A gig and more stitching

So it was off to Colchester last Monday, via my friend Jane's home in Newmarket, and another Burwell  Bash friend Jean, to see Andy Cutting, Nancy Kerr and Martin Simpson, at the Arts Centre. It poured down but we had a great time, meeting up with another Burwell Basher Tim. At the end we were standing around waiting for the crush to depart when Andy came down to chat to us, which was lovely. In February 2015 he will be back there with his new band Leveret, with Rob Harbron and Sam Sweeney (and a new cd out soon after) So hopefully we shall be there in strength with other Burwell Bashers.

Apart from a little bit of music I have mostly been stitching! Oh, apart from my birthday which was lovely. We are now into count-down mode for the Craft Fair , three weeks only to go. Here are some photos of the last blue cushion and the panel which I finished mid-week.

There has been quite a lot of interest on facebook about the Folk Flowers cushion, so I think people like it; I enjoyed stitching into this lovely felted wool. I really enjoyed stitching the panel as well, it turned out just the way I had wanted, but I'm not sure it is as saleable as the cushion. It is to hang on the wall, like a bas-relief carving, or a picture, but lots of people have asked what it is "for"! So maybe no one will have it. 

I love the frame, it just makes it different form everything else. But there you are, if you don't try these things out you never move on do you? Still not happy with the felt wreath I did the other week. But now I need to concentrate on some more bangles ...... and I was intending to make some cards too, but I think that may not happen! 

I've been reading so many blogs about bottling and otherwise preserving this year's harvest, I feel quite inadequate. Maybe next year......... Anyway, we seem to be hurtling into Autumn - it felt quite chilly today and overcast. Surely there is still some sunshine left?

Craft Fair at Letheringsett

Lest you think I have abandoned textiles entirely for a life of music and frivolity, here are a few photographs of some of the items I've been working on for the Craft Fair at Letheringsett this weekend.

First the details - Back to the Garden can be found very easily on the main road from Fakenham to Holt, and all the details are on the website above. Come along for a visit, have coffee, a snack or lunch - and there is also a food festival on at the same time as the craft fair.

As well as the bangles and pin-cushions, brooches and quilts, I have some new items, some of which I am rushing to finish!

                                    A woollen bag with felted wool appliqué decoration.

A new cushion using some of my dyed blanket. I made the buttons with felted wool and pelmet vilene.

                  A fourth "One Bird Upon a Hill" cushion, they are proving to be very popular!

                                           Folk art blooms and birds on this third cushion.

I made this little nursery cushion using reproduction "flour sack" fabrics, and the central panel contains a dozen genuine vintage Suffolk Puffs or "yo-yo's" as they are known in the States.

        And this is my latest Angel Panel, slightly smaller than the first one which has sold. I so enjoy         designing and stitching these panels - more in the pipe-line, but not in time for the craft fair!

It will be an early start on Saturday morning, though it is less than an hour's drive for me. I'm quite looking forward to it, and bless her cotton socks, Yvonne Autie rag-rug maker and silversmith extraordinaire, has volunteered to come and keep me company all day Saturday. I know several other friends have promised to pop up and see us, and I hope that my Norfolk blogging friends might be free to dash across-county and come and say hello. This is a new venue for North Norfolk Arts and Crafts, and I am very proud that Textile Treasury has been selected as one of the exhibitors, so do come along and help make it a success!

Colour Schemes

Amidst the present buying /Christmas menu -planning / card writing /etc etc I am playing with wool and felt and threads and fabric. You have to have balance, after all!

I am taxing my brain at the moment selecting  colour schemes for my bangles. I originally came up with the ambitious idea of making them in seasonal shades. I thought I would give them cute names, thus:

Spring Blossoms, Summer Holiday, Autumn Woodland, Winter Solstice. I had a rough idea which colours would match each season - poor old Winter Solstice remains a tad boring being merely reds and greens, but there you are. Then I thought I needed to expand upon this because I made a bangle in greys to go with my "Fifty Shades" outfit (I do wear a lot of grey, 'tis true.) And I wear a lot of blue so I wanted bangles in blue shades.... so I combined them and came up with Blue Lakes and Rocky Shores (I bet all you Girl Guides are singing along now, aren't you?) Then my gaze fell upon a particularly scrumptious hand-dyed wool-felt  in purples/greens and I thought Heath and Moorland might be another nice colour way.

                     
                                                                     Spring Blossoms

                                                                   Summer Holiday

                                                                    Autumn Woodland

         
                                                                        Winter Solstice

                                                       Blue Lakes and Rocky Shores

                                                                Heath and Moorland
Excuse the poor colour, the light is bad, I'm a poor photographer and my camera also is very selective when it comes to accurate shade depiction. Also, I need to say that of course I will dip into other colours which pop up which seem to belong in a particular scheme; only I had about reached my toleration limit for faffing about sorting these out for you!

Then I was reading the deliciously colourful eye-candy blog Attic 24 and was gripped by Lucy's latest crochet project in her signature saturated colours and knew I had to make a bangle to match. The best match I could come up with in my colours was Summer Holiday, where I can indulge in all my brights, but somehow it begged to be called Carnival when I had made it.

