FNSI for April

Thank you Wendy for inviting us to join you again - you can see who else took part in our Friday Night Sew In here.

Last week I showed you these 'Basket Case' blocks

I had a hankering for some Flying Geese and so my four blocks became this wall hanging!

Having pressed and photographed my hanging I put it aside to add the buttons during the evening and got out my sketchbook. I have been working on another pomegranate page and was determined to get it finished - which I did.

After spending the rest of the afternoon in the garden I settled down in the evening to add the buttons to my baskets and tadah!

Now to get it quilted and I am thinking just some simple ditchquilting around the blocks and the geese might be all that is needed! Watch this space.

I had good intentions of joining in with the Community Stitch Challenge this week and have the fabric and threads prepared and sitting on the table but that is as far as I have got! Maybe this evening. The challenge is to fill four squares or shapes with different types of couching and I will do this to add to my running stitch samples.

In other news, the nightingales have arrived and have been singing their hearts out all week, seemingly 24 hours a day! Lovely to hear them along with the cuckoo and hoopoes. We had some much needed rain yesterday evening but could have done without the wind that came with it. Lots of stuff in the garden needs tying up once it hasdried out a bit.

Our lockdown has been extended until May 11th - what will happen after that we dont know yet but I am sure there will still be lots of restrictions for some time after that.

Hope everyone is holding up - there certainly seems to be a lot more blogging activity going on!

Another New Year!

It's nearly a month since my last post. During that time we have been to UK to visit friends and family over Christmas and New Year. I hope that you all enjoyed Christmas and I wish you all a

VERY HAPPY 2019!

A new year means a new journal and this year I have decided to combine my sewing journal with my day to day 'to do' lists etc. I purchased a cheap bullet journal last year and had some fun making a cover for it.

I made a large piece of embellished felt ( you can see my method here ) and used a DMTV travel journal tutorial, adapting it to my own needs.

We spent the weekend before New Year in Bristol and visited the Clifton suspension bridge. I have driven over this stunning bridge several times, so on this occasion it was good to spend some time walking over it and looking around the visitor centre.

There were several competitions to choose the design for the bridge during the early 1800's and Isambard Kingdom Brunel's design was eventually chosen. However the bridge you see above, although his design, was modified by the eventual builders. The bridge was opened in 1864, after Brunel's death.

The bridge is a toll bridge and self funding.

There are lovely views - if it is not foggy and grey!

Good to be out for a walk.

Another lovely visit during our trip was to Hestercombe Gardens near Taunton. Another grey day but even in winter the gardens are beautiful and with a small person in our group the Christmas garden trail was worth doing for it's chocolate reward!

The Witches hut is a favourite stopping place ..

I love the way this tree has pushed its way though the back of the hut and produced some beautiful catkins.

Well I think that is enough for one post - more tomorrow!

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.

 



Time for a change

Towards the end of last week I was starting to feel that I had 'sewing overload' and felt the need to spend some time doing something different. I have not really done any sketchbook work for a while so I was toying with the idea of playing in one of them when along came the DMTV newsletter and I spotted the perfect thing. Handprinted Sketchbooks. So I signed up for the videos and on Monday I made a start.

The idea is that you start off by taking a very large - A1 - sheet of good quality white paper and play around printing and stencilling on to it. Now of course those large sheets of white paper that I put carefully away were nowhere to be found! So instead I laid out 8 sheets of handmade cotton rag paper onto a plastic sheet and printed on to them instead.

My print blocks - that old sandal has been hanging around for a couple of years waiting for just such an occassion.

So I printed over one side of the paper and left it to dry.

Then I turned the pages over and did some more printing.

Once they were dry came the exciting bit - each page is carefully torn in half. Then the half pages are folded in half and put together four at a time to form the book.

And at this point I was so happy as the pages were looking great all together. The next stage was to stitch the pages together and into some covers and hey presto, one new sketchbook!

It was much quicker and easier than I had thought. I have just used mount board for my covers as I intend to make a fabric slip cover for the book so the board will not be on show.

I am so pleased that I used the rag paper as I love the soft edges it gives to the page - now to pluck up courage to go in and start working into some of the pages!!

It's FNwF tomorrow - still time to sign up so if you fancy joining in then sign up here  - hope to see you there.

EPP Tuesday - and I nearly forgot!!

Many thanks to Anthea for hosting our link up again today - pop over to her blog to see who else is linking up.
So what have I to show you? Well first of all I have completed my DMTV Summer Stitchalong book cover.

I added some embroidery and beads.

And the finished book cover looks like this.

 

I

Having completed the border blocks for my Hexathon quilt I laid them out to work on the correct order. And this is what I have come up with.

 

 

So now I need to make some plain blocks to add in to the 'grassy' spaces.

Some lovely flowers have arrived from my swap partners.

 

I must have shown you the ones I sent last time. I have some ready to send this month but the recipient lives in Florida so I am holding them back for the moment.

 

Sad that there are so many people in the world whose homes are lost for one reason or another - floods, hurricanes and the Rohingya people forced to leave their country for ethnic reasons. So much sadness.

 

I hope that all is well with you and yours.