I cropped this, and couldn’t bring myself to stick to the rather drab colours … the screen started off rather colourful and I added black as I went along, and mixed it into the remaining colour left on the screen to make the progression…

I also printed it on to different coloured paper which made for interest:

This one is on handmade Indian Khadi paper.

And I have some decorative scrapbooking paper which I printed one on… looks like it’s in a snowscene!

I do like putting in a photo of all the cards drying in the rack:

This time I made another pair of socks out of some gorgeous Hundertwasser sock yarn by Opal which I bought in Abergavenny market a while ago.  Here they are in their colourful glory!

I’m looking forward to wearing them through the cold weather….

I’ve also been doing some more Gocco printing this week, using a couple of screens I made to test some of the machines I’ve been selling.  This one is a crow which I drew using the Gocco pen and doodled inside to fill in the pattern of his feathers.  It is a small one which I’ve printed on lots of little cards and a few Moleskine notebooks.

I also printed one on this previously painted newspaper:

I’ve also stamped this at the bottom with a wall-shaped print block that I made from fun foam (great for making print blocks!). 

Today I printed an image of a cottage in the grounds of the slate mine we visited in North Wales in the summer but that will be the subject of my next post…

This week I’ve been having fun with the first lesson of the free online course which Maggie Grey is running for anyone who has bought her book, Textile Translations: Mixed Media.   We had to choose a motif and I had one of these made from a stamp of beach huts so decided to keep to my present theme of houses and make the book in the shape of a house rather than the sort of triangle shape she suggested.  These are all going to be stitched together to form the cover but this is as far as I’ve got so far.

This one will be the back.

And this one will be the middle.

Here is the reverse of one of the cover pages. 

I’ve got to stitch into them next so I hope the gesso and paint don’t break the needle!!!    More anon…

Mass Observation was started in 1937 by a group of people who realised that politicians didn’t really know what the ordinary people were thinking and how their daily lives were shaped. So they recruited a team of observers and a panel of volunteer writers to study the everyday lives of ordinary people in Britain. When the Second World War started, they asked people to write diaries and send them in weekly, and in this way we have an amazing archive of experiences from the war. Several of these diaries have been published.

I read Nella Last’s War (which was televised a year or two ago as Housewife, 49) a while ago. Recently, the sequel, Nella Last’s Peace, was published so I rushed out and bought it. I identified with her, I suppose because I have three sons and am nearly 49 myself, and I could just imagine what I’d feel if they all got called up and I didn’t know what their fate would be. Her writing is strangely relevant to today - I suppose because human nature is the same.

I enjoyed reading Nella’s diaries so much that I decided to get several other Mass Observation publications from the local library.

Wartime Women is an anthology of a number of women’s diaries in wartime, interspersed with Mass Observation surveys and reports (which I didn’t find so interesting!).

Among You Taking Notes is the diary of Naomi Mitchison, an author in her own right, whose husband became a labour MP in the 1945 election.

Our Longest Days is a collection of excerpts from the wartime diaries of about 20 different people, and is arranged chronologically to take you through the war seeing it through different people’s eyes for, eg. the same day.

I love reading these diaries because they are so immediate and they take me into people’s lives, what they were actually thinking and feeling during the Second World War, the struggle just to find a varied diet, often on little sleep due to the disruption of the air raids. They are not people’s memories, they are what they wrote at the time… Just how ORDINARY life was, especially for women, the daily grind, having to find meals on rationing, the relentless fatigue when air raids were on, of being up half the night and having to clean up afterwards. But also how people still travelled, though not so much and usually by train… And what stands out for me is, despite the changed circumstances of the intervening years, people are essentially the same, their hopes and fears and dreams.

I’m just sorry I didn’t pay any attention to my Nan when she used to speak of it … but when you’re a teenager you think it’s all old hat…

Coincidentally, I’m also reading a blog started by my friend Pat, who is serializing her Dad’s diary of his time in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Java. It is called A Precious Memory and it is fascinating…

I didn’t make last week’s journal in Sue’s journal making course because it was a wire bound one and I have a Bind it All machine which I thought would do the job adequately.  But I did make this accordian fold one the week before, with envelopes as signatures.   I decided to make it from the remaining house fabric.

I had previous gocco printed some brown envelopes which I bought in Machynllech on holiday.  Some of them I got upside down but because they were put in vertically in this journal it didn’t matter!

The gocco prints are of buildings too, so they fitted in nicely with the theme.  I didn’t have quite enough so I also put this white envelope with a lovely bee stamp which someone sent me a while ago.  I kept it because it looked so nice and I’m glad I did because I’ve finally found a use for it.

We made little journals to go inside the envelopes and, being short of time, I decided to use some of the scraps from the previous house journal to make triangular ones, instead of the larger rectangular ones in Sue’s instructions.

Here they are sitting in their little pockets:

I even got an ATC sized piece out of the scraps and I think it looks great with this altered leaf on top of it!