Dreaming Spirals

Happy New Year to you all!  I don’t know where the last week went, I seem to have been sleeping a lot; we went up to Stoke to see my parents and on Monday,  I had a lovely day because two people who I have known online for several years now came to visit me. 

Sara Lechner from Austria, who blogs at The Fabric of Meditation, was visiting her daughter in North Wales, and she had a three hour train journey to see me!  Wales may be a small place, but it takes a long time to travel from north to south… And Sue Krekorian of The Magic Armchair Traveller came to join us.  We had a lovely time chatting, visiting a local cafe for lunch and wandering round Newport’s shops, chatting again… and having the obligatory photo in my studio!   DS2 kindly obliged and took this photo of the three of us:

While I was trying to upload that photo, Live Writer decided it wanted to upload another one and it’s such a nice one that I decided to let it stay…. This is one of the leaves of my avocado plant.  I thought the veins with the browning edges makes for a very interesting photo:

While we were in Stoke we saw this ferris wheel which is in the grounds of Trentham Gardens factory shopping village (I think it’s called something else but since it was Trentham Gardens when I grew up, that is what it will forever be in my mind).  I had my first summer job there, working as a cashier in the open air swimming pool.  Sadly, the said swimming pool was demolished some time ago…

I thought the centre of it would make a good Gocco screen…. (without Stoke City football club’s sponsorship medallion … or maybe even with it)

I wonder what 2009 will bring?  DH is going to India again later this month so I’m planning to do some gelatine plate monoprinting and some more screenprinting while he’s away.  So look out for lots of fabric photos.    I meant to do a blog post about 2008 and what had happened in it but time somehow flew away from me.    I think I will remember it for the Gocco and for getting involved in Etsy.  And for my two magazine articles in CTDG.    And for those of you who subscribe to Fibre and Stitch, look out for the January issue because I’ve got an article in there too!  Here’s a bit of a teaser…

How do you get from this:

to this:

with the least effort possible?

I took it into my head the other day to use up some of the vast supplies of yarn I’ve accumulated so I decided to make a pair of felted slippers.    So I went to Knitty and found this pattern for Fuzzy Feet.   

This must have been the quickest things I have ever knitted.  I only took a day to knit each (aided and accompanied by lots of Cast On podcasts on Itunes) on 10mm circular needles with some yarn from Rio de la Plata that I bought last year.  I had heard that it felted well but hadn’t tested it…     They knitted up so quickly I would make these again any time.

Anyway, they were absolutely ginormous to start with…. this photo shows one of them on the ironing board:

And here they are nearly finished:

Then I had to throw them in the washing machine with a towel to agitate and aid the felting.  The last thing I felted took two 60 degree washes (centigrade) so I thought it was going to take a long time but I followed the pattern for these and did them at 40 and stopped it halfway through the wash cycle.  (I had to check the manual for that… it’s a computerized machine and I’ve only ever done that before when it has refused to spin properly due to me loading it too full!).   And I was glad I did because they’d shrunk quite adequately by then.  So I finished them off with the rinse cycle and then, as the pattern suggested, put them on for a while and walked around to fit them to my feet.  And here is the result!

These took two skeins of Rio de la Plata but I am definitely going to use this yarn for felting because I love the way it looks and feels.

After you were all so complimentary about my house fabric, I decided that I would list some in my Etsy shop…

You can find it here.

Here are some pics of it:

In case you missed it the first time round, here is my blog post where I used it for a house journal when I was doing the second of Sue Bleiweiss’s online journal making courses.

You will remember that I posted about the wartime diaries I was reading a few weeks ago. I heard today that Nella Last’s Peace is the Book of the Week next week, from Monday-Friday on BBC Radio 4 in the UK. It is being read by Imelda Staunton and is on at 9.45 am, repeated at 12.30am for night owls or those who can’t listen in the daytime. It may well be on ‘listen again’ on the BBC website so if you aren’t in the UK you could check this after each broadcast.

I must remember to set my timer to remind me to listen in!

There’s a particular walk I love to do from my house when I want to get a bit of peace, fresh air and exercise.  The other day I went at sunset (which is not difficult as this is at about 3.30pm here at the moment).  And I remembered my camera!    I love the trees…

I love the winter silhouettes against the sky.

And the way the golden colour of the sun is reflected:

It’s funny how this photo seems much lighter just because of the direction in which I took it.

But these are my favourite trees, I think:

Changing the subject entirely, I recently lugged the old Windows 98 computer (which keeps going despite our best efforts to kill it off) up to the boxroom as no one was using it, preferring the newer, faster models.   So its desk was freed up for me to appropriate… so now I have all my things I use for Etsy down here in the same room.  I’ve put most of the smaller things for sale downstairs too, to make it easier to photograph them and list them without trudging upstairs to my studio.  But most of all, I’ve been able to clear my studio of ‘business’ stuff, receipts, packaging and things like that, in the hope that they won’t stifle creativity.  Trouble is, other things are stifling creativity at the moment….  feeling ill, and the run up to Christmas.  I hope it will spring up afresh in the New Year. 

Meanwhile, here is a photo of my ‘Etsy Corner’!