On the mend

At long last, I'm finally starting to feel a little more like my normal self. But in case you thought I'd been completely idle, I thought I'd show you a work in progress that I made a little more headway with in the past couple of weeks.

It started with this photograph of rust taken a couple of years ago whilst enjoying a textiles holiday here.

I played around with it a bit in Picasa to bring out all the wonderful colours that you could see with the naked eye but that the camera just couldn't seem to capture and have started a small hand embroidered panel. I wanted something that I could pick up and put down as the mood takes me (or to do whilst keeping my DH company while he watches stuff on the TV that doesn't really interest me) so it came in very useful lately when I haven't felt like doing anything much at all!

I have also started on the first of what I think will be my first 'series' of works but you'll have to wait to see it I'm afraid as I'm planning to enter it into a juried exhibition - yikes!

Normal service will be resumed shortly

That epic journey home at New Year has played havoc with my health. First, the horrendous cold/flu bug bit, then hard on its heels has been a chest and throat infection. At long last, I'm feeling slightly better and hope to get back to something crafty tomorrow.

Thread sketching

Urged on by a number of your comments after my previous post, I thought I'd have a go at interpreting this photograph with some thread sketching.

I've had the book, "Freestyle Machine Embroidery" by Carol Shinn for a while now but had hesitated to try it out given the fantastic realism Carol achieves in her work.

I heat transferred the photo onto a piece of smooth, white cotton, and then bonded the cotton onto some heavyweight canvas in the hope of avoiding the distortion that comes with heavy machine stitching.

When stitching, I simplified some of the detail as I soon realised I'd picked something far too complex for a first attempt!

Anyway, here's the result which I've mounted onto black painted canvas. Although I didn't quite manage to avoid distortion, I'm really quite pleased with it.

Creative Cue

As a bit of fun, and to help generate ideas (although I'm not usually short on those - just the time to realise them), I thought I'd join in with the Creative Cue challenge at Three Creative Studios.

My response to the first cue are these photographs - what the east wind from Siberia brought to the little Northumberland village of Ovington on New Year's Day. We were staying with John's brother and his wife to meet our new nephew, Thomas, aged 7 weeks.

Coming home on the 3rd, we were booked on the 10.30am train from Newcastle (normally a 15 minute drive from their house at most) however, because of the snow, and the fact that the village is in a valley so every way out is uphill, the car just couldn't make it. Revert to Plan B - a three mile walk through deep snow to the railway station in the next town but we missed our train out of Newcastle. Nearly ten hours, four trains and a bus later, with soaking wet feet and clothes, we made it home to Norwich. Since then we've both succumbed to the most horrendous colds/flu. Hope it doesn't last too much longer .....

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.