Spring

Well, it's officially Spring and for once we are getting some lovely sunny weather and today a very warm day. We had our first taste of Spring a couple of weeks ago when Easton Walled Gardens near to us opened up for snowdrop week.   We hadn't visited for a while and there have been some exciting changes to the gardens.

You might be able to tell that it was very windy when we visited. The snowdrops were being blown sideways!

 

We've joined as friends of the gardens so I hope that we will visit often this year.  My stitchy friends and I are planning to use Easton Walled Gardens as the basis for some work later in the year and I'm thinking it would be nice to visit each month and chart the changes through the seasons.

I've almost finished the bag I started in Wendy's workshop, I just need to make some button holes and add the buttons.

I won the jelly roll in a raffle on Stitchcraft's birthday last year and it's made a very pretty bag.

I've been enjoying myself making a small gift for a friend of mine and indulged myself making a rockpool that I thought she would like too.

It's about 5" x 7" and the base is hessian with a felt backing.

While on the subject of the sea, I belong to a Yahoo group that has lots of fun chatting but also responds, or not, to a monthly prompt.  The prompt for January was 'New' and the prompt for February was 'fictitious'.   I didn't manage to complete anything for January as I had planned to use my dremel drill to work with seashore finds, a new technique to me, but couldn't find my Dremel (sigh).  So, for February I explored a new way of working making a fabric collage of a fictitious (well, almost) place.  I was inspired by a coupleof ladies that I follow on Facebook, Louise O'Hara of Drawn to Stitch and Lynne White.  

This is as far as I've got and I still have to add some boats but I've enjoyed what I've done so far.  It's probably no coincidence that my fictitious town looks very like my spiritual home, St Ives.

I spