I've been tidying up ...

Usually, if there's something to do other than cleaning & tidying I'll ditch the housework and have fun elsewhere. But occasionally you have to accept the inevitable and drag the vacuum cleaner around. My sitting room was looking like a bombsite, overflowing with crafty stuff, while the front bedroom wasn't much better. That was being used as a dumping ground for the crafty overflow. I blitzed both rooms, brushing carpets, wiping surfaces, binning what wasn't worth keeping and bagging up unwanted stuff for the charity shop. I also rearranged my bookshelves. Bringing together from various places all my craft books and - blimey! - I seem to have acquired rather a lot. I didn't realise I'd amassed so many.

Well, I shouldn't run out of inspiration any time soon, should I? Not with all those reference books to hand. I also shouldn't buy any more books for a while ...

I bundled lots of paper scraps into this pink storage tub, then played around with an idea I'd seen on Instagram, for making homemade washi tape (of a sort).

That diverted me for a few minutes. (I'm easily distracted.)

You can stencil and use ink pads and printing stamps to add interest to your tape. I would've made more, but I needed to crack on with the cleaning.

With a tidier house and a virtuous, even slightly smug glow, I settled down to my stitching. This little fishy piece is nearly done. The colours are more vivid than in the photo, which has kind of washed them out.

This is another completed page for the Ann Wood 100 days stitchbook challenge, and below is the page I'm currently working on. Day 67, would you believe! I'm so looking forward to making up my fabric book and seeing all the pages displayed together.

Anyway, there's not much more to tell you, so I'll keep this blog post short and (reasonably) sweet. Having finished reading 'The Mad Women's Ball', set in France, I've returned to 15th century England and Philippa Gregory 'The Kingmaker's Daughter'. It's about Anne Neville, daughter of the Earl of Warwick, who grows up to marry the man who'll inherit the throne and become Richard III. Once I've read that I'll only have a dozen books on my once-towering To-Be-Read pile. Slowly but surely I'm getting through them.

Hope you're well and enjoying the Spring weather (assuming it's springtime for you too, that is.) Bye for now.

Comments

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...

rubykittyruby

Search This Blog