A bit of a washout ...

... is how I'd describe the results of my snow dyeing efforts once I'd rinsed, dried and ironed them. The watercolour effect is very pretty in some areas if you can ignore the big dark blotches where I guess there wasn't enough snow on the fabric.

I wasn't expecting the colours to be so faint but with all that icy water to dilute the dyes, then perhaps I shouldn't have been so surprised. Think I need to reflect on where to take these next.

Blowing away the cobwebs

On Monday, as it was such a lovely bright, sunny (but cold!) day, we decided to take a trip to Great Yarmouth and have a walk along the beach to blow the Christmas cobwebs away.

We took the camera and took photos of a concrete sofa sculpture,

lichen at the harbour,

and rust on the remains of Wellington Pier.

The old stanchions made some interesting shapes,

as did the offshore windfarm,

the patterns in the sand left by the receding tide

and the benches along the seafront.

It was good to get out in the fresh air, but even nicer to get back home in the warm again!

Snow Dyeing

Sitting in my dressing gown this morning enjoying my first coffee of the day, I was catching up on all the blogs that I follow when I came across a mention of "snow dyeing'. I'd never heard of this before but a quick Google search came up with lots of references and, in particular, a link to Michele's blog where she describes exactly how it's done.

Seeing as we had another 4-5 inches of snow last night, I thought I'd give it a go - once suitably dressed of course!

Here are the pictures so far:-

As I have nowhere indoors to keep piles of brightly coloured snow covered fabric, I'm just going to have to leave it all outside in the garden until the snow melts. I'm intrigued to see the results but I guess I'll just have to be patient and hope the thaw sets in soon!

P.S. If you missed the Twitter update, I didn't win the Chairman's Challenge.

Chairman's challenge

Last month, I joined the local branch of the Embroiderers' Guild. Our next meeting is on Saturday and we have a 'Chairman's Challenge' - design and make a Christmas card - any size, any technique. I'd had an idea kicking around in my head for a while so after a couple of false starts, here is the result.

To make the snowball, I bonded two layers of shiny, sparkly, white polyester sheer fabric together with bondaweb, cut out lots of circles with a soldering iron and then stitched them together, adding a bead at each joining point. The card base is two layers of thick craft vilene with the same sheer attached with the embellisher machine. I cut a circle out of the card front and inserted my snowball.

And a close up

I'd also watched the Talking Threads episode on www.countrychannel.tv recently that featured Fay Maxwell and her slashing technique and had been intrigued to try it out. Using lots of different shades of green fabric, I constructed this Christmas tree to which I added beads and mounted it on shiny card.

And a close up

This will be the very first time I'll have entered my work in any sort of competition but, to coin a phrase, 'you can't win it if you ain't in it!' Wish me luck.......