Charity buys and blackberries

It's been a beautifully sunny day, and I've been a busy bunny, though managed a stroll into town and back, stopping by several blackberry bushes on the way to collect another tub of shiny sweet berries.

I swear the freezer's three quarters full of fruit. Earlier in the year I was freezing those homegrown strawberries that escaped being devoured within minutes of picking. After that, it was raspberries from the allotment, and now blackberries. They'll all get added to porridge or overnight oats during the autumn and winter months.

Naturally, being in town meant a quick rummage around the local charity shop, and I managed to get a very nice haul of goodies at a bargain price for £6.00 for the entire lot. A good as new Christy dusty pink handtowel. A stencil to add to my small stash of 'em.

A couple of board books that'll be squirreled away to use as the basis for art journals in the near future. Plus, some very shiny reels of what's labelled as 'Lurex fibre'.

No idea what I'd use them for, but who could resist such metallic prettiness? Finally, some hearts and alphabet dies.

One of the packs is the Sissix brand, and I've got a Sissix machine gathering dust somewhere which I'll dig out. Hopefully the A to Z letters will be compatible with that machine too. If not, I'm sure they'll be useful for creating patterns with the Gelli plate. I'd be tempted to go and find the Sissix machine now and have a play with my new dies, but I'm thoroughly engrossed in the Robert Galbraith thriller 'Career of Evil', which is creepy and downright sinister but an absolute page-turner.

Hope your Monday's been a good start to the week too.

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Threads of Freedom and charity shop bargains

It's Saturday afternoon, and I haven't done half the things I'd meant to. Partly because I spent most of this morning messing about with paints, stencils and the gell plate. Never mind, everything on today's 'To Do' list will join tomorrow's 'To Do' list ... it's hardly life or death if I don't haul the hoover around the room or pull up weeds in the front garden. I thought I'd show you what I made on Wednesday. I'd gone to my monthly StitchArt group, and this time we did something a little different. There's a project called 'Threads of Freedom' which is working with various community groups across the city. It's about creating little stitched pieces, some of which will be included in a textile panel to go on display at Leeds art gallery. There was lots of fabric we could choose from to sew with, and I picked this vintage tray cloth with the roses embroidery. My own embroidery's not a patch on those flo...

Another week's flown by ...

Saturday's rolled around again, and it's not been the most eventful of days. Cleaning and hoovering, a walk to the shops to buy groceries, an hour on the allotment, then home to do some odd tasks in the garden. The strawberry plants are sending out runners, so I've been dealing with those, plus deadheading the perennial sunflowers, and cutting back the gone-over flowers on the sage and marjoram. I'm sad to see those blooms gone as the bees loved them. This afternoon I spent a few hours finishing 'Dawnlands' by Philippa Gregory. It's a really good book, a page turner where you care about the characters and want to be reassured everything's going to work out well for them. Plus you become enraged about the corruption of the so-called justice system at the time of the Stuart kings and queens, about transportation of prisoners to the West Indies, and about the vile nature of the sugar trade in the 1600s and the vast profits made from it....

Folding a zine and an alternative use for a bank card

Hello again, and excuse me while I scratch my insect bites. I don't know what it is, but at this time of year I'm invariably itching like crazy because I've been bitten by bugs. It seems to coincide with blackberry-picking season, but whether that's purely coincidental I don't know. Whatever's biting me, I'm obviously a tasty morsel in their world! I might try using a highly scented oil like Tea Tree oil, see if that deters them. Anyway, let's get on to more pleasant matters - I'm having a go at making a zine style booklet. Because I didn't have any paper large enough, I joined together two A3 sheets of sketchpad paper, using torn pieces of book pages for the joining. I thought that'd look less noticeable than packing tape or similar. Having chosen my colour scheme I used acrylic paint and an unwanted plastic bank card to apply the paint. Plus a stencil, sponge and modelling paste. Applying paint with a ATM card wa...

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