The More You Do...

the more you learn. This afternoon has been spent with the heat press, working out just how long you need to press different types of polyesters, including lutradur...okay, especially lutradur...to get a good print. The answer is....it varies....but I'm glad I made the purchase, and the trials, so I'll include the information in the book I'm writing on Lutradur with Dijanne. If you haven't already got it, you can have a free information sheet by emailing me here . The picture is not a carefully constructed transfer dyed piece. No, indeed. I wanted to protect the bottom of the heat press, given that I'm likely to use it to press dyed cloth, particularly if I decide to start selling the cloth again, as I may well do, so I popped a piece of pelmet Vilene beneath the lutradur, and got this effect. It's the functional equivalent of the mopping up cloth in cold water dyeing...and I'm going to cut it up for postcards.


I spent yesterday at a Well meeting, and left tired, but having learned several things. One seems to be that perhaps my intuition was right. I'm not good at attending groups, being part of groups. I prefer to work alone, and to deal with people one to one, or in threes or fours. Six months on after the group's formation is perhaps a bit slow for me to come to this realisation, but then I've always been slow on the uptake with certain things. And I don't want to leave The Well, having conceived of it and started it along with Helen Simpson...but I do need to find a compromise that suits everyone.

A week to go before I go on holiday, a visit to my son and future daughter in law in Edinburgh, and one to my friends Alison and Michael in Inverness. It'll be good to see them all...we talk on the phone, but it's not the same as being able to hug a friend on impulse... People talk of cats as being either people cats, or place cats, drawn to one or the other, but not both. Despite what I've just said about not liking big groups, I do see myself as a people cat, or should that be person... rather than a place person. I'll be glad to see the mountains, but I'd much rather hug the people...they are very special to me.