Twenty five years ago today...

we were awoken in the morning by Cheese Minor, standing at our bedroom window, and telling us that there was a tree in the drive.

'Don't be silly', I said.

He e-mailed me this morning to remind me. I told him always to believe his children.

For those who don't know what I'm on about, it was the morning after 'The Great Storm', a.k.a. 'The Hurricane of 1987'  and there was, indeed, a tree in the drive. When we went to bed It had been in the garden of the house opposite, the owner of which subsequently complained because we still had power, and she didn't. I pointed out that it was her tree which had brought down her power line - and her drive was unblocked.

Wensleydale subsequently cut up the tree, and struggled into work - where there was no power and therefore no students (Health and Safety). He's like that.

I took the boys to school on foot (I'm like that), and discovered that the school had no power either, so I had to bring them home. I'm surprised Cheese Minor didn't remind me about that as well, but perhaps they've forgiven me at last.

Speaking of education, we enjoyed our drawing for beginners class at Walford Mill. Some bits were familiar to me, but it was all new to Wensleydale, and the teacher, Yvonne Lee, was very good at explaining the purpose of what we were doing.  Inspired by what we'd done, I had another go at some drawing I'd done for the Karen Ruane class, and improved it a bit. No pictures of that yet, but I do have some of the previous exercise, based on transfers.

The results of some of my design explorations, all starting from the transfers you can see at the bottom. Before they were ripped up, glued down and stitched into.

The two page spread - the blue flowers on the left hand page are embroidered using one of the transfers before I ripped it up.

I love the interactive nature of what we are encouraged to produce, very inspiring. I can feel a hand made book coming on when if I get some time.

When Wensleydale saw some of these he looked at them for a long time in silence, then said 'It's not like your usual work. It's pretty'. I'm still trying to work out whether to be pleased or annoyed...

However, I know what he means, but although I might never follow up any of this design work directly, the techniques are great and I will definitely use them again, perhaps with some of the stuff from the Contemporary Textile Workshop last Friday.