Black tomato . . .

. . . grown this year for the first time. haven't tasted it yet. It weighs 9 1/2 ounces! Red underneath, black on top, light variations in the photos. There are a few more on the plant, still normal tomato size and very green yet, but this baby is enormous! Move over Jamie Oliver (which is where I first saw them).

Doodling the summer away

At the moment I only seem to be happy with a pen and a bit of paper in my hand.  Exaggeration, but pen and paper do seem to have replaced needle and thread for a bit.  So far I've used one and a half small homemade books, pages in a 23p from Tesco lined notebook, various bits of paper that happen to be lying about, including this brown A5 (or is it 6) envelope that arrived with a Quilters' Guild regional newsletter in it!

The photos are in the wrong order.  I did the b/w one first, setting out simply to try drawing the circle things, but then just having to create a whole page design.  Then i found my stash of gel pens and had to try them out, to see if there were empty ones to throw away, and that turned into another design, on the other side of the envelope.  More fun at the breakfast table that failing to complete the sudoku.  And 3 pens got weeded out.

Like the zentangle people say (link in previous post, from which you can get onto an endless chain of other 'tanglers') this kind of drawing activity does seem to have effects that you might not expect, like a general loosening up and growth of confidence where drawing is concerned.  I guess that these things might occur whatever it was you were drawing, if you started doing it a lot.  But with these doodles you don't have the pressure of trying to make the drawing look like something and losing confidence when it doesn't. 

I like the idea of doodling on spare scraps, which in my mind links the somewhat structured, rather more considered and deliberate art of the zentangle style with those mindless scribbles on the phone pad, the back of an envelope or the Co op till receipt.

Cooking, painting, doodling . . .

. . . in the second half of July.  A visit to the local farmers' market yielded the colourful caulis (tasty, too) and the yellow courgettes.  The round one, the beans, the basil and the tomatoes are all DH's work, well, with me as advisor, as in, couldn't we try a different kind of courgette this year as well as the normal ones?  We had them all for Sunday lunch on my birthday weekend.

The tomtoes are beginning to ripen and deserve a shot or two to themselves.  DD2 takes very arty pix of veg, flowers etc and I am trying to emulate her.

Well, i keep trying.

Painting at church again, on the glass wall on one side of the main church bit, looking into the hallway.  We had a Dreamday i.e. family fun day, about Bugs, Bats and Dragonflies.  See the fat black spider on its web, in the hallway, not the painting!

I really enjoyed doing that.  Not sure how it will be cleaned up eventually!

But my own work lately has been taken over by a somewhat obsessional doodling.  Look here for the source of it all, zentangles.  I'm not into the 'zen' bit, and prefer to call thm 'doodles' than 'tangles', but the claim that 'It increases focus and creativity' I find to be true for me.  I don't think the zentangle people intend it to become obsessional though!  The first has a seaside theme, because the frame turned out rather like cliffs, but the second has no special theme, just patterns.  I enjoy creating the 3D effect in some patterns.

Harvest time . .

. . . for the gooseberries.  11 lbs of jam and another 4lbs of fruit waiting.  Anyone have a nice recipe for gooseberry chutney?

Last year was a great success for courgettes.  This year they are struggling because there's been practically no rain.  Trying another kind this year to keep the usual long green ones company and this is the first one, which DH says is just a bit bigger than a cricket ball.

He says I should have taken a photo of him bowling with it.

Actually I was expecting them to be dark green, not this interesting pale textury colour.

West Country Embroiderers in July

We had a very enjoyable workshop with Lyn Prosser doing an informal kind of mola, involving layers of fabric, stitching a design and cutting back parts of it. Letters proved to be a very effective design idea. Some of us whizzed along with our machines, others worked more slowly by hand., both methods equally effective.

My bit, solo.  Not finished yet.  It uses a letter from the Tamil alphabet.

More wrapping . . .

. . . of fabric round something cylindrical. a real bit of drainpipe this time.  It is quite a fine cotton, and the colour has mostly gone right through it, so I must have applied it a bit unevenly to get those irregular blotches.

