Dreaming Spirals

Lots of diagonal movement this month…

And the reed heads had these purple flowers which will become the seed heads.

Nearly a week since I got back from FOQ and haven’t had time to post!  I’ve been busy helping with crafts at my church’s holiday club for primary school age kids, and packing to camp (WHAT was I thinking!!!) at the Greenbelt Festival this weekend in Cheltenham.  I am going with just DS3 and we’re travelling by train so everything needs to be packed really scientifically.  I don’t do methodical packing at all.  At least the weather forecast is looking okay but I’m still taking my walking boots after all the rain this week…  Unless I can find a pair of nice flowery wellies in town this afternoon.  Highly unlikely.

Anyway, back to FOQ.  I had a wonderful time!  I diidn’t take many photos because I wanted to concentrate on actually looking at the work.   I went to six lectures over 3 days, mostly artists talking about their work, which was fascinating to watch and listen.  Elizabeth Barton showed us the progression of her work over the last few decades, Susan Shie talked about the background behind her quilts and what was going on in her mind and her life (and the life of the US as a whole) as she made them.  Pauline Burbidge talked us through her year juggling her studio quilts and quiltlines businesses. It was great to be able to go and view their exhibitions  and chat to some of them after listening to what they had to say about their work.

A bit highlight for me was meeting so many people who I know online either from Yahoo groups or via this blog or Facebook.  So many I missed meeting too!

I had an all too brief meeting with my Artful Dodgers friends between two lectures:

From left to right, Sue of The Magic Armchair Traveller, Gill of An Elegant Sufficiency, Paulene Cattle, Mags of Digital Gran (who I met for the first time), Helen of Textile Goddess, Carol of Textile Tales and Maggie of Stitching with Schnauzer and Siamese.  I met Helen a few more times and had a good chat over coffee on Saturday but sadly the others were only in Birmingham for the day.  Myfanwy of Winifred Cottage was also at the show but hard at work on her stand. 

I also met Rayna who blogs at Studio 78 Notes – Rayna was teaching a 3 day masterclass and I managed to catch her at the very end.

I have been reading Rayna’s blog ever since she started blogging, I think, and it was wonderful to actually meet her at last. 

Another blogger I met was Marlis Egger of Textileartand…  Sadly we didn’t get a photo but kept on bumping into each other throughout the 3 days, as I did with Stephanie Pettengell, who I got to know on the 3 day class I attended last time I came to FOQ (was it really the last time?).

I also enjoyed meeting Claire Benn and Leslie Morgan of at the Virtual Studio and bought their last two books, Screenprinting and Thermofax Printing of Committed to Cloth and spent quite a lot of time there!  Here is Leslie screenprinting:

I’ll save my purchases for the next post once I’ve taken a few photos.  Not so many of them for once!

It occurred to me that I haven’t put any pictures of my Etsy shop listings on the blog for ages, so here we go!

This medieval city journal has been selling well recently.  It is based on a Dover publication of some medieval woodcuts.  I printed it, embossed it with gold embossing powder and then painted it with watercolour paints to bring it to life.  They are all different.

Here is another variation:

Here is one that has just been printed with brown ink.  I have them in unlined or lined notebooks.

This is a new one too.  It has been printed twice.  First with the yellow spiral design, then with a new design of a street in France.

Here is another variation on the French street, again embossed and painted with watercolours.  It is a lot more abstract than the medieval city.  I do like the way that printing with the Gocco is so adaptable!

Here is another new design.  It shows a boat in the harbour in Bristol with houses behind.  It has been printed on a beige moleskine cahier and then I’ve added a blue watercolour wash over the top.

And lastly here is Honfleur Harbour in Normandy this time with a blue watercolour wash over it.

Here are the superdragons by the Transporter Bridge.  In case you haven’t come across a Transporter Bridge before, this page tells you about the one in Newport.

Newport’s has a platform to take cars and people across the river.  It has just been reopened after several years being in disrepair.

This is the top level – you can walk up those steps and across the top on some bank holidays but I’ve never stomached it!

This dragon is called One Flew Under the Transporter Bridge and the artist is Anthony Davies.  Those are two of my sons in the background with their young Spanish cousin, Pablo.

This one looks like it is covered with wrinkled silver foil (very effective) and it is called Reflections of Nature.  The artist is Cerian Price.

I’m going to be at the Festival of Quilts from Thursday to Saturday – hope to see you there!

My sketchbook is progressing.  I have gessoed a lot of pages in preparation for painting and have also glued several together to make them thicker. Continuing my theme of shadows over bridges,  I inadvertently drew on one upside down so decided to turn it to my advantage. 

I cut out the offending page (the one shown on the left here) and glued down just the left hand side so that it opens up…

…. to reveal the other side of the page.  The page on the right is an inkjet transfer of the page I’ve sketched – I transferred it over a thermofax screened page.  I don’t think it is finished yet though….  Like a lot of the pages in my sketchbook, I’m sure I will keep adding to them.

This evening, I just added a layer to this page:

It is a railway line viewed through a chain link fence.  I have been wondering how to portray the fence for a while and tried to rust dye the grid from a disposable barbecue on to some polyester organza.  It rusted fine, but I got the negative pattern of diamonds rather than the positive one of a diagonal grid.  So I cut a stamp and stamped this.  I quite like the uneven look it gives.  I decided to continue it across the other side of the page as well and I might doodle a bit on this side.

I’m really enjoying this sketchbook and having a theme to stick to.  I think I work much better with parameters and a deadline.

And just up the road I saw this tree with the remains of an ivy stem around it, forming a grid.  I think that will be working its way into the sketchbook and maybe into a piece of art cloth eventually.  I’m starting to see grids and lines everywhere!

For several years now, our garden has been getting rather out of hand.  Until a couple of months ago, the border on the left hand side consisted of lots of overgrown bushes (mostly dead actually), with more mostly dead honeysuckle growing up them.   I decided to cut back two of them.  Well, I cut them back so much that it looked like they’d had it, and I exposed about 8 feet of soil in the process!  One trip to the garden centre later, and I had several perennial plants to fill it up.  This is what it looked like just after planting.  A bit sparse….

I decided to plant some annuals in the gaps to fill it up a bit.  I got some pot marigold and some other unidentified yellow plants.

Then I put in an evening primrose plant I had growing in a pot on the patio – this self seeds really easily and though it is only biennial we’ve had them every year since we bought the original one about 20 years ago.  And a comfrey plant on the left.  They looked really nice when all these were in flower:

This was taken a couple of weeks ago – already they are starting to fill up that space.  Now almost all the red flowers have finished but there are loads of that orange one.

It was a wet day when I took this one!

And in case you wondered, those two bushes did recover and are about to fight back – I will have to remember to prune them vigorously in future!