round of applause at the end.
Great escape day...back to the decorating tomorrow!!

April Calendar Girls 2008.......

I wanted to do something special for the April challenge as my swap partner was Doreen who thought up the challenge in the first place. As I have already explained to her this immediately fried my brain, and that, and all the upheaval of the decorating (still ongoing) meant I just couldn't settle or come up with anything.

In the end I made three cards, this is the one Doreen chose


This is "paper" made from silk cocoon strippings and sprayed with inks.

These are the other two.

All change.....

How do you see change? As a negative or a positive. That is Sharon's challenge for this month and this is the colour scheme. I have given the concept a lot of thought and have come to the conclusion that it depends entirely on circumstances of change whether I see it as negative or not. I have had a few thoughts on the piece and must get to it soon as things are going to change around here.

We are about to have a major decoration job done, I am sure it will be great when it's done but the next three are four weeks are going to be messy, to say the least, amd I am not sure how much time I will have for creating and/or blogging as things are going to be disconnected!!!! The interesting thing is that though I mess with colour and stuff all the time when it comes to something like what colour carpet to chose, I freeze. It has taken weeks and I am won't know if I made the right decisions until it is finished. A classic example of how change can be negative or positive I think.

Just look what this artist has done to change a pile of pebbles!!

This is 100 in the World Beach Project.

Just for interest Neil Gaiman had this link to a talk on TED on what Leonardo Da Vinci looked like when young.



One more world on change, our Spring has just changed back to winter as it is snowing heavily at the moment. That definitely is a negative,

Happy Easter....

or should that be Christmas judging by the fact that we woke up to snow this morning!! It hasn't stayed though. This morning I tried turning brown eggs into pasche eggs this morning and much to my suprise the results weren't too bad. Pasche eggs were what we had at Easter when I was little. They are actually just hard boiled eggs which can be decorated in anyway you think fit but my mother's way was to place a flower, like a primrose on the egg and wrap them in onion skins binding them with cotton. Foolishly I forgot to photograph this but you can see it here. The eggs are then boiled and when they are cool comes the magical moment of removing the skins to reveal the wonderful patterns and if you are lucky a perfect imprint of the flower.

In the Barrow in Furness they used to display the eggs in the window, I think there was probably a fair bit of rivalry over the displays. I couldn't find a picture so I had a go at drawing what it looked like.
This is just one window but the whole street would look like this.
There is further explanation of pasche eggs here and what they are used for here. We used to roll them against each other to see who had the hardest shelled egg.
I couldn't resist having a play in PSP with the two photos. This is after I ran the "art" script on them. What fun.


Happy Easter.

Wonderment and a Puzzle

Yesterday was a special day. DH, me and our two children(grown up but you know...)went to the British Museum to see the First Emperor exhibition and to wonder at the Terracotta Warriors.
This picture is from Wikipedia, no copyright breach intended, this photograph illustrates what was so wonderful, it is difficult to describe how the very stillnes of the firgures made them more life like There was one in particular that I gazed at for a long time, feeling that at any moment he would turn his head and smile at me.I so wanted to touch. The farmer who found the first head must have had a terrible shock. The expressions on the faces are a marvel, each so different on the ones on show and this apparently applies to the 7000 that they have found so far. The detail on them is also amazing,there are a lot of photographs on flickr by people who have been fortunate enough to visit the site in China. One part I wasn't expecting were the beautiful birds, cast in bronze. One bit that we all loved was exhibit which showed how the figures were constucted in an "assembly line", it was a truly special day.

Now can anyone tell me how it is that hens only lay brown eggs these days???? Young Mr Sainsbury didn't know. I went to buy some eggs to make pasche eggs, more of that at the weekend but all the eggs were brown and I wanted white ones. How strange!!

Tulips in March........

This was the Calendar Girls picture for March,
Lots to choose from. I had a play in PSP9. This is one I considered

but in the end I focused in on the tulip heads, altered them a little and then printed them onto cotton.
This is the first one which is on it's way to Jenny

Inspired by the talk by Carol Naylor we had at EG, see here
I decided to try some heavy machine embroidery.
This is my second take on the tulips,
just light FME but using the words alphabet on my machine, which I love.
Jenny mentioned that she had used the lilac as her motif, I had focused so much on the tulip I hadn't even noticed them. So thank to Jenny, this is my lilac done on the embellisher.

There is some stunning stuff on the Calendar Girls this month

Match It for Pratchett........

In my last post I made a reference to Terry Pratchett, one of my all time favourite authors.I have laughed at his humour and admired his wisdom and his creation, Granny Weatherwax is my role model for my old age! In December he announced that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimers disease, a tragedy for anyone but for such an inventive mind as his....well as Granny herself would say..."Bugger". On Neil Gaiman's journal today I came across this link to Match it for Pratchett, which tells how you can donate to try to match the $500,000 Terry Pratchett has donated to Alzheimers research. This is an article in the Sun where he talks about the poor funding for such vital reasearch.

Could be a map of part of the Discworld but actually a kind lady at the EG brought me a piece of packaging which had been round some buttons and which she rescued from the waste paper basket because she thought I would like it. How kind. So I made her a couple of postcards to say thank you, just by printing parts of the card onto cotton and then adding a few stitches and buttons.

Thank you....

to everyone who has left a comment on my March TIF piece. I have tried to contact each one but some of the links didn't work so if I missed you I'm sorry.

Here is a link that I have just found if you like books and Libraries. Cyndi of Layers upon Layers posted this link to Curious Expeditions who has some wonderful photographs of beautiful libraries all round the world.
This photograph is of the chained books in Hereford Cathedral, it says they were chained to prevent theft. Readers of Terry Pratchett know better. Oook!!

I am suprised the reading room at the British Museum doesn't seem to be there.
It did strike me that some of the photographs would make terrific basis for design and colour schemes.

It's the little things......

you do together, as the Sondheim song goes.Sharon's challenge this month, to notice the little things was another springboard for a lot of thoughts.

Here are some bits of the stream of thought bit....

A small crack might be the sign of a deeper rift.

A detective looks for small clues that will help complete the picture of the crime.

An artist or photographer will focus on a small part/area and transform that in to the whole of the work

A finishing detail on a couture garment may be an indication of the quality of the whole garment.

I didn't say they were earth shattering, it is just some of the things that came to mind!

My first reaction on seeing the colours was "camouflage" and this resulted in this train of thought, camouflage, leaves on hats, ferns, bracken, the young fronds of ferns (bracken) which contain the form of the whole plant be it a small fern or a huge tree fern. I couldn't find the photograph I took of ferns so I looked in flickr and there I found this perfect picture. (which was much better than mine anyway)
I asked for permission to use it as a base and Nancy generously said yes. She has some wonderful pictures in her album it is well worth a browse.
I ran the photograph with the painted wood script in PSP9 to give it a more stitchy look and then printed it onto cotton.
Next step was it pick out some details to embroider. I used variegated threads to echo the lights and shadows of the original. The stems are couched and then split stitched. The insides of the curle are french knots, bullion stitch and detached button hole band (I didn't do TAST for nothing!!!)

At first I was going to make it into a post card but because I was stuck indoors with today's awful weather I played a bit. I dug out my encaustic waxes, at first I tried making fern patterns but it all loooked to heavy so I ironed it off onto a piece of material but then decided I like the remaing wax better so this is now the background for the piece. I found the whispy yarn and added it to give that tangly feeling you get when walking through bracken.This is the scan
and this is the photograph, neither are quite "right". Neither of them show the texture.

For me, just the word "bracken" transports me the Lakeland hills. Memories again!!