C&G - the next step

These are the beads I have made for my metre piece - they are about 1.5 cm long or less. Most of them are made of Tyvek - painted gold, machine embroidered, rolled and zapped with a heat gun.

The whitish ones are Kunin felt, embroidered and zapped. Unfortunately they haven't come out as well as the samples I did - they just went hard rather than hole-y - so I may try the soldering iron on them instead.

There are a few made from dampened rolled Sinamay, but I think they are not tough enough for what I want, so I will probably use the Tyvek ones. I usually like to have at least 3 different variations of things, but in this case I will probably end up with no more than two as I can't think of another variation. In any case I am getting rather bored with roiling tiny bits of textile round a kebab stick ...

Quality Control

My quality control inspector, Custard. has aroused some interest so here is another picture of her hard at work testing the sofa for comfort. She isn't just rolling over - this is her favourite sleeping position. I read somewhere that cats only sleep on their backs if they feel safe. If that is so she feels very safe in our house!

She does get a bit rattled when the grandbaby comes to visit with her dog - although Custard much prefers his Chappie to cat food.

What I saw out of the window this morning

I do not like winter - even here in the south where we rarely have any snow. I hate the long dark nights, even though, now I am retired, I don't have to go to work and come back from work in the dark.

Any sign of Spring, like these snowdrops, is welcomed with joy - even if they were blowing in the wind and sprinkled with raindrops.

I believe Spring is really on its way when our flowering cherry blooms. It is one of the biggest and earliest in the area, and it really cheers me up. I will try to remember to post a picture when it flowers.

i used to wonder why so many textile blogs were filled with pictures of flowers - but I think we are sharing the things that inspire us. With me, however, it is more likely to be pictures of trees ...

Silly stuff

This week's task in my City and Guilds class was to make 'danglies' - trimmings to add to a larger piece of embroidery. Although I didn't feel very motivated in class, since then I have made quite a few. This is partly because they are the sort of thing you can make when you don't feel too brilliant - they are small and quick and if they don't work you can bin them without feeling you have wasted lots of time.

That is just a rationalisation. The real reason is that I love making silly little things like this. When we did tassels in Part 1 of C&G I made -er - well, I just counted them, and there are getting on for 50. The little ones on the twigs in a vase and the 29 in my portfolio. Makes the 19 danglies I've made [so far] look a bit thin...

I'm sorry the picture is a bit blurry - being 3D. they don't scan very well. I've made a few more since then...

Tomorrow I will have to buckle down and get on with my metre long piece - the one I was sewing leaves into plastic pockets for. I need to make 50 or so 'beads' from embroidered Kunin felt, rolled and zapped with a heat gun. The prospect is rather boring which is why I would rather make danglies.

Then I will put the leaves and the beads on pieces of raffia hung from a piece of driftwood. Then I need to work out how to hang up the driftwood ...

It's been a while ...

but nothing much has been happening that was worth posting about!

Things got a little more exciting when we went on a C&G college trip to the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford yesterday. I have never been before [although I have seen it on 'Morse'].

It is an amazing place - a warren of narrow passages between glass cases stuffed with ethnographic artifacts, many labelled in neat handwriting - how museums used to be. I think every colonial administrator with a connection to Oxford had left all the stuff s/he had collected to the place. There was really too much to take in, especially as I was coming down with a cold.

We went because this year our course work includes a study of the embroidery of three foreign countries. Unfortunately the countries I have chosen - China, Palestine and Ukraine - were underrepresented. I did find some beautiful Chinese embroidery and a small piece from Ukraine but nothing from Palestine [could have been there, I just didn't find it!]

Lots of inspiration for embroiderers, however, in the textiles and in other things, e.g. a collection of amulets against the evil eye. I think we will probably go again when I feel more with-it.

Slot books

There has been a discussion of slot books on the book-art Yahoo group since Carol of http://barnaclegoosepaperworks.blogspot.com/ posted a picture on her blog of a beautiful one she had made.

I am not a book making expert but I had been shown how to do this in the past and I have had another go at making one.

I used A4 copier paper, folded in half, but I think something stiffer or smaller might have been more successful.

There are two types of pages in the book which I have called ‘slit’ pages and ‘slot’ pages.

‘Slot’ pages have a slot cut along the fold, leaving 4 cm uncut at either end.






‘Slit’ pages have 4 cm slits cut at each end of the fold.






Now for the tricky bit. I folded the slit page, long side to long side, without creasing it, and slid it through the slot. I lined up the slits and the slot and gently opened out the slit paper.





I ended up with one piece of paper threaded through the other.













You build up the book by alternating the two types of page. Each slit page goes through two slot pages. I found this was easiest to do by threading the slit page through two slots at once.

In this picture you can see the second slot page [turquoise] behind the green one.



This may be clearer. The slot pages are the turquoise and green ones. The pink page has already been threaded through and straightened out. I am threading the grey page through slots in the turquoise and the green pages. To add another slit page I would thread it thought the green slot page and another slot page – and so on ad infinitum.

I think with enough pages and a bit of care you could thread the final slit page through the last and first slot pages and end up with a book with no front or back.


Here is quality control inspecting the finished product.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be

We spent yesterday afternoon with the other new grandparents, R & S, at King Alfred's Buses Running Day. Despite having lived in the area for nearly 20 years we had never been before, and we really enjoyed ourselves. There were dozens of buses offering free rides all round the city and the district, and hundreds of people, many [mostly men] with really serious looking cameras.

I took this with my little, unserious Canon: it is the bus which took us to Stockbridge and back.

This is what the bus was. It was rather an odd experience to travel on a 1965 Ipswich bus because in 1965 I was at school in Ipswich and may even have seen DPV 65D when she was in her prime.

Did it make me feel nostalgic? No. 'Nostalgia' implies a longing for what has gone and I have no wish to go back to my teens. To quote Maurice Chevalier, 'I'm glad I'm not young any more'. But it was an enjoyable reminder of another time, another place.