-Well, hello again!
Not sure I’ll be able to catch up with everything that’s happened over the last few months, but I’ll give it a go…
About a month before Christmas, I turned *gulp* 50. Not quite sure how that happened, as I’d swear it’s only a couple of years since I left home, but my birth certificate doesn’t lie. Anyway, various members of my family got together and paid for me to attend a residential craft course of my choosing – a lovely idea for a present. The course I chose was “Machine Embroidery”, offered by Anglia Leisure Learning and tutored by Annette Morgan.
The venue was very good, food was plentiful (too plentiful, really, my jeans got very tight) and tasty and the organisation was excellent. The class was very small (just two students) and Annette was a wealth of knowledge and inspiration. We started off making paper collages, which were then scanned and printed onto heat transfer paper, transferred onto fabric and then stitched, cut, bondawebbed and generally fiddled around with. There were mistakes, obviously, but these led on to new discoveries – accidentally ironing gold transfer foil all over my fabric, instead of just a few selected areas allowed me to discover a) how difficult transfer foils is to remove and b) what an interesting effect is produced by scratching the surface of said foil with the side of a scissor blade.
I spent a very happy two-and-a-half days up to my elbows in vilene, threads, bondaweb, fuse fx, calico, heat transfer paper, paint, glue and fabric. At the end of it all, I had produced this:
It has now been mounted on an artist’s canvas, which I covered in some lovely textured hand-made paper, and hung on the wall.
Since coming home, I have had another go using similar techniques and produced this one, too:
I haven’t decided yet how to frame/mount this one so it’s just languishing in a corner at the moment, but I hope to finish it off very soon.
Knitting has taken quite a back seat lately – there are lots of projects in my queue on Ravelry, but I just don’t seem to have any inclination to start anything. The current WIP is a pair of gloves – rather lovely gloves, actually – but they’ve been half-finished for months now and I’m not even sure where they are!
I have finished a weaving project – a silk twill scarf for my lovely sister-in-law – but rather stupidly, I don’t seem to have a photo of it. It was quite a challenge to make, as twill is much easier to do on loom with multiple harnesses rather than the rigid-heddle loom that I have, but I got there in the end. I didn’t swear much, either. Well, not that much…
Since the weather finally seems to have got over itself and become a bit more seasonal, Bethany and I have made the most of it in our usual fashion:
Speaking of which: it’s Pimms o’clock!
Till next time…