rubykittyruby

  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 thought I'd better catch up on my blog posting as I've been rather tardy about it lately.  Today's been another beautifully sunny day and I'm just back from a long healthy walk, ready to crash out on the sofa for the evening.  I've got a book to read, 'The House of Whispers' by Laura Purcell.  I realised when I started it that I'd read it before, but I can't remember how the story ends so it's worth a re-read.  The book's set in Cornwall, and is a gothicky creepy read, full of unexplained noises and lights out to sea, talk of supernatural goings-on and featuring as it's central character a devious servant with an over-fondness for gin and laudanum.   This is the latest completed page of my Ann Wood stitchbook challenge.  Mainly masses of seed stitches.  It's not the most complicated of pages, but I enjoyed sewing it.  You can't really see from the photo, but I used Christmas material on the left hand side.  I turned it over, so ...

I woke to a foggy morning.  Cold enough to have frozen over the water in the bird bath.  It didn't last long though.  By the time I'd walked into town to buy groceries, the fog had lifted and the sky was a flawless bright blue.  Back home I didn't have the energy to mooch down to the allotment, so instead I did more of my crewel embroidery.   I'm trying to make every square slightly different, despite my limited range of stitches.  The crewel wool is so thin and delicate.  I'm using a single strand of it on the needle and you get a lovely soft effect but oh, it is fragile.  Tug too hard on a stitch and the wool breaks.  I suppose it might not help that I'm using mainly vintage wool.  Age might've weakened the fibres. This is the latest page of my  Ann Wood inspired stitchbook.  It's a piece of gell printed cotton, and has been stenciled and stamped.   Apart from that stitchiness, I've been catching up on my readi...

  Well, apart from my front room looking like a bomb site, there's nothing much happening in my quiet corner of the world.  February seems muted, rather a dull grey like the sky.  I reckon we're all waiting impatiently for Spring, and days that aren't constantly punctuated by the whooshing of the combi boiler as it lumbers into life and sends out another blast of central heating.  I've made a tentative start with the Spring Cleaning.  A bag or two of stuff's gone to the charity shop, and I've begun listing things on eBay.  There's only so much vintage china you can hang on to before you're knee deep in dainty tea cups and dessert bowls.  I'll keep some of them, and use the ones I really like, but the rest can be sent on their way to new homes.   I've also been finding things I'd completely forgotten about, like these pretty pink glass dishes.  Should I keep these?  Or should they be eBayed too?  I'm undecided.  Meanwhile ....

If, like me, you're not familiar with the work of artist Rex Ray then here's a brief intro via the wonders of YouTube.   Why am I showing you this?  Because, if you stopped by yesterday's post you'll have seen info about Abstractuary.  The arty prompt for 2nd February was Rex Ray, and I took inspiration from his collages and tried making my own.   Hmmm ... me and collages don't get along.  I tried cutting out painted papers and glueing 'em down, then switched to colouring pencils and tried that.  But I always end up with stuff that looks like a primary school kid made it.  So instead I took up needle and thread.   It's not finished yet, but it's a fabric postcard-sized bit of stitching, and is meant to represent one of his paper collages.  I think I'll eventually make a fabric book based on this Abstractuary challenge, and this will form one of the pages.   Today's prompt is 'print' and as I haven't hauled out the gel...

  It's the first Wednesday of a new month, so I'm traipsing into Leeds today for a StitchArt class.  Don't know what the theme will be for this session, but I'll blog about it tomorrow.  Probably.  For now, here's a quick round-up of crafty things that might - maybe possibly? - be of interest to you.  First off, I've shown this before but in case you've not seen it.  It's my version of a fodder keeper.  An expression I learnt from YouTube where lots of papercrafters were showing books they'd made to keep paper flowers & small cutouts, etc in.  The books had stitched plastic pockets inside to slip things into. Rather than make a new book, I decided this was an ideal use for a photo album that was brand new but never previously used.  I stuck a gell print on the cover to prettify it, and it's been re-stuffed with lots of flowers I've been recently making.  Plenty of these unused albums turn up on charity shop bric-a-brac shelves, so yo...