The wet one from the previous post now nicely ironed.  A bit less colour on this one, so I should have applied a bit more.   

And the last one, just scrunched down in a plastic tray in the ordinary way.

Using paint, the runny silk paint variety, is easier to manage than dye, because of not having to mix up salt, soda etc, but you do have to iron to fix the colour.  Those darkest lines seem to come when applying paint but not with dye.  Interesting.

Colouring fabric . . .

. . . by wrapping it round a cylindrical thing and squashing it down in pleats, then painting it. I used an old wine bottle as my fabric bits were not large, but scrappy leftovers, and the intention was to experiment as I haven't done this for some time. It was mentioned on the Contemporary Quilt Group yahoo list and a link given, which spurred this activity.

Finished result, ironed, and looking a lot paler in this photo that in real life!

And here is piece 2, still damp and unironed

Why not do a bit of stitched resist while the paints are out? Scraps again, and set in motion by meeting a Dorset shibori artist, Annabel Wilson, and seeing her lovely meticulous work, see here, at an art and crafts fair at which our church stitching group had a stand last week. Some bits have worked better than others, depending on the type of cloth, and there is a mix here. I don't know what they are, being unmethodical. Also I have difficulty pullling the stitches up tight enough to resist enough often. But again, the pieces all have more marks on them that this photo seems to show.

Garden update.

In spite of the absence of rain things are taking off a bit, though slowly. Clockwise from top left: great colours in a hanging basket - thank you B&Q; potato plant flowering - one of last year's that stayed behind in the ground; a variety of tomato that isn't moneymaker; a courgette plant producing flowers but I can't see if there is anything more than flowers there yet; more B&Q trailers, though not trailing much yet; a self-sown opium poppy plus bumble bee; swelling peapods; the first red raspberry; and my black tomato plant has a tomato on it!!! Move over Jamie Oliver!

Under the sea . . .

. . . with West Country Embroiderers this month. or some of them at least, I don't seem to have managed to get photos of all the pieces of work. Apologies to those i missed:/

They are very pretty little pieces, intended to be stuck over a stone, or used on a box lid, or the front of a book cover, or . . . ? We ruched up fabric, covered rings and beads with thread, couched hairy yarn, made 'rocks' with padded fabric circles.

Homework . . .

. . . last Saturday for one of the DGDs, was to make a picture of a monster with a collage of food pictures. Grandad suggested she took photos of as many food plants as she could find growing in the garden and make her monster from them. So here are some of them.
Clockwise from top left - strawberry, rhubarb, spinach, oregano, tomatoes, grapes, lollo rosso lettuce, baby cabbage plants, oats (spilled from the bird feeders, not for us!)

And from top left again - shallots, curly lettuce, blueberries, strawberries, potatoes, peas.

Layer upon Layer . . .

. . .  in the mountain views in the south of Bavaria. 

Nice picnic spot.  Thanks to DD3 again for the pix.

Coloured houses . . .

. . . in Freising, near Munich.

I'm borrowing some of DD3's photos again.

Tidying up . . .

. . .  bits and pieces after my book making classes, I just had to use up some cover bits and pages that were left over. 

A slightly different treatment of the long stitches - wrapping the outer ones - and some bead dangles.

While painting a cover I like to paint an A4 sheet or two as well to use in the book, generally as the outer page of signatures.

A different stitching style, going over the spine edge to get into the next signature.  Buttonhole stitch over those stitches turned them into curly squiggles, to match the oil pastel squiggles on the cover (inadvertently!). 

Plain stitches in matching threads.  I was trying to copy a stitch design I'd seen somewhere, but just couldn't work out how to get smoothly into the next signature with this pattern so did a lot of fiddling about and improvising.

Printing with interference paints on black painted card, and a button sewn on the front to wind a cord round for a closure.

Another button plus cord.  I need a few more ideas for closures.

The background is some paper DD3 and i printed up to make something to wrap a present for DD2.  We made the big butterfly print blocks and the small butterflies and flower shapes came from a stick on set of bits in the children's craft sectin at Tesco.