I can't tell you how satisfying this one was to make. The wool felt is gorgeous - from Jean at Oliver Twists, really soft and wonderful to stitch. The perle 5 thread is 'confetti' from Weeks Dye works, and is an overdyed fibre which just SHOUTS carnival to me!

I think now I have dug a hole for myself - perhaps I should abandon the idea of colour schemes and just make bangles as the fancy takes me. But then, I do like the idea of being able to just gather felts/threads in specific colours when I start to work without all the deliberation each time. It is helpful. And to be honest, I just like giving things names. I love playing with words. What do you think? And what, apart from festive concerns, has been taxing your mind at the moment? Have you any spare time or mental capacity for anything else? See you soon -ish!

Stitching down the Wind

Wow! What a storm! I do hope that you aren't among those poor unfortunates who have lost their homes, or have had to move out while repairs are effected. We escaped here in our corner of West Norfolk but up on the North Norfolk coast they took a real battering, and I know in other parts of the UK the wind, rain and high tides have wrought devastation and loss of life.

In expectation of a couple of days of bad weather Jim and I planned for staying home and 'pottering' - home chores, long coffee-and-crossword breaks, and blissful hours to tie flies and order from fishing catalogues (Jim) and sorting threads and stitching (me). Mind you, the wind was so strong on Thursday afternoon in the little conservatory that is my sewing room, that I thought the roof would be ripped off and judiciously repaired to the Big Table in the dining room!

I made more headway into the task of tidying up the thread straggles - you know, when you cut into a skein of thread you always end up with an impossible tangle eventually, so I have started to wind the threads onto bits of card. It's a deliciously mindless occupation, high on the list of anyone with OCD I'd imagine! If you do it before things get too bad it's not such a task.

I did a little more on the Farmhouse Quilt. Some of the fabrics are quite gorgeous to quilt through, and this pale flannel here is one of them - see how the stitches just melt back into the cloth?

All the applique pieces will be embroidered when the quilting is finished and I have bound it. Yummy!

I'm using one strand of a hand-dyed 21st Century Yarn 4-ply cotton to quilt with - so much softer than quilting thread against the flannel, and I love the way the variegated colour changes just add a little something to the stitches.

A little Christmassy felty something. Bet you can't guess .......

And some more wool felt bangles. On a roll with these now. The bowl in the top photo contains tiny felt squares ready for embellishing the bangles. I must get my bead boxes out and see which ones will work with the wool.

So that's how I've spent these last couple of stormy days, stitching down the wind and really quite enjoying being 'stuck in the house'. I hope they have been good days for you, and if not, my good wishes to you.

Now then before you whizz off to your next blog stop, do me a favour and pop over to Potter Jotter, as Cathy is doing a really fab give-away of some of her lovely ceramic buttons. Hop across and say hello!

Bye for now and thank you all for your lovely comments these last couple of weeks about my lengthy wait for a hospital appointment. Believe me I know I am not in dire straits and other bloggy friends have been having a much more drastic time of it, health-wise. But it has been so good to read your remarks, thank you.

Feltastic!

I hope you are going to enjoy a burst of colourful felty fabulousness to brighten up this miserable November morning! I am suddenly consumed by a passion for felt, and have been stitching away for the past few days and no let up in sight! My threads are tangling again ......

.... but as it is Work In Progress I think I'm excused. I'm heavily into a tactile and colour sensory overload and it's brilliant! Of course, I've been working on the pincushions for a while now, so there's nothing new there, and you will remember my Angel and Wingèd Hearts  (need to make some more)

Gloria was begun at a Madeline Millington workshop quite a few years ago, and of course, as it is more or less a Madeline design I cannot sell her, nor copy her for sale. But I have been working on some designs of my own and hope to get round to making them up some time soonish. (Oooh, can you spot something rolled up at the back there? I have rediscovered my rag-rug work!)

The Wingèd Hearts are my own design - well, an adaptation of a very old image really, it's been around a long long time. I know one went to Penny  and Victoria bought one ...I must have sold them all so need to replenish.

But something else has been nagging away at the back of my mind for ages. I've been interested in African wrapped and coiled jewellery for some time - again, texture and colour, very attention grabbing. And lately I've seen a lot of jewellery made from felted wool; I love the effect of felted wool but just don't want to go down the wet-felting route, or even the needle-felting route, come to that. So I had to devise a way of utilising my felt and wool felt to make the coils I wanted. So, remember those felty worms from the last post? This is what they were destined to become!

I have to say I am pretty pleased with them. It took a while to work out how to make the base coil, and the 'faff factor' is quite high. But each one I made I refined the process and think I have just about got the hang of it now.

The embellishment part is the fun bit - but even here there are improvements to make and different effects to discover.

I shall be experimenting with various embroidery, and am debating whether to add beads. I do have the odd bead stashed away, as you might have guessed! The bangles are less chunkier looking when worn than it appears from the photographs, but I might experiment with various size cores.

So there you are, last post's mystery solved! I'm chuffed with them, hope you like them too!