Loose ends . . .

Why am I always dabbling with bits and pieces, try this, try that? There are too many beguiling creative techniques and ideas out there. And here are three.
1. Sunprints in winter - I have heard you don't need lots of light for this, so thought I'd try .

Plain cotton fabric, painted with green and blue acrylic, dried, then overpainted with dark grey silk paint. While wet I laid on it torn strips of paper and shapes cut using those gadgets that punch holes , sprinkled some salt grains in between, and left it to dry on my worktable. Gloomy day, light on in the room.
The painting didn't work so well. I wanted the colours underneath to show more in the shapes. But the shapes show up.
2. Abstract work - thought I'd try an abstract approach to autumn, leaf colours printed in non-leaf shapes. I'll stitch some leaf shapes over them. Why blues in the background? I think it is echoes of the summer that preceded the autumn. Work in progress anyway.
3. Insertion stitches - article by Beryl Taylor in one of the latest 2 Quilting Arts mags, lent by a friend. Wanted to try them out. And the strips between were begging to be filled up with couching - just lacing and whipping running and back stitches with various threads.

Autumn colours in the park

The beech trees are the best at the moment. Other trees have had a mixture of green, yellow and brown leaves all at once for ages, but this week's winds have stripped them. I should have taken a photo of the ground in our church car park today, (I was there for the church banner group session), that's where all the leaves are, turning to mush in the periodic downpours.
My husband read out to me today, from a book about British history, that after the battle of Glencoe, it kept raining and the sun did not shine in Scotland for 3 years!

Oh I do like to be beside the seaside . . .

. . . and if I had two and a half million pounds I could buy this house and live 1 minute up the road from this beach, at Sandbanks, Poole, Dorset, UK.





But I don't, so whenever we go to visit family down south we just all wrap up warm, pile into cars, find some free street parking , and go for a walk. Which we did last week. But none of us can resist the shells, and because there'd been some blowy weather recently there were lots more than usual, and more variety.


Having grown up in this place I miss the sea where we live now, miles from it just south of Manchester.

Red and green in stitches

Time for a bit more textile work . . . a couple of hangings I made a while back, influenced by all the reds and greens, and by shapes in Indian pieces.














(Be nice if blogger would arrange the pics tidily)

(Oh, perhaps it has)

I also made a traditional sampler patchwork quilt in reds and greens, which our eldest daughter decided she couldn't live without and I handed it over. But she did then pick some nice green paint for her bedroom to go with it! Any photo I have of it may date from my pre-digital camera days, so it may take a while to find. Watch this space.