CAKE

I find that CAKE usually gets the attention of bloggers!  This was my offering for the table at our fund-raising teaparty in a pretty garden in the village.   We had so many kind people offering to bake cakes that I was able to be very generous with the size of the slices we served to go with the dainty cucumber sandwiches.   Can you see my bunting on the trellis?  

More cake - this time for my birthday lunch and made for me by a kind friend.  

Some tomato tarts, heart-shaped in honour of my neice and her fiance who joined us for lunch to share news of their wedding plans for the New Year.

And some scrummy punnets of fresh fruit to end the meal, just to counteract all those cakey calories!

Today is the exciting day that the Postman's Knock cards are all received.   This stunning version of my New York! New York! theme is from Joanna, who made a lovely envelope out of an old map of North America and inside was the very bling version of Liberty against a backdrop of the Manhattan street grids.   Liberty is portrayed as a version of the goddess Kali, who is perhaps enticing emigrants into Ellis Island with promises of prosperity.   I thought it was a most thoughtful interpretation and a very precious addition to my collection.

I forgot to take a photo of the Taking Flight one I sent to Lesley this time, but it's on the Postman's Knock blog if you care to see it.

Another big treat today was a visit to Gina's Open Studio.   And it was 'two for the price of one' on meeting-the-bloggers front, as Gill from VintageRockChick was there too.    I had met Gina before when she came to talk to our Embroiderers Guild, but it was great to get to talk to Gill for the first time, having laughed at her blog for so long!  

We knew we were in the right place when we caught sight of the red phone box that Gina had decorated with her mobile-phoning figures.   They were incredible close-up!  

I think my favourite thing when visiting someone's studio is to explore their sketchbooks - I love to see how ideas develop and are recorded, which is something I'm just hopeless at.   Gina's were real works of art.   I did have a bone to pick with her, though, because her tidy studio was held up to me by my husband as the epitome of how a workroom should be kept.   He rode rough-shod over my stuttering excuses.    Nothing for it then, I'll need to have a clear-out.......

If you can get to Gina's studio, it is open again next weekend and the details are on her blog.   There's lots of exquisite work on display and great fun to be had with her sock monkeys and 'More Tea Vicar' teacosies!

Hope you're having a lovely weekend!

                Chrissie

heart bunting - vintage stylie

Well, I did threaten to bore you with bunting ....

I placed some vintage fabrics, thick cloths with unfinished embroidery transfers (I love the blue) and some bits of old traycloths and lace and bonded them to shirt-weight cotton, made a see-through heart template and decided where to cut out the shapes for best effect.   Little bit of zig-zag sewing in places, a wee blue button and yards of twine and lo! we had bunting. This is my first attempt, but I think I'll make some more, maybe a bit smaller?

This string is going with me to a Strawberry Day at the local watermill this afternoon, where I have been given a little sales table under "the hovel" - sounds delightful!   However, I'm going to put a reasonably high price tag on it, and maybe it can come back home with me to hang in my lovely new kitchen!

These little posy-corsage-brooch-thingies are coming with me too, but I'd prefer not to bring them home!   They came about when I was showing a friend's daughter how to put a stalk on a piece of flat felt.   She made herself a flower, which she had meant to have a thicker stalk on to make it stand up.   However, I loved them the way they are and I had a go at developing the idea using the nuno technique and trapping some floral chiffon in the fibres and making some brooches.  

 The one below has no chiffon, just throwster's silk waste and flax fibres on the petals

 dark pink petals and floral chiffon

 white petals and floral chiffon, which I think is my fave - what do you think?

The chiffon is a skirt I wore at every available opportunity when I was about 30 years younger than I am now and could get away with that Lady Di  look ... nowadays it would be more sack-of-spuds (King-Edward's of course)!



Hope you're having a good weekend - what have you been up to?  I'd love to hear, so do leave me a comment and tell me.

                     Chrissie

down the rabbit hole (and other feeble excuses)

How can I have been too busy to blog? What is the world coming to? Didn't fall down a rabbit hole, but have been absent without leave. Fair amount of tedious stuff has filled my days, but not exclusively so.   For example, I met Jill!  I took a day off from committee works and whizzed over to Luton to visit her open studio exhibition. It was such a treat to meet her and be able to see her delicate and painstaking craft work and photographs and to chat to her about her sketchbooks. Such an inspiration. I bought one of her sweet needle-felted cards which I'll be getting framed to hang in my workroom.   I specially love the little french knots worked in multi-coloured thread on the pink flower heads. 

Also not tedious was this scrummy pud

 eaten here

at a friend's special birthday lunch.   We had a great day with lots of fun and laughter.  

And someone I have never met, but whom I know to be a very lovely lady indeed, made me a gift which I shall treasure.   Carolyn has just recently opened an Etsy shop, which is a rip-roaring success already, not surprisingly.  She has been making tyvek beads which have miraculously turned into veritable Byzantine jewels and she generously sent me some beautiful turquoise and gold ones.  

I've always loved Carolyn's St.Ives-inspired hearts and I couldn't believe that she created one just for me.  What kindness.

Isn't it amazing?   I adore this delicate knitted shoreline and the little quayside cottage.   There's so much to see and explore in this fascinating work of art.  

Not in the same league, sadly, but I have been felting one or two heart brooches - this is my attempt at being exuberant .... and resisting the usual strong urge to tidy, neaten, snip and straighten.   I quite like this red and orange one, which has bits of an old Indian bag that fell to pieces through being loved to much.   But the ones below just look a bit scruffy to me.   Probably because I rebelliously and repeatedly stabbed them with my little pointy scissors!

Using some avocado skin dyed fabrics which I got from Heike last year, I stitched some little stitcheries to make into greetings cards

And Lesley might recognise some of the snippets in the blue versions.   I've incorporated my indigo bits with some hand-dyed lovelies that came from Lesley's Shed.   The snippets of lace were out of my Erosion Bundle - they were buried in the compost heap and took some dye from screen-printed fabric they were wrapped up with.

 mother-of-pearl buttons and

 pink knots

And, see, I can do loose threads and frayed edges .... but I did hide the stabby-scissors.

I was going to make you hang on for some more photos of some cards I made today, but I think you've persevered long enough.   However, those who come back in a day or two will be rewarded not only with pictures of greetings cards, but with views of bunting.   Heart-shaped bunting.   Aha, now I've got your attention.

Chrissie x

Is this a 'Collection', or just 'More than One of its Kind'?

I've decided that there's a difference between a collector and someone who just owns more than one of everything.   When I was looking around for something to contribute to Lesley's challenge to other bloggers to show their collections, I couldn't help concluding that I definitely fall into the latter category.  

My stamp-collecting passion faded in about 1962, having survived an attempt by my youngest sister to chew most of my Magyar Posta treasures, perhaps because they portrayed soft fruits of the region.

Since then, although I have gathered a lot of stuff around me, it's been more a case of "oh there's one of those things I've already got two of, perhaps I'd better get it to go with the others".  

Many many moons ago, I developed a keen nose for identifying places that Victorians dumped their household waste.   Not necessarily the most useful faculty, I grant you, but digging up an old rubbish-dump did provide an occasional diversion when the weekend had little else to offer.    As a result, I became the proud owner of a large collection of Bovril jars.   They were thankfully disposed of long ago, but I did keep a handful of little bottles just for sentimental reasons.

ribbed bottles, denoting that the contents could be poisonous if taken in quantity

oh, I seem to have kept one teenytiny Bovril jar after all....

hardly big enough to contain a tablespoonful

 Eiffel Tower fruit juice bottle

The Foster Clark company was founded by George (who was for a while Mayor of Maidstone in Kent) in 1890 and these pale green glass bottles contained concentrated lemon juice, probably used more for culinary purposes than for drinking.

These stoneware ink bottles were picked up in a ploughed field (near Ayot St. Lawrence, the home of George Bernard Shaw - do you think he dipped his knib in them?) and I am truly besotted  with them.   I love the colour, the weight, the warmth, shape and size of them and admire the way they withstood many years' daily use and survived being buried for years before I came across them.  They are always out on display somewhere, so that I can see them all the time.

These old broken clay pipes are special, too.  I love the decorative detail they have been given, despite the fact that they were workaday objects destined to have a very short life.     My vegetable garden is always turning up pipe-stems, broken by their owner probably 100 years ago or more.

I invariably rescue any bits of broken china I find in the garden or when walking alongside a ploughed field.   Lots of it is blue-and-white, maybe a cup handle or the rim of a marmalade jar.  

this one is a strange one, with a little hatchling making its way into the world

Bits of broken china were an important part of my mum's play in the late 1920's.   In the back yard of her Glasgow home, mud pies were made and sold, the local currency being small shards of broken plate found in the household tip.   Anything with a gold rim was treasure indeed.   It must be in my genes!

What do you collect?

             Chrissie

Paint the Town with Joy, (and other happinesses)

Making some little owls for a woodland-themed craft demo on Monday

 

A wonderful addition to my New York New York! postcard swap collection, beautifully made by Sue.

Click on the this Postman's Knock link to see the latest batch, including the Yee-Ha! Ride 'em Cowboy one that I made for Jo.   Can't seem to access the photo to post on here for you .....

We've all had a lot of problems with loading, logging in, commenting etc. on Blogger at the moment, so please excuse me if it seems I haven't visited you lately.   Not for want of trying on my part!

And a few random Spanish holiday snaps, just to brighten a dull day.   Wind and rain and cloudy skies here at the moment, but at least not the torrential hailstorm we had the other day when I had to give shelter to passers-by who were in danger of getting concussion!

Cap Roig botanical gardens

Calella de Palafrugell

shell-seeker

Aigua Blava

footprints in the sand

souvenirs

Hope this helped to brighten the day!

Chrissie