It’s SPRING!

I might be jumping the gun a bit here but when I went for a walk with the dog earlier it felt like spring.

You know, when you can smell new growth in the air?

As if to confirm that winter is on it’s way out, the garden has recently begun sporting some spring flowers – crocuses, snowdrops, even one or two daffodils.

Out with the old and in with the new… the hellebores are starting to fade.

Palm progress

It’s coming along quite well now.  Here is my mess on the sofa! I’m  running out of bright yellow wool already!

Blogging as therapy

After yesterday’s post I gave myself a good talking to. I often find that I do that after blogging – it must be a kind of levelling therapy.

Anyway I achieved quite a lot yesterday on my tapestry and have this little segment to show you…

What you can see here is three of the palm’s “fingers” (?) – I don’t know what the proper name is but they look like giant green fingers to me.  The colours actually appear more earthy than in the photo.

I say I achieved a lot – when I finished and unfolded the rest of the canvas it looks pathetic in relation to the huge expanse of stiff canvas but there’s quite a few hours stitching in there! The main thing is that it’s progressing and I’m looking forward to it being on the wall…eventually.

Previously Benita asked to see the original photo which is below:

So the segment above relates to the second leaf from the top, on the left. It’s the three fingers furthest on the left.  

I’ve decided the best way forward is to blog little updates frequently – like this – and to try to squeeze in some work on it at the very start of the day, getting up earlier. Otherwise Dorothy is right – I will be here for years and will probably move house before I finish!

Biscuit-fuelled tapestry

I’ve been Little Miss Elusive lately on the blogging front, namely because the tapestry I last posted about has failed to get out of first gear!

Here’s a little photo of what I have so far done, which is quite pathetic!!  The area spanned equates to about 1/10th of the finished article…and that’s without any infilling!

It’s lovely to work on but I’m struggling because a) the thing is just so big it makes it awkward to work with and b) I’ve realised that I watch far less TV than I thought I did and so haven’t really spent that much time on it.

Lying in bed wide awake in the middle of the night last night, I had some flashes of inspiration and have been carrying them around in my head all day till I write them down.  I was thinking that I will return to the loom for some wallhangings that I can rattle off much quicker and quiet my mounting rage at the lack of wall adornment. It’s amazing how free your mind is if you wake in the middle of the night, I always find it great for problem solving and inspiration. Not much fun the following morning though when you feel like a zombie!

So I’m just about to scribble down my ideas on paper while having a cup of tea and some biscuits from my Valentine-inspired biscuit tin. I’m a little too obsessed with biscuits at the moment!

Lately I have been peering through windows late at night

My own windows I might add – more on that in a minute. I’ve turned my attention to wall hangings recently as I mentioned previously and, in the way that usually happens when I allow my mind to wander, I have since moved on from woven wall hangings (although they are still very much on the to-do list) to hand stitched tapestry ones.

The reason for the side step in technique is two-fold: one being that I don’t have a tapestry loom, and two that I wanted to represent a picture and for the wall hanging to have a visually recognisable subject in the way that can be created with a tapestry, but not so easy with a loom like mine.

Lately I have developed a peculiar fascination for going outside my house and looking at it after dark through the bushes in front of the windows. Yes I know this sounds really weird!!

I tend to do this if I’m taking the dog for a walk during the evening and I find it looks so appealing. We have various spiky plants outside the house such as trachycarpus fortunei and phormium which have the most amazing leaves especially when silhouetted by a light behind them. It’s something to do with the tropical shape of the leaves and the warm light coming from the windows.

So during the daytime I took a photo of this view and used Photoshop to fiddle with the image and came up with this:

The idea is to make it into a hand-stitched tapestry. I say ‘idea’ because although I’ve started it, there’s an awful lot of stitches and it’s going to be a l-o-n-g project! The eventual size is about 1 metre wide and probably 1.25m long. I’m in such a hurry to get it on the wall though. MUST STITCH FASTER!!!

And now for something completely different…

Now that the recent rush of “gift-weaving” has petered out for now, I am turning my attention on my next project. And I’m thinking of a wall hanging, or several. Ivan and I have been doing up our house for ages now (since we bought it nearly 3 years ago) and we moved in in April 09. Things are by no means finished but they’re well on their way and I need to turn my attention to the fun bit – decorating it.

Here’s how it used to look 3 years ago.It looks a lot happier than that now but I don’t really have any recent photos to share. The house was built in 1963 and is of a Modernist design – we love it, it’s so unusual for Sussex and we love the space and light. Our last house was a terraced Edwardian town house which was equally as beautiful structurally but completely different! I must say I found our last house very easy to decorate – you could basically do whatever you wanted with it. Want to see some pics?

 

(I've become very enthusiastic with my new blog editing client as you can see from the fancy photo effects!)

Anyway, our new house is much more of a challenge to decorate. I’m not sure why exactly because I understand the style but maybe there are so many choices and approaches that it makes it really hard to decide what to do. The last thing I want to do is fall short of the house’s innate style and create a bland interior. It just wouldn’t do it justice, but I do find (she whispers) modern architecture sometimes hard to live with 365 days a year.

I need to soften it, make it unique and personalise it. And what better way to do that than with some wall hangings from my trusty loom!

So I’ve been researching Modernist patterns, prints, colours and shapes. I’ve realised that Amish quilts are very inspiring – just typing ‘Amish quilts’ into Google images brings out masses of  fantastic colours and designs like this one from this web page.

I’ve got lots more reference pics stored away but as I haven’t saved the sources with them I might get into trouble if I show them here.

How all of this is going to manifest itself in a woven wall hanging I don’t yet know but what I do know is that this is probably the biggest weaving challenge I’ve so far assigned myself.

Bookmarks at last

I finally got round to snapping the bookmarks I gave as gifts at Christmas, here’s a selection.

These two are my favourites – particularly the one with the long fringes. The warp was a brown cotton and the weft is cotton of the same type but a variety of colours. You may remember that the pattern I intended to use turned out to be something quite different, more akin with rug weaving. So I kept the same tie-up but started randomly making patterns. Mostly of a basket-weave nature or twill.

The one at the end with all the coloured bands is a bit lop-sided but I quite like it, it’s shorter than the rest but feels thick and bright.

After the initial panic of not understanding the pattern, it turned into a rather fun project. Definitely a quick fix project!