Old Cooker Pleads For A New Life.

It’s nice to think about my new kitchen but three weeks in I am fed up of dust and chaos. I want my washing machine back!

 But the one good part is that I salvaged some of the old cooker parts and had some happy hours waiting for them to rust onto paper.

 Years ago I did a hanging with some rusted fabric I had made using  wire wool pads and vinegar. 

                            A couple of years ago I also made a book using rusted fabric and some of the copies of the notes and recipes my mother had left.

 Suddenly rusting is in vogue again and on the net there are some lovely images of both fabric and paper which people have rusted; most remarkably Alice Fox.     Mine is just a bit of a diversion but I hope to use one of the images on canvas as a picture for my new kitchen.

Lacy grid 3

 This piece is coming together very slowly and at times I find it hard to work on it. I am hoping that it just needs times and will gradually speak to me and help me to solve the problems I have with it.

 Despite the lovely winter sunshine I am grumpy with a cold and fed up of having a house which seems to be full of dust and builders.

 The only upside is that I have salvaged the parts from my old cooker hob and am gradually rusting them in the cat litter tray. Watch this space!

'Lacy Grid' Two

I am working slowly on my Lacy Grid piece. I'm not quite sure about the overall look/balance or where to go with it. This is why at the moment I am concentrating on the individual sections which are pleasing and hoping that seeing the piece pinned on my line on the wall will help me to bring it all together.

 To start I embellished a piece of dyed brown silk onto a piece of commercial felt and made some grids by embellishing black felt.

 I found some pieces of silk paper which I had felted into white merino wool. The fact that I had added black threads to the silk paper gave it an appropriate look; almost like fine veins. 

I felt I had to be careful when I got as far as embellishing over it and sure enough for the first time I broke one of my embellisher’s needles. I have worked with all the needles in place rather than reducing the number and my experience of changing a needle has confirmed me in that practise. There was no way that I could turn the screw to loosen the needles and I had to bring in an ‘ expert’, without whom at least it would have cost me a lot of money to get the problem sorted, husbands do have their uses!

A butterfly playing with Caterpillars

I have to say that, as I mentioned before, I wonder about Pinterest and some of the controversy over people grabbing images without any comment or link to the original, but recently I am really enjoying and appreciating other people’s collections of images which relate to particular interests.

This can be time consuming, also daunting at times to see the amazing work produced. It makes me even more aware than usual that the butterfly approach does not lead  to a thorough mastery of any particular skill. However, the other side of me enjoys the thrill of trying something new, even if it is a one off; although I like to think that in some way it all works towards the whole process. I am pleased to still enjoy the excitement of following the new and feeling carried along with it for a time.

So on PinInterest I recently saw a link to  Canberra Craft Bookbinder's Guild    where there is a detailed tutorial on how to work the Caterpillar Stitch.

I tried it out on a piece of card.
 In the past I turned to the instructions in Keith Smith’s book and was determined to master it.I gave up in desperation with all the arrows going everywhere. I really think there is room for someone to offer similar detailed instructions but just to try and make them less complicated to follow. Or is it just me?

If you want to try the stitch follow the link and also take a look at this excellent video on You Tube.

It really is quite simple when you get the knack of completing the first few stitches.  I have not so far tried a curved stitch, but will do at some point.Thinking about it, I should try it on fabric.

I found some illustrations in an old book for the inside of the front and back cover.