Collecting

I have always been fascinated by walking along the shore line and collecting bits and pieces of shells, wood and other salvage. We now have a house by the sea and hopefully will be spending more time there in the future, ‘Crabstones’, and this should give me time to collect more and more ……

I ordered some hemp and nettle thread which is interesting in itself and tried to remember how to crochet, mine is more like amateur knotting but fun.

I am in part inspired by Gooseflesh’s collections on Flickr and certainly by the way she weaves and crochet around her finds. 

You don’t necessarily need the seaside as a number of people have been weaving over flat stones and branches. I tried using a piece of Hampshire flint.
If you have a go let me know.

'The Blanket Book'

Elizabeth Caush who lives in Hampshire UK has just published her first book about the healing power of creativity and craft, specifically that of knitting. She recently came to give a talk to my group at the day services where I work. Elizabeth brought along her books, her story and her wonderful samples for the book. I thought her use of colour to be stunning, bold and vibrant, and the simplicity of the patterns which turn into modern throws, cushions and bed runners is amazing. So as you are aware I do get tempted by all sorts of new projects, but no way with knitting, since I grew up knitting my own school jumpers and my last attempt was being talked into making a shawl for my grandson, BUT yet again the ideas in the book are so simple yet the results so satisfying that I could get tempted.

Elizabeth is promoting her book at the moment, so if you have a group that you think would be interested in the Hampshire or specifically the Portsmouth area do contact her.

Distort Threee

This time I found a monoprint of the field,  which I had coloured, in one of my sketchbooks and decided to use that as the background.

 I transferred this to calico using TAP (Artists' Transfer Paper).

This was, of course, much less hassle than free machining a background, but also interesting as I wanted to try a different method/effect. I liked the quite dramatic red line down the centre and after all the green and brown decided to go for red with a touch of iridescent tinting  medium; the effect was rather more pink shiney than red and I pondered over whether or not to darken this area, in the end I have left it.
  I added the whole to white felt and needlefelted the three layers around the edge. This time I also machined around the inner edge of the picture as I liked the effect of the white felt being more dimensional. These pieces are difficult to photograph, if you click on the top picture it gives a better idea of the dimensional quality (I have just realised that if you click twice the image comes up really large).