Catching up

 First of all a reminder that the powers that be are removing the follow by email feature so if that is how you follow my posts then you will need to find another way. Hopefully this post will sneak in under the line!

After a brief hot spell we are back to cooler weather and showers here. One bonus of this is that I have been able to crack on with quilting my tablecloth. The quilting lines are all marked and fortunately I got back to the beginning without being way out! I'll save pictures until it's complete.

I have also worked on four more Field Journal embroideries - and here they are.

I am going to try and do one of these a week although the next one on my pile has got a lot of work in it! Maybe its something for FNWF which should be coming up next week.

Also for Ausust there is a new RSC colour to work on - aqua. Mmm lovely, I'm sure I have some of those to work with.

A few weeks back I saw a lovely post by Freezeframe Annie here where she recycled some junk mail return envelopes into lovely tag pockets. I thought this was a great idea and decided to have a go by adding some into my sketchbooks. First up though was a lovely envelope and stationery which arrived in the post from Australia. It was far too nice to throw away so I thought I would try out the pocket technique on it. I used the back of the letter paper to line the envelope which I glued into one of my sketchbooks and also used some of the paper to cover a tag that I had been saving.

I then enlarged some of the beautiful flower and leaf shapes from the paper, using them to fill the rest of the double page spread. I spent a couple of happy afternoons drawing and then paiting these.

I am sure I will be using some of those flower shapes to make print blocks from at some point.

I then turned to something completely different!

This return envelope was cut in half and glued onto a page in my sketchbook challenge sketchbook. I then covered the envelope and page with a layer of gesso.

You cant see it here but the laft hand page is mostly covered with a piece of green/black splodgy paper which I had added when I started the sketchbook. So I next rubbed a black oil pastel over parts of the spread before splashing on some greeny blue paints.

Rummaging through my tag basket for something to put in the pocket I found a couple of pieces of experimental newspaper/painted bondaweb/printing/sheerfabric/machine stitching in colours that go perfectly with my page.

The print on it is a Hundertwasser spiral from when I had a Hunderwasser phase a few years back. So I pulled out the print blocks that I had made then and used one of them to print onto my page and the pocket.

I stabilised the tag and added some gold around it's edges.

And that is as far as I have got. I can see some gold script on the page somewhere - maybe a Hundertwasser quote about spirals. We shall see.

Well if you have made it to the end of this post - thank you! and well done.

Have a good week and I shall see you at Cheryll's place next week.