More Winter Embroideries!

 I've been finishing off the last of my unfinished work from last winter - these two only needed beads adding and some hand embroidery.
I do love working on that soft, fluffy background - it's actually off cuts of thermal curtain lining that a friend donated to me - very appropriate for winter!

 

I'm linking up with Julia over at What's On Your Workdesk Wednesday.

Winter Embroideries

Goodness, it hardly seems possible a whole year has passed by and I am now back to working on my winter garden embroideries!  
 These two have finally been finished off after being rudely interrupted by the arrival of Spring last year!

  

I am linking up with Julia over at WOYWW this week.

Cyanotype printing

I've been busy this week printing cyanotype prints in the garden.

Not much sunshine around so making the best of it when I can!

Garden foliage and lace held down with sheets of glass.

Some of the prints being washed off in the kitchen sink - the stripes across the photo are the reflection of my kitchen blinds in the water - however I tried they just kept wanting to be in the picture!

I am linking up with Julia over at WOYWW this week.

Seed Head Embroidery and WOYWW #307

There is not much happening on my desk this week I'm afraid.

Some post-op complications mean I'm waiting for more surgery and I'm finding it a bit of a struggle to keep my enthusiasm going!

 However, I've been doing a little embroidery - it's very relaxing, and it's quite different for me to be working without a plan in mind - I'm just seeing where it takes me!  

  

I'm linking up with What's On Your Workdesk Wednesday.

NIGHT MOTHS AND EMBROIDERY

For WOYWW my desk has been busy this week! I have been having great fun trying out a new technique I learnt about from the incredibly talented Morag over at Paper Rainbow.  It involves Citra Solv cleaner and National Geographic magazines, and the process dissolves the ink leaving beautiful background papers.  For anyone interested I found this tutorial here particularly helpful.   The backgrounds on this weeks index cards for ICAD are all from my first attempt at this technique and they led me to work with darker colours and a night time feel - I ended up with a wonderful mix of highly patterned papers and more subtle ones like these - you never know what you are going to get!  I introduced blue as I adore this peacock shade but very rarely use it - I thought the black really enhanced the vividness of it.  I used some pieces of real wings from my old antique collection and I matched them with some brilliant blue embroidery thread  and black lace.

Some close-up details

I love the darkness of this one with the delicate blue spots - so perfect for my theme! 

I used some of the Victorian butterfly wing jewelry I've collected over the years to photograph with the index cards, including a brooch that fell apart when I picked it up - strangely I was thrilled, as I would never have pulled apart a perfectly good piece of jewelry but I love the old, broken look of it and I know I'll put it to good use in the future!

Focus On Life Week 27

For the Focus On Life challenge over at the Studio Sublime the prompt for this week was 'texture'.  Ooh, so much to choose from, but finally I focused on a large lump of coral that has been out on my desk while I've recently been doing some coral design artwork.  I decided to photograph it against some old antique lace as it has a similar delicate, lacy look but is so completely opposite in texture.  It's surprisingly rough to the touch for something that looks so 'spongey', and it's actually disappointingly unpleasant to hold considering it's so beautiful!   

WOYWW #211 and ICAD

  I would like to say a big thank you to Tamara at To Bee Studio who was so kind and complimentary when mentioning me on her blog last week.   Tamara's work is beautifully delicate and has a wonderful vintage feel to it - I would definitely recommend a visit to her blog!

On my desk at the moment are this weeks index cards for ICAD over at Daisy Yellow.  The challenge is to decorate an index card every day for the 6 weeks of the challenge - or in my case 'nearly' every day, as I only managed 6 and not 7 this week! 

I used left over scraps of gelli prints for the backgrounds and added machine stitching, vintage lace, glass beads and scraps.  I thought the flower head (bottom left) looked rather like a pin cushion so I added some tiny little brass pins that I found in my lace-making equipment.   I must also point out that the lace butterfly cut out of a strip of lace was an idea I took directly from the wonderfully talented Terri at art-life-rust, as last week she cut a butterfly out of her strip of lace!  Hope you don't mind Terri - yours was so much bigger and better!

Why not hop over to WOYWW and have a snoop at other people's work desks - it's great fun! 

Embroidering like Crazy!

I have been so enjoying the two week course I joined, run by Karen Ruane.  I have always enjoyed free machine embroidery but have not done much hand embroidery, so I felt this course might offer some new ideas and inspiration - and I wasn't wrong!

This is my first piece of work - I have been totally immersed in it to the detriment of the laundry, house-work and all those other mundane jobs!  I even sat through my book club having unsociable thoughts that the evening might be better spent embroidering!

  I tend to usually work with slightly thicker silks and cottons, so using delicate antique laces and very fine silks has been a learning curve!

The finished sample and close-up detail

Playing About with Bits and Bobs!

In an effort to get myself somewhat inspired and 'arty' I decided to collect some bits and bobs together over the weekend and have a 'photo shoot'!

Out of the many, many photos I took I was really only happy with a very few - my success rate is about 1%!

Anyway here's a few of them and I am linking this post with Mosaic Monday over at Little Red House.

I used Kim Klassen's texture 'Nested' on this photo

TAG TUESDAY - LACE THEME

 This weeks Tag Tuesday theme is Lace.

I ended up making two because I wasn't too happy with the first one.  As a lace-maker myself I know the effort and time it takes to make one small piece of lace so I find it quite hard to cut it up!

I tried to create these tags using textures to represent lace, such as the skeleton leaf and the dragonfly wings on the stamp.

For this tag I stamped a lace pattern on the basic tag, and added a skeleton leaf, some antique paper punched with holes to give a lacy look and a small piece of hand made lace with a butterfly motif.  The small moth and label were cut from an old print.

For this tag I used a glassine envelope that I had pierced to create a holey/lacy effect, a beautiful British stamp with a dragonfly on it and some small scraps of hand made lace that were already cut up.  I used Sticky Fixers to create depth to the envelope and placed them under the glassine envelope to lift it from the tag slightly, and behind the stamp to give it depth.

I'm now busy working on next weeks tag and can't wait to see what everyone else is posting on the Tag Tuesday Blog (there's a link to it on the right).