FNSI for July

Well here I am unexpectedly back in UK due to family illness as my father has been unwell. Fortunately he is well on the way to recovery and hopefully will be home soon.
So my afternoon was spent hospital visiting and we found that the hospital has a very lovely smoke free garden which it was a pleasure to sit in. These alliums were gorgeous.

So I just had a couple of hours in the evening to work on my new crochet project - Persian Tiles. It is a kit by Janie Crow
This is my second block and I now have two more rounds to work to finish it off. I need 16 of these.

I love the colours in this project.
I hope that this will post successfully and that my photos are not too blurry - I am working with a basic phone and tablet!
Hope everyone had a good Friday night and that you are enjoying your weekend

FNWF's - a very late July report!

Late afternoon last Wednesday (4th) a terrific storm came up our valley bringing with it very strong winds, hail plus some much needed rain. Here it is coming towards us.

The storm passed, we had a few blips of the power but for no length of time and when we went to bed later that night all was well. However, next morning, no internet and we have been without it until today (Thursday12th). First of all we were told it would be back the same day, then it would be back by 6pm Monday and then that it would be back by 6pm Friday. So at least it is a day earlier than the last prediction. You can imagine how many messages and blog posts are queued up waiting to be read!

Anyway, back to Friday. Before the internet went down I had watched a DMTV video entitled 'Stencilled Iris' which involved stencilling onto fabric with Markal (Shiva) paintsticks through freezer paper. It looked like a great technique so I decided that would be my project for the afternoon. I have a print block of an Imperial Pink flower that I made some years ago and knew that would make a perfect stencil. So I traced the design onto freezer paper and cut it out carefully so that I had both the negative and positive images intact. I used a small square of fabric to trial my design with the flower shape and ironed on the freezer paper shape.

 

I then used a gold paintstick on the freezer paper

 

and pulled the colour with my finger onto the fabric

 

The freezer paper lifts off easily to leave the negative of the flower shape

Magic! I love it. You can reuse the freezer paper shape as many times as you like until it runs out of stick (protect your iron with some non stick parchment!) I added an Antique White flower to my gold one.

 

 

I remembered that I had used the print block of this flower in my hand made sketchbook so decided to add a stencil to the book using a turquoise paintstick. I have also glued the used stencil onto another page in the book and they are both now waiting to be worked into.

 

 



 

 

On a larger piece of fabric I tried out my other freezer paper shape, again using gold.

 

 

And then that was it for my afternoon. Since then I decided that the larger piece of fabric would be enough to make a book wrap for my handmade sketchbook and so I continued stencilling onto it. It is now layered up and ready to embellish with stitch.

 

 

I have worked one each of the stencils into my current journal and played around with a gold pen.

 

 

I was able to find my original sketchbook pages which included photographs of the pinks which was very useful.

 

 

I must get some more seeds for these and grow them next year as they were such lively flowers - I nicknamed them 'dancing pinks' at the time.

 

I am off to catch up on some more emails and blog posts - more news from here over the weekend I hope.