Breaking My Own Rules

I've spent a long time encouraging people to break 'the' rules.  There's a lot of talk in quilting about the 'quilt police', and the long litany of rules that apply if you want your quilt to be taken seriously by the quilt cognoscenti.  So I give talks about 'The Rules of Quilting', in which I talk about what the 'rules' really are, why they are and when to ignore them.  And I don't get myself overly riled up about technique. 

So, I was surprised to discover that, as well as these commonly recognised rules, I have been working under unconscious rules of my own.  I was dye painting and printing today, and, just before I packed up for the day, I painted these two pieces.  I think they are the beginning of a series of work in which I explore colour in general, and dye painting in particular.  I had run out of plain material to work with, so I picked up a piece of hand dye in reds and oranges, and painted on top of that.  I'm calling them Rooted In Red, because, in truth, they are; they began as red, with yellow added. 

So...what rule did I break?  I realised that, until now, I had always dye painted on white fabric.  Nothing wrong with that, but when it becomes a rule, it stops you seeing the other possibilities that exist.  If there is a rationale behind that 'rule', it is probably that working colour on top of colour could possibly give you mud, not clear colour.  These, though, don't seem muddy, and I'll be interested to see how they turn out.

I came to break the rule because I had a piece of blue fabric ready to paint, and and had some success with that, so the leap to working with multicoloured cloth was not such a huge one.  I wonder what other 'rules' I place on myself...and how I can break them...and the limitations they put on my work.

Printing Petite....

Well, I've got my technology sorted out (look mom, new card reader...), so I thought I'd continue talking about the print proofing I was doing at the beginning of the week. I wonder if you can guess the size of this particular block?

 Well... it's just under 4" long, and less than 1/2" wide... that's small... I had cut a square from a rectangular block, and had this little bit as scrap.  I don't believe in wasting materials, so I thought I'd see if I could carve it.  As you can see, I could.  I deliberately kept it very, very simple.  I thought it printed out pretty well.  I then tried printing in several colours, below.

 then I took a couple of ACEO sized cards, which had been sprayed with Brusho, and printed the small block repeatedly over their surfaces.  The one on the left was printed in blue alone; the one on the right was double printed, first in blue, then in yellow.  I think they are both interesting, but I do particularly like the double print, which, I have to say, looks better in real life than in a photo.  Ain't that the way...sigh.

 And, of course, a block like this would make a great border print on a card or a piece of fabric, for that matter.... Small, in my mind, is definitely beautiful!

There's Nothing Worse...

...than sulking technology.  In my case, it's a card reader which point blank refuses to read the card with my images on (or any other card, for that matter...).  Grf.  So the images I meant to use for this post are not available until I go get another one.  So I'll talk about the rest of the printing another time.  Meanwhile, back at the ranch...I'm dyeing.  My hands are blue, cobalt blue, but my cloth is a variety of hues, from pale green to rich brown.  I haven't dyed in a long time, and I had forgotten how much I enjoy it.  I'd also forgotten what it means to lug two gallons of water down to the shed...but that's another complaint entirely.  I'm dyeing cottons and silks, as well as some tshirts and a few onesies, just because they're there, and I can... I think the lilac one will be cute... The image above is of a previous session (that sulking technology strikes again...).

And when I'm done with low immersion dyeing, I'll thicken the leftover dye, and paint with it, though probably not today; there's a fridge in the shed, and the thickened dye will keep in there for up to a week.  I like dye painting; it's more relaxed than formal painting.  That said, I have a painting in my head that needs to be put onto canvas, or at least board... so I may sit in the shed this afternoon and see if we can come to some sort of agreement about what it needs to look like.  I love painting on a large scale, but these seem to want to be small... it's a completely different discipline.

My paintings are usually full of movement and energy.  At the moment, I'm personally low on both...so I think I'll try to reflect that, as in this painting, 'Tranquil'.  It's not as small as I'm planning to work, but it is small by my standards lol.  The problem with painting large, of course is what to do with it when you're done... my house is too small to actually hang these works, and nobody seems to want to buy them.  I'm contemplating lending them to a local hospital or public space of some kind, as they are currently in the shed, and in the way.  Large painting, anyone?

