A little round-up of what's going on in my world ...

 

When I've not been picking strawberries off the allotment - they just keep on ripening - or reading Barbara Kingsolver's fabulous 'Flight Behaviour', or when I've not been trying to tackle the wildly dishevelled June greenery in my garden or moving furniture and cheese plants around in an effort to have a tidy house - I should give that up as a hopeless task - I've been dabbling in various crafty pursuits.  

I've finished the scroll-like piece that I made as part of this month's Stitch Art group, based around an exhibition by Roger Ackling.  It only really makes any sense if you look at his artwork (and even then it doesn't make a massive amount of sense!).  But I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out, and I've added it to the fabric book I made to collect up all my Stitch Art efforts.  

I was hoping to roll this up into a scroll, like you would with a snippet roll, but including cardboard put paid to that.  So I folded it up and made a band out of a ribbon for it to fit snugly into. 

More by accident than design the ribbon with its horizontal lines of black and gold is perfect for representing the scorched dark-wood lines of Ackling's sculptures.  

Speaking of fabric books, I've also got this separate book on the go.  It's opened out in this photo (above) so you're looking at the front and back outside cover, patched up and with buttons and beads decorating it. 

Closed up it's roughly about 5 and a half inches x 6 and a half.  The cover's not finished yet as this is a project I'm picking up and putting down.  I'll be slow-stitching it for several weeks to come, and I'm in no hurry to finish. 

The inside pages are different sizes, and will be full of oddments I've sewn as the mood's taken me, like this flower outlined in embroidery thread and stitched on top of a jumble of fabric scraps.  

I'd used a square of cotton material as a base, putting that in an embroidery hoop.  Then laid my fabric scraps randomly on the cotton before sewing the flower.  Then I cut that out and appliqued it to my book page.  

These are another couple of book pages, the one on the right still with the dressmaking pins stuck into it.  

When not playing with fabric, I've been playing with making painty papers.  Delightfully messy fun.  I used alcohol inks and watered-down acrylic paint to make lovely splodgy patterns on brown packaging paper.  Die-cut butterfly shapes and stencils also got roped in to help with the mark-making.

I managed to get pretty effects from applying paint both before and after I laid the stencils on the brown paper.  Definitely a technique I want to experiment with some more.  

Finally, a couple more charity shop buys that I'm really looking forward to reading.  I've loved Richard Osman's murder-mystery books, so this cosy crime novel is right up my street.  As for the Susan Hill book, I mean, who doesn't find old fashioned dolls a wee bit sinister?  The blurb on the back states 'Orphan Edward Cayley is sent to spend the summer with his forbidding Aunt Kestrel at ... her decaying house deep in the damp, lonely fens.  With him is his spoilt, spiteful cousin, Leonora.  And when Leonora's birthday wish for a beautiful doll is thwarted, she unleashes a furious rage which haunts her ... cousin for years afterwards ...'   If that doesn't whet your appetite for a creepy gothicky tale, I don't know what will.  

Thanks for stopping by.  Hope you enjoy your day.