'If you make happiness your goal, then you're not going to get to it… The goal should be an interesting life."

Dorothy Rowe

Tuesday 13 May 2008

Does silence indicate procrastination?

Well – in this case – yes. I confess, I have been stalling on getting on with the beech/birch wood. I could rationalise it by saying that I was waiting for this lot to dry. I also put some dimensional paint on the tree trunks [and then rather wished I hadn’t] – so I had to wait for that to dry too.

So what do I do when I am procrastinating? I make books. I think I have mentioned Esther K Smith’s ‘How to Make Books’ before. In it she shows how to make a book out of a cake mix box. Seriously. [I have also seen books in blogs made from Ritz cracker boxes.]

Biscuits and cakes rarely enter the doors of Cheese Acres – but when I was going through my stash of paper I found two other possible covers.

The red one came home with Cheese Major from one of his trips to China – it is, I think, the wrapper of a cigarette packet. The brown one was a present from Mr and Mrs Cheese Minor when they returned from living in Singapore. It contained ‘Pocky’ - lovely [Japanese?] chocolaty things for dunking in your coffee.

The boxes are not very strong so I lined them with fabric [the Chinese one] and hand made paper [the Singaporean/Japanese one]. The latter has a straightforward straight stitch binding but the red one is a bit more elaborate.

But - when I got up this morning I was motivated to get started on the 3D piece – hurrah! Not that i seem to have got very far ...

First I found my Angelina and made a few patches see if I liked the effect. Unfortunately none of the colours I have were really right so I will have to see if I can find something more suitable - perhps a trip to the craft shop is necessary?




Next I auditioned all the threads I had that might do – these are the candidates:

and this is the long list – sampling will decide on the final choices.




Then I collected all the stuff I needed to start to turn the pile of fabrics into leaves and leaf litter. Having ‘reorganised’ my workroom recently I couldn’t remember where half of it was …

Here it is all collected together.

The synthetic fabrics were heatgunned / cut up with my soldering iron. The silk was cut up and candled to seal the edges.



I tried what I’d done on the background. This is why I wanted to hang on to A’s frame. The green is OK but that orange is far too bright!











Tomorrow - some embroidery?

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