And the card reader isn't the only technology that's sulking.  Our broadband is dipping in and out, more out than in (as it were), so, having written this, I can't publish the damn thing... oh well.  Back to the shed.

No Comment.

Well, you know, I keep saying I'm coming back to blogging, but then I keep underestimating how severe the depression has been over the past three years or so.  Merely putting on a happy face and continuing to work just hasn't done it, so I haven't been making, and therefore not blogging.  I am, however, hoping that I'm climbing up the other side of a very deep black hole; therefore, I'm not making any promises about blogging.  I'm here today; I might not be here tomorrow.  Regardless, though, I hope you know that I do think about my friends in the world of blogging, and thank you for persevering.

It's been a difficult week (and it's only Tuesday...sigh...).   Recognising it was going to be hard, I bought myself some gerbera, which always cheer me up (what, you didn't think I grew them, did you???).  When I'm coming out of a depression, I begin to realise how muany things I've neglected, and what I need to do to put things right.  The studios look as if bombs have gone off in them, and I've spent a bit of time in the shed today, putting things to rights.  In the kitchen too... I had left a lot of the plastic jugs and buckets I use for dyeing outside for...err... rather a long time... so they needed a good scrubbing.  I don't have plumbing in the studio, so it all got dragged up the path to the house, hosed off outside and finally scrubbed in the kitchen sink.  Mwah.  I'm now ready to dye, and the garden looks a bit better for it, too... no surprises there. Most of the improvement to the garden, though, is thanks to two lovely young chaps who are gradually working their way through much neglected borders, cutting things back, digging things up and generally being helpful.  Including unearthing a LOT of buckets...not sure whether to be grateful or not.

This afternoon, though, I felt that I really had to make something.  So, I looked out some lino blocks that I cut at one of the markets I take the work to, and decided to test print them.  No matter how careful you think you've been in cutting the pattern out, there are always places on the blocks where you haven't quite cut enough away, making odd little marks on the print.  Now I don't mind odd little marks, but I'm planning to make some greetings card type prints, and the General Public tends to have a much tidier mind than me, so I'm being Very Careful.  To my surprise, the leaf print was absolutely fine, no further cutting required.  Here it is printed on an ACEO sized board which I'd sprayed with Brusho.

But it really wasn't enough... so I added another one... different colour, same block...

Better, huh?  More interesting, anyway.  Probably not the best quality printing you've ever seen, but it's a reasonable composition, and I think I'll play with that idea on a larger, or rather, longer, scale; it would make an interesting printed border.    The flower, though, was not so well cut; look at the extraneous marks...

And as well as the unwanted marks, there are one or two places where the petals themselves haven't worked well.  They need a trim, as well as removing all the odd bits and pieces.  That's a job for this evening, in front of the tv.  I have one of those trays on pillows, which is ideal for cutting lino blocks on my knee.

And then there was the little word... Joy.  Joy, my granny.  No joy at all... lots of wee annoying bits to take out...  but it will, I hope, be worth it...

As you can see, haven't quite got it right, yet... and too much paint, too... (as a believer in Making Things Difficult For Myself I'm working with fabric paint rather than printing ink... this is probably A Mistake, but hey, I've done it now.  Besides, most of the time I'm working on fabric, anyway...).

And, when I noticed the too much paint bit, I thought I'd try a ghost print... and preferred it to the first one...

So...the manner in which I apply the paint needs to be considered...

In the spirit of change in which I'm working, I even tidied up after myself, so I can go in the shed tomorrow and dye.  Note the spelling!  If you would like to make comments on the post or the quality of the printing, please feel free.  I answer when I can, particularly if you ask me questions... which I welcome too.  More tomorrow, I hope.

The Artist Who Cried Wolf.

That would be me.  I talked for most of last year about change...changing my work focus, changing my life, changing all sorts of things.  I talked up the proverbial storm... but didn't actually do anything.  Well, I did do some things... I started two new blogs, as if making more work for myself would actually help anything (it didn't).  Recently, though, I've been talking to a business advisor, the wonderful Chris Leighton, for whom I occasionally work as a volunteer mentor.  I now have A Plan (cunning, business), and A Schedule (relentless).  And I feel Much Better about everything.

So what am I going to do?  Well, that would be telling...but right now, I'm clearing the decks and getting ready to start properly.  Part of the problem, believe it or not, is that I have too much stuff, and therefore, the more than ample three studios (read it and weep...) I have to use have Not Been Enough.  So... I've been selling off my commercial fabric, and that has given me a lot more space for starters.  I'm allocating different types of work to different places...seems obvious, right?  But it often isn't; I had two cloth studios in the attic, and pieced in one room, and quilted in another, with felting/embellishing floating between the two.  It so didn't work.  So now, all the sewing is done in one room.  The embellisher, dry feltmaking stuff and hat making lives in the other, along with all my textile books.  Wet stuff, eg making hat bases using blocks, dyeing and silk paper making, live out in the Little Green Shed.  The only strange thing that lives out in the shed is my cutting table.  Ideally, I would have it in the house, but because the rooms are attic rooms, the headroom in them is limited, and therefore, the useable space is, also.  There just isn't room for my cutting table, so anything that needs cutting has to be taken out into the shed.  It's not ideal... but then what setup ever is, unless you can build it from scratch?  This way, I get to keep bulky stuff like wadding and bolts of cloth in the LGS, and that frees up a lot more space in the cloth studios.  Hurrah!

I'm also 'clearing up' my blogs.  Rather than having several, as I have at present, I've decided to amalgamate them into one.  It seems silly to be spreading myself so thin, given that the other blogs are only really covering stuff I talk about here, anyway.  It seemed like a good idea at the time...but hey.  I will be leaving them open, because there is some useful information in them, but there will be a clear link back to this blog, so that everyone can see what's going on!   Hopefully that way, it'll be easier to keep talking; one or two blogs are doable.... five is overkill.  Normal service will be resumed, etc...

Thank you to all my loyal readers who have stuck with me through what has been a really difficult year.  I hope you'll enjoy and benefit from my change of direction, which I'll be talking more about in the next week or so... I promise!

Mad As A...

well, yes.  I'm back onto hats.  It has been a while, what with the flu and one thing and another.  I've been playing about with roses for a while, but this is my best rose fascinator so far, made from stitched sinamay.  I think I'll make some in other colours, too, just to see what they look like, a yellow one, for instance...  I'm interested in making hats for people who don't wear hats...usually...  Small and unscary, my hats are, I think.  I hope!

I've created a new shape, and am about to wire it, and put its bias binding on.  These things are becoming second nature now, a learned process.  It's interesting to watch myself learn, as it were...and to see how much easier I find the process as I do it more and more.  My next step has to be to buy blocks so that I can make more felt hats, I love making those.  Meanwhile, I'll stay with fascinators and small hats on bands or elastic.  Like the rose, and  this flower one, below.   Poppy, do we think?  I'm definitely on a floral kick!

Making Space.

I'm finally recovered from the flu, and starting to make space around myself for creative things to happen.  My upstairs studios have had stuff dumped in them, as I work my way through the house, decluttering and muttering...  Now, it's time to get that sorted out.  I spent half a day this weekend, just sifting through one of the rooms, and found a remarkable amount of unfinished work.  I've been beating myself up for not making much in the past two years, only to find that I've got plenty to be working with for the meantime, thanks. 

I've gone back into therapy, the demon depression has been biting again.  The major focus of that is to help me to get out of my own way; there is a whole tangle of 'stuff', a bit like the thorny forest surrounding Sleeping Beauty's castle, that needs to be pruned back and sorted.  It's hard, painful work; those thorns scratch!  Part of what I'm learning is that I seem to have moved away from the work I do best, the work 'about' depression and mental health issues, the work about feelings.  Instead, I've been chasing the elusive 'sellable' work, that seems to be indefinable, at least for me.  Nobody seems to want to buy my work; that's not a complaint, it's a fact.  So I may as well please myself, and make the strong depression work, the work about feelings, and starve happy!

cough, cough,,,

...yes, the lurgy is still here, but I'm up and dressed...it must mean improvement!  This is a truly vicious flu; I haven't been as ill as this in a long time.  But I'm well enough to start thinking about things... which is a distinct improvement over lying around like a wet dish rag!

Hats, as you know, are my current fascination, and a workshop with lovely Louise has introduced me to working with felt.  I do make wet felt, but have to say that this is much faster... you take a 'hood' of felt, and stretch it over a hat block.  Which, I suppose, is pretty much what you do when you make your own felt... must try it.  As you can see, you get amazingly sculptural shapes, depending on which kind of block you use. I particularly like this one, because I have found I can wear it in two different ways...two hats for the price of one!

 We met Louise through attending a workshop organised by the equally lovely James at Hat Blocks Direct; check out his site to see all the amazing possibilities for hats...he makes the blocks by hand, and they are truly lovely; these are the blocks I've bought so far from him.  The head is known as a 'dolly'; the blocks are for making small hats, such as pill boxes.  At first glance, they all look the same, but there are distinct differences in the way they are finished; in combination, they produce a number of different styles.  I'm having fun just working out all the different ways in which I can use them!

Now, of course, I'm trying to work out which hat blocks I need to get to make Even More Hats... watch this space!  

Whine, Whine, Whine...

...and it's not the whine of a buzz saw (see previous post...).  I've got the flu.  Nope, not man flu, even though I did get it from my husband, who believes in share and share alike...  The real, achy, coughing, sneezing flu.  Bleh.

For once, I'm practicing what I preach.  I'm tucked up in bed, with a cat at my side, feeling marginally better than yesterday, playing silly games on Facebook and sleeping a lot.  When I'm sleeping, I'm dreaming of hats, and weddings, and friends.  This is not a bad way to dream...  I'm leaving the hanging of our exhibition to Jill and Clare, and may not even make it to tomorrow night's opening.  This is not like me.  But I'm of the view that pushing myself to get up and out of bed is just so much wasted energy.  Better to keep it for getting better.  Health, in my book, comes before productivity, and marketing, and all those things... if I'm not well, I'm not well. 

That's not always the case when I'm depressed, though.  Over the years, I've come to realise that getting up and going for a walk, or to make something, will help to lift the depression, rather than make it worse.  Physical illness needs lots of rest.  Depression tells you it needs lots of rest, but if you can persuade it to shut up for five minutes, enough time to get engrossed in making or writing something, then often you feel refreshed and A Whole Lot Better.  It's a balancing act.  If it doesn't work after ten or fifteen minutes, I go for a nap.  There are worse things to do with ones time. 

Be kind to yourself, is what I'm trying to say, here.  Even when it feels as if you're being cruel, initially, like forcing yourself to work.  It may not fix everything...it may not even help anything... but it's always worth a try.

Buzz, Buzz, Buzz...

said the very busy bee...(that's me).  I've been doing a lot, but not sharing it here... partly it's to be seen on the Spunbond Sensations!  blog.  Partly, it's to do with hats...not the making of them, but the work behind the scenes in promoting them...  Add into that, facilitating a creativity support group on Facebook, and starting a new blog on creativity as well... and it's pretty hectic.

Myrtle♥Rose are bringing our exhibition, Blossomings, to @The Gallery, Dereham (in the Memorial Hall) for the first two weeks in October, so if you have always wanted to have full permission to try on a LOT of hats and fascinators, not to mention hairbands and ornaments, that would be a golden opportunity!  As well as the hats, Jill Arnold and I will be showing textile art that relates to the theme in one way or another. Contact me with your email address, if you would like an invite to the Preview (I'll be making cupcakes for that one...).

I also wrote a profile of my work so far, in the new UK Art Quilters blog, .  The blog is an offshoot of a Facebook group.  Writing this was a very interesting exercise, and has made me think a lot about the direction my work has been taking over the last few years.  I'll write more about that another time, I think, when I'm clearer in my own mind about it.  It is a theme I return to constantly on this blog.  It's really important to me to make work with meaning; going back and looking at what I've made, there are several threads that run through my work, all of them meaningful to me, some for obvious reasons, some not so obvious.  I'd like to settle down into some serious work, and focus properly on it, rather than spreading myself thin over a lot of work that isn't quite so meaningful for me.  If you see what I mean...

I made a not so deliberate mistake in the UK Art Quilters Blog; I said I would show an abstract garden quilt...and then forgot all about it... oops!  So here is 'Green Girl In The Garden', one of my favourite Lutradur quilts.  The 'Green Girl' in the title refers to a textile doll I made several years ago... she had a triangular head and odd shaped body... this 'Green Girl' has a triangular body and a round head... but they relate, nonetheless!

Lucky Me.

I never win anything.  Never.  Ok, I exaggerate... very, very rarely.  But I noticed a giveaway by Myfanwy Hart, which she wrote about on Facebook, and I thought... nothing ventured, nothing gained... and LOOK what I got!!!  Yes, I'm nuts about thread, and I'm delighted to disprove the saying that red and green, should not be seen, except upon an Irish queen...  aren't these yummy?   And she's doing these giveaways all this month... click here to find the 'rules of the game', as she puts it. 

Now...what to do with these beauties...mmm....  I might even consider doing a giveaway of my own... 

Stitch, Stitch, Stitch...

and a bit of forgetting to stop.  Four different pieces of fabric (including the water soluble stuff), all with stitched circles.  I find this kind of stitching really meditative.  I don't have to pay attention to a pattern, I don't have to have even stitching, I can just go with the flow and let the pattern develop by itself.  Bit like life, really.  You do have to get through the boredom barrier, and past the thinking about the work, and what else you have to do, but finally, there is just you, the stitching and a quiet mind.  Pure concentration.  It's very relaxing.

I must buy more bobbins for my older Berninas, making patterns like this need a lot of bobbin thread, and I have to use the same thread top and bottom.  Breaking off the stitch to refill the bobbin is a distraction.  There is a fifth piece upstairs, which I've done two bobbins worth of stitch onto... it's a little under half way stitched.  It would have been only a quarter stitched, but when I looked at it, I couldn't resist doing just a little bit more.  If I listen carefully, it's singing quietly to me to come back, change the needle and Get On With It.  All of this cloth is intended for hats or bags for Myrtle & Rose.  We're exhibiting in Watton in July, and doing Burnham Market Craft Fair this August, so we need a bit of stock. Which is why the cloth will have to wait a bit; I'm off to wire some hats...and as the rain seems to have stopped for a moment, I'll just nip down into the shed and get the hat forms I left to dry last night, ready to wire.  Obsessed?  Hell, yes!

Learning The Ropes...

is great fun, it transpires.  This is today's creation, a sinamay fascinator.  What's interesting about it is that the sinamay has been painted in places, using metallic paints, so predominately it is pink, but with a very gentle shade of green popping up now and again, and a lovely sheen to it.  I hadn't tried that before, and will do it again, but instead of using a brush, I think I'l use a roller... much easier to get the paint on evenly.  I like learning...what have you learned today?

Getting It Right...Eventually.

As you know, I went on a wonderful hat making workshop last weekend.  One of the things I made was a fascinator, which I teamed with a felt flower; it's in the image above, perched on Dolly's head.  It looked okay...but somehow, there was something not quite right about it.  There was just too much difference in feel between the tactile softness of the felt and the sculptural nature of the sinamay.  I did persevere... made some more flowers, thinking that it was the balance that was off.  No.  So... I tried something else.  I made a rose out of some hand dyed silk organza, and tried that, instead.  Silk also has tactile softness...but of a different, somehow more formal kind.  This time, I think I got it right.  It's elegant, rather than a cross between elegance and...well.. cute.  What do you think?

Is It A Fruit Bowl? Is It A Sugar Bowl? No...

it's a hat.  I thought it was important to prove, if only to myself, that I can do this stuff without the eagle eye of a teacher upon me... so I've been putting what I learned into practice.  This particular one is another pillbox; I love these shapes.  Much of millinery is applied textiles, with a bit of 3D thinking thrown in.  I finished this one this morning, it looks like this:

Now, I have to decide how to fasten it to hair.  The tutor recommended a thin hair band, covered with the same colour fabric.  That way, you know it won't fall off, and perhaps more importantly, it has to be worn in the right place on the head.  Hats are designed that way, for a particular spot on the skull (as it were), and often doesn't look right anywhere else.  I've been trying this one out, and surprisingly, it looks good in two or three positions.  The other option would to be to put milliners' elastic on the hat; the elastic gets hidden in the hair at the back of the head (no, not under the chin!!!).  Decisions, decisions. 

Felting Flowers...

for my fascinator.  I thought it would be a good thing to get the hats finished, so I started with felting.  And then, I thought, better try out the skills I learned over the weekend... so, I got my blocks out.  And here is my hat making corner in the studio...  meet Dolly, the head, and the small hat block set.  The iron is essential; steam is the milliner's not so secret weapon.  And the little box has my hand sewing kit.  The little lilac and cream things scattered around the blocks are stylised sinamay flowers for decoration.  As well as making the felt flowers, today, I managed to finish off the binding of the saucer hat, and start to think about how to decorate it (still not sure...), as well as make a sinamay base for a second fascinator, in eau-de-nil.  It's merrily drying on Dolly, and the bias binding for round the edges will be added tomorrow morning. 

The flowers are still drying; when they have, I'll be adding stitch to create movement and line, and then see which ones I want to use.  The pink wool is commercially dyed, but the lilac I dyed myself.  It's great to have so much of the creative process within my own hands.  Control freak?  Me?  Surely not!

Hat Heaven!

I have just got home from the best workshop I have ever been to, in any capacity.  Louise Brooks, from Hats From The Hall was the inspired and inspiring tutor to myself and Clare Hedges ...and that was it!  Almost individual tuition.  Each of us made three hats, various Fiddly Bits and had a truly wonderful time.  It was held at the workshop space of Hat Blocks Direct , a wonderful family firm, really welcoming and knowledgeable about hat making; mum is a milliner herself!  Fantastic.  Can't overdo the superlatives. 

So...what did I make?  Well...you can see them above.  None of them are completely finished; the saucer, below, has to have its binding completed, whilst the other two are complete hats, but are missing embellishments (as is the saucer, of course...).   We started by making a fascinator base by hand (I don't think I've ever stitched so much by hand in my life!), and added sinamay embellishments.  I really wanted to make a pillbox hat, so that was next, made over a lovely dimpled hat block.  Not bad for one day, huh?  Day two, and we made the saucer, which I suppose you could say is half way between a hat and a fascinator; bigger than a fascinator, easier to wear than a hat, and doesn't ruin your hairdo. 

I've never felt so at home with techniques and craft.  At the end of it, I felt that I have finally found what I want to be doing, the reason for collecting all that knowledge, skill and experience.  I LOVE making hats.  Clare had just as good a time, and we had a great girly weekend!  If you get the chance to learn with Louise, run, don't walk.  She is an absolute star (and she hates getting her photo taken...sorry, Louise!!!).

This image shows Clare stitching and listening to Louise in full flow.  The 'dolly' or head shaped block on a stand, came home with me (oops...) as did a set of small blocks to make...well, yes, small hats... just don't tell Robin...  The one on the far right of the shelf is used for extra large coolie hats, apparently.  There were an assortment of hat brims and crown brims and really everything you could possibly want to make hats with.  We both loved it, and I really didn't want to come home... but all good things come to an end eventually, don't they. 

These last two images are of the almost completed hats.  You know what it's like; you take bits and pieces you think you might use to a workshop, but if you don't have enough, there's only so much you can do!  The fascinator has a hand made felt flower on it, but it needs more; probably a couple of buds, or different sized daisies.  And I have an amazing black and glass button to go at the bottom of the feathers, and will probably add a little puff of black veiling... very burlesque!  This is bringing out the frivolous parts of my soul... and it couldn't happen at a better time.  Watch this space!

Breaking Through...

As you know, or may know, I offer creativity coaching, and work as a volunteer mentor for people starting their own businesses.  I've got a background in personnel and self development, so I hope I'm fairly good at helping people to work out what they want, and how to get it.  That's particularly important in a small business, because you are often your only resource.  One of the most important things a coach can do is get you to listen to yourself, to what you and others are saying (often about you and your business), and work out what that means.  I'm currently working with another textile artist, and we came to a somewhat unexpected conclusion to what her business might actually be.  In reaching that conclusion, I said to her that the word people use about me and my work most often is 'inspirational', but that sadly, they never seemed to actually buy the work. 

On the way home, I was reminded of a Facebook conversation between myself, Annabel Rainbow and Felicity Griffin Clark, about the making and selling of work.  Annabel's comment (and I paraphrase wildly...) was that you either made work to sell or you made the work you needed to make, but the two didn't often go together.  That rang in my mind with the comment about being 'inspirational' (you, of course, may have another word to describe me...feel free to add it to the comments, I'm always interested in feedback).  And suddenly, it all clicked together in my mind.  I may have to make the work...but I don't have to sell it.  I don't have to do anything, really, except what I want to do.  What do I want to do?  I want to inspire people...it's what I seem to do best.  Perhaps the nicest thing anyone said about me  was that when I was on form, everybody around me changed their lives for the better.  That's what I love most.  Much of the art I make, is to illustrate a point for something or someone...like the Spunbond Sensations! blog, which is predominately a teaching blog, which I hope, eventually, will become a community. 

This feels like a huge breakthrough.  My art is important to me, and I won't stop doing it (actually, I don't think I could),  but the pressure of working to sell is something I just don't need.  I would rather enable others to do what I do.  I want to make up some kits using spunbonded fabrics, and others using hand dyes, for people who would like to try working with these things, but aren't quite sure where to start.  Enough 'stuff' for the project, and full instructions.  Hurrah!  I feel so much better about things now... sometimes, all you need is to listen to yourself...and the feedback you're getting.   Phew.

If You Are My Sister, Look Away From The Blog!

Everybody else, you can look, but don't tell anybody, especially my sister!!!  Yes, Frank and Kate, that means you too!  I sat last night and finished a lap quilt for my sister Jane.  She loves autumnal colours, hence the leaf motif.  At the time she said she wanted a quilt from me, she had a cat, hence the small cartoon block of cats, and the similar binding.  Each fabric has its own quilting pattern, mainly leaves; the gold borders need quilting, but that'll be done today, just with some abstract squiggles, methinks...  I forgot about them when I added the binding, and thought I would be as well to finish that before finishing the quilting.  I may live to regret that... but it's too late to worry about it now.  Even mitred my corners...

I very rarely make useful quilts, and I'm wondering why, to be honest, I thoroughly enjoyed making this one, and the two cat lap quilts I made for my son and daughter in law as birthday presents (there will be photos when they come back from honeymoon).  Meanwhile... see what you think of Jane's quilt.

Felting...

is becoming something of an obsession.  This is a shawl collar, made from Nuno felt, with stitch round the edges of the collar, to give it some definition.  I'm quite pleased with the way it turned out.  I'm not sure that it looks great on my chair, there, but on a person, it looks great.  I'm now trying to decide how to fasten it.. perhaps frogging, perhaps a loop and fascinating button... perhaps a vintage brooch. I'd love to know what you think.

As well as the coaching I do, I work as a volunteer mentor for people who are starting small businesses.  I met a new mentee today, and as always, it inspired me to do more coaching.  It is not a part of my work that has ever really caught on, though I have had some success working with people who are in some way stuck at some part of their creative journey.  I'm working on a new workbook, intended to help people find their own symbolic visual language, which I'm finding quite interesting.  Actually, it's more of a work bag, as you get a journal as well as the book in E-book form, and some other bits and pieces.  I hope it'll be fun to do. 

I've intended for some time to start a creativity blog; even made one here on Blogger.  I've held back from working on it for some reason, and my recent experience with Spunbond Sensations! is making it even more doubtful.  I had hoped that people would participate in Spunbond Sensations, as I can't answer questions I'm not asked...it's a bit like talking to yourself.  Perhaps it is just the blog structure... you can comment, but you can't blog on someone elses' blog, unless they allow you to.  I'm aiming for a cross between a blog and an email list; so far, it much more blog than conversation...  Perhaps if I started a list to support it?