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  Couldn't resist this trio, picked up in the same charity shop.  I was never a Harry Potter fan - I'd already aged out of childrens and YA fiction well before they were published - but I love J.K. Rowling's Strike novels.  While 'The Casual Vacancy' isn't one of that series, I still think there's a pretty good chance I'll enjoy it.  Simon Schama's 'Rough Crossings' won't be the cheeriest of reads, covering as it does slavery and the American War of Independence, but it never does any harm to educate yourself about world history, does it?  The other book - 'Fair Fight' - looks intriguing.  Set in the Victorian Age and featuring a woman pugilist.  The blurb on the cover promises the novel will take you ' from a filthy brothel to the finest houses in town, from the world of street-fighters to the world of champions.  Alive with the smells and the sounds of the streets, it is a raucous, intoxicating tale of courage, reinvention a...

  I'm in a mood to tidy things up.  It's not often that mood strikes me, so I better make the most of it.  But more of that in a moment.  I'll start off with these embroidered birds.  I'd already made the blue tit, and followed that with a robin.  Now, there's a second robin.  I reckon the first was a more pleasing shape than the second robin.  Plumper and with more character.  But either way I'm fairly happy with how these turned out.  I'm thinking of the robins in terms of Christmas tree decorations, but are they Christmassy enough, do you think?   Sorry to drop the 'C' word in there, by the way.  It seems absurd to think about the festive season when we're not even into summer, but sometimes ideas pop into your head and you just have to go with them.  The other absurdly-timed idea involved a post on Ann Wood's website.  She wrote a blog post about making fabric triangles she called tetra charms.  The link...

I'm finally getting around to blogging part two of the Leeds Tapestry.  (See previous post if you're not sure what I'm blathering on about.)  First of all, here's the 'Leeds in Bloom' panel, which features stunning embroidery of flowers and leaves.  It seems that when ideas were sought about what themes individual panels ought to cover, the natural world was a popular choice.  The Yorkshire branch of the Embroiderers' Guild were eager to get involved, but progress was slow as funding needed to be raised and sponsors weren't quick to put their hands in their pockets.  Below is the best shot I could get of the full panel.   The Queen's Hotel is at the centre of it, and could you imagine embroidering all of those windows?  It would've sent me round the bend!  My dodgy photography doesn't capture the way the panel's designed - you have Kirkstall Abbey at the base, shown in springtime.  Queen's Hotel in summer, the Tropical House & Ros...

Today's post will be one of two, maybe three on the Leeds Tapestry.  What's that?  Well, I didn't know either until recently, and I know more about it now due to an event on Wednesday.  First things first, it's not a tapestry.  In the same way the Bayeux Tapestry is an embroidery, so is the Leeds Tapestry.  It's a textile work made in sixteen panels, and they're about 2 and a half metres by 1 and a half metres, all framed and under glass.  (You can just about make out a panel in the photo above.  No idea why there's a CID sign too!)  The panels took hundreds of volunteers ten years to complete, and were a labour of love, the initial idea coming from artist Kate Russell who must've despaired that it'd ever get finished.  Made between 1992 and 2002, this was assembled before our online saturated days, before everyone could be instantly messaged on their mobile, or log on to Facebook and Instagram to catch up on everyone else's progress.  H...