The hot weather continues, and I know I shouldn't moan. I really shouldn't. But I want RAIN!!! I want a typical English summer. Sunny days and showers, alternating blue skies and dreary grey. I'm fair skinned and freckled and once - in my childish days - had bright ginger hair. It's toned down over the years, but I still retain the kind of colouring that's not suited to high temperatures. I go red and sweaty and come over all lethargic, I just want to lie on the couch like a swooning Edwardian lady, fanning myself and demanding a constant supply of cold drinks.
Okay, I'll stop whingeing now. I just needed to vent.
These photos are from my jaunt to the Scrapstore on Wednesday. It's located in Farsley in Leeds, which turns out to be a pretty place and I got the feeling it's a bit upmarket. The high street has several fancy boutiques selling women's clothes, but I couldn't spot a single charity shop.
The Scrapstore's a great place to rummage. There's everything from empty Fortnum & Mason cake boxes to lino printing equipment, ribbons, zips, all kinds of haberdashery supplies, rolls of paper, offcuts of cardboard and leather, plastic, foam, all manner of art materials.
It's also located in this beautiful room. I mean, look at that wooden floor.
I could've spent a lot more, but I reined myself in. Partly because I don't have unlimited space at home, and I'm trying to use up what I've got rather than keep buying things. Trying, but not always succeeding!
I bought a tin of watercolours paints, a bargain at just under £3.00. Plus, these two sample books of fabrics that I thought would be ideal for different slow stitch projects.
However, it was obvious when I got the weighty books home that I'd made a rookie error. The fabric pages each had a label stuck on the back, identifying which particular design it was. Annoyingly, the label won't cleanly peel off. So either I - in a bad temper - take a frustratingly long amount of time to peel off each paper label when I want to use a particular page of material, or I cut out the smaller rectangle of material from the centre of the sample in order to use it and discard the rest. Which is wasteful, isn't it?The entire lot has been dumped in a storage container while I mull over what to do.
Never mind. The paints are really good, and I love the names the individual colours are given. Prussian Blue and Yellow Ochre, French Ultramarine and Burnt Sienna. Though I did raise an eyebrow at Hookers Green. Really? That's - that's the name of a colour. Hmmm, okay.
Finally, here's a little experiment I did today while staying out of the heat. I took a few sheets of sketchpad paper and a sheet of watercolour paper and had a go at dyeing them with tea. I threw four or five 'Berry' teabags into a dish and filled it with hot water, dunking the paper in it. I hoped they'd turn a pretty shade of pink.
Interestingly, despite the berry-coloured water, the paper remained pink-free. The sketchpad paper went a slightly off white, while the watercolour paper went a shade greyer. But they all had speckled marks from the tea leaves and the texture of the paper's much more like that of handmade paper now. So the experiment - and the teabags - weren't entirely wasted.
Right, I need to toddle off to the allotment to collect a few more raspberries. (This blog post was written on Thursday, but I forgot to publish it sooner!) It's early evening, so the temperature's gone down a fraction. Then it's home to a Galaxy Ripple, which I realised today is like a Cadbury's Flake but with another coating of chocolate on the outside. How have I not known about these before?
Thanks for stopping by, and bye for now.
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