Two angels, a matchbox and an eye

Some odds and ends for you today. First off, I love the work of an Instagram user by the name of ievate, and I was smitten with this crazy looking Folk Art style angel that she made. Which meant I've collected fabric scraps & had a go at making my own version.

They're still very much W.I.P.s, and they're definitely not going to be your traditionally pretty angels! (Once they're made I'm going to try a reindeer too. After all, Christmas isn't that far off, is it?) I'll remember to show you the angels once they're finished.

When I'm done with scrolling through Instagram with the first cuppa of the day, I like to scoff my morning porridge while watching crafty videos on YouTube. Well, it beats listening to news reports full of doom 'n' disaster on the radio. I'm enjoying Jude Hill's short pieces about her textile work. This little video about weaving had me emptying out a matchbox in order to use it as a make-do-and-mend style mini loom. Just creating this tiny swatch had me thinking about the possibilities of using different yarns, embroidery threads, string, maybe even dried grasses or twiggy bits to weave with. I've dug out an offcut of MDF, a hammer and a tub of panel pins, and I'll see it I can cobble together a larger 'loom' so I can really play around with the process.

Speaking of Jude Hill, something that she'd sewn and that I noticed in another of her videos had me adding to my nearly-complete embroidery. I couldn't resist sewing my very own Jude Hill style embroidered eye.

Is it disconcerting to have a single eye staring out at you? Maybe it is, but the eye is such a powerful symbol in Folk Art. This embroidery is meant to end up as a bag to store my fabric book in, so maybe this eye's a protective symbol. Looking after the book, keeping it safe.

Perhaps, as well as Christmas angels and reindeer, I should make a few decorative eyes to hang from the tree, along with the tinsel and baubles? To protect the spirit of Christmas. Now, there's a thought ...

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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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