Skip to main content

Is that sunshine??? Haven't seen that for a while.

 

Monday morning and after at least a week of grey dreary skies we've finally got a sunny day.  It's amazing what that does for our collective mood, isn't it?  I've spent a lot of the weekend happily - and sometimes irritably - going down various rabbit holes.  You see, the Find my Past website had free access for those two days, so I was merrily building a family tree and scouring old newspaper articles for mention of long-gone family members.  It was enjoyable, but also frustrating when you hit a brick wall and can't get further than a couple of generations ago.  I can find endless records for the Pughs, Dunkleys, Thompsons, Arnolds, etc but can I find my Keyte ancestors?  Their name's liable to be mis-spelt in old records, so I'm looking up Kites and Kytes too.  Anyway, I decided to buy myself a month's access to Ancestry as they were offering an initial month for a tenner.  I just need to remember to cancel before it auto-renews in early December!  
I've dug out old photo albums and am going to upload various pictures to the site.  How smart did people used to dress?  The men in hats, the ladies in their best dresses or skirt-suits.  I just wish more of the photos had peoples names on the back.  Sometimes I can identify them, but sadly others are lost in the mists of time.  
This photo shows an angelic looking child who's now a grand old lady of 94, and my favourite aunt.  She's having a day out at the seaside with her grandparents, and note how he's wearing his jacket, waistcoat and hat.  Well dressed, even in a deckchair on the sand.  
I had to put the family history stuff aside for a while in order to start this.  Hopefully this'll be an on-going project.  I'm calling it my colour study, inspired by this account on Instagram.  Lorene makes this beautiful little swatches of colours from the natural world, and as I'm not good at colour mixing - or painting in general - I wanted to have a go.  I started this morning with an autumnal leaf, and tried to represent the colours I saw in it, using a combination of watercolour paints and watercolour pencils.  The paper is just a sheet of A3 sketchpad paper that I've folded into a zine.  
It's not a highly accomplished start, but it's a start.  After all, I can't get better if I don't practise.  (Or is it practice?  I never know.)
I'll also show you this photo of something I've been stitching, after watching yet more Jude Hill videos on YouTube.  There's no particular purpose I've got in mind for this piece, but I've really enjoyed putting these materials together and finding a simple but interesting enough arrangement.  I've always tried to make things that are practical - quilts, cushion covers, etc - so it's a mind-shift to sew things purely for the pleasure of stitching, with no purpose in mind. 
Okay, that's it for today, except to mention I've started reading Gaynor Arnold's 'Girl in a Blue Dress' and it's superb.  Well, it was a Man Booker prize winner in 2008, so it should be.  
Bye for now, and do check out Lorene's Instagram.  It's well worth a look.



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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....
Post a Comment
Read more

Sari scraps, PVA, a couple of books and a necklace

  I'm typing this as snow's falling, and has been steadily all day.  It's not settling to any great extent, though I bet by tomorrow morning the paths will be slippery with ice.  Which always makes me paranoid about falling over and at the very least looking undignified, but at worst breaking a bone or twisting an ankle.  Oh well, it's ideal weather to stay inside and craft, isn't it?  I finally got around to listing packs of sari scraps on Etsy this morning.  I only made up six bundles as I've no clue whether they'll sell or if I've set a reasonable enough price point.  Time will tell.   This is a link to the listing, if you're interested.  This vaguely pink fabric isn't from one of my Etsy packs.  It's from a bit of experimenting I was doing yesterday.  I'd seen a post on Instagram showing how a DIY version of batik could be done without using hot wax.  The Instagrammer used PVA instead, and I wanted to try this out....
4 comments
Read more