The irises are flowering

Irises are the strangest looking flowers, aren't they? These purple ones on my allotment are flowering, and they're such a beautiful colour.

There aren't many flowers on my plot at the moment. The hyacinths have finished, the tulips are nearly over, but the Love-in-a-mist are about to emerge in their jewel-like shades of pink, purple and blue. Also the vivid orange of Calendula. That should keep the bees happy and well fed.

Back at home, I've been finishing a couple of crafty projects that've hung around for too long. I stretched this fishy embroidery over a square of cardboard, then added a felt backing and a hanging loop. (Funny, but until I took this photo I never realised the doors on the bookcase weren't hanging entirely level. How could I not have noticed?)

I also made the stripey binding for this wall hanging.

It's waiting for me to hang it on the wall, which I will get around to. Honestly, I will!

I had another session playing around the paints and the gell plate, and in particular adding colour to this padded envelope, with the idea of eventually making it into a junk journal cover.

I made some painty papers, including printing on tracing paper which works really well.

The padded envelope ended up red and gold, and a lot brighter than it appears in this photo, which has bleached out a lot of the colour. I don't know the theory of why cameras don't always capture the colour as we see it. Maybe I should google that?

I also slow-stitched a little fabric brooch. It's got the tiniest gold sequins, part of a vintage earring and a scrap of printed cotton with 'Why not?' on it. Again, the colour's not as bold in the picture as on the actual brooch.

It's backed with this lovely tweed. Wish I had more of it.

Oh, one more daft little thing - I finally found a good use for the metal bobbins I've kept from my previous sewing machine. I can't use them in my current machine as they're the wrong size and are metal, not plastic. But I realised I can use them as beads, of a kind. I added one to the tie on this journal. It works pretty well, don't you think?

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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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