Scrappy patchwork on a cold but beautifully sunny day

It's been a glorious autumn day. Chilly to wake up to, then the sun came out & shone brightly, so it was off to the allotment where the earth's softened up after recent rainfall. I was able to weed and tidy, trying to make the plot look respectable before the cold weather sets in and we slide inevitably into winter. At home I fitted in some sewing. The patchwork bug's bitten me again, after having a break and spending time lately with gell printing. I've been gathering up lots of tiny scraps and joining them together, going for a haphazard look. Nothing matchy-matchy or colour coordinated. There's something very satisfying about finding a use for the smallest strips or triangles of cotton, little pieces that might otherwise be destined to end up as cushion filling.

Speaking of gell printing, I've been using prints to turn into seed packets for flower seeds gathered from my garden. Hollyhocks, scabious, catananche. No calendula as hardly any of those flowered this year despite having masses of them last summer.

I'm thinking of taking a stack of these filled seed packets to my local library and asking if it's okay to leave them on a side table with a note saying 'help yourself'. Anything to encourage people to grow flowers and provide more desperately needed food sources for our under-threat pollinators.

I've been sewing more tags to go into the fabric book I'm making at my Saturday class, the second of which is being held tomorrow afternoon. This pair are decorated with motifs from a piece of shiny braid, and I thought they fitted in with my 'Winter Jewels' theme. I've also dug out a few of the boho style beads I made a while back, and can maybe add those to my fabric book, perhaps as part of the closure.

As you can see, I'm not exactly going for an understated minimalist look! Hope your week's going well, and thanks for stopping by my blog.

P.S. Just finished Richard Osman's latest Thursday Murder Club novel, 'The last one to die'. Brilliant storytelling. Highly recommended if you're a fan of the 'cosy crime' genre, and so refreshing to have older characters featured positively in novels.

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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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