The Most Beautiful Little Painting and WOYWW

I am thrilled to show you what is on my desk this week -

a most beautiful water colour sea urchin by the incredibly talented Sandra De, plus a card and some little stamps and sea urchin spines.

I sent her one of my Victorian cabinet card collages and she kindly sent me this - how lucky am I!  I love her work and I'm always in awe of her amazing ability to paint with such delicateness, reality and beauty.  I can't wait to get this framed and up on my wall.

The beautiful leaf card is also going to be framed and the stamps and tiny sea urchin spines are just delightful and filling me with inspiration.

A huge thank you to you Sandra.

I'm linking up with Julia over at WOYWW this week.

Bobbins and More Bobbins

 This week I have been busy successfully squishing my lace-making equipment into a space half the size it was originally in!  I also made a new bobbin roll for my bobbins as the old one was on it's last legs - I found a lovely William Morris off-cut for it in my stash so also made a little space in my fabric box -  woohoo - double space-saving success this week! 

Many years ago I used to paint bobbins and sell them - it was quite a success and I had lots of lovely ladies who collected them.  The designs had to be easy to replicate and not too detailed as I could easily be painting 50 of the same design at any one time!  During my sorting I came across my collection of Honiton bobbins that I painted for myself and thought I'd share a few of them with you - I don't make Honiton lace anymore as it's very fine and my 'old' eyes struggle with it, but I've held on to the bobbins 'just in case'!

If you wondered why these don't have beads (spangles) on the ends, Honiton bobbins don't as the lace is a lot finer than other laces so they would be too heavy and also there can be a fair amount of threading the bobbins through loops which would be much more difficult with spangles on the end.

I'm linking up with Julia over at WOYWW this week.

Never Ending Sorting and WOYWW

I decided that I needed to move my lace making equipment off the book shelf it had been sitting on for years to make way for a pile of books that are currently homeless - what should have been a simple job has taken two weeks of re-shuffling and re-organising virtually all my belongings!

I have eventually made a small gap on the book shelves and the lace stuff is being sorted to see if I can stuff it into a much smaller box that will fit on another shelf!  Why oh why did I start this!

So this week my desk, unusually for me, is an absolute mess - old bobbins that need new spangles (spangles are the beads that hang on the bottom end), a large jumble of beads and all the supplies that go with the job.

I'm linking up with Julia over at WOYWW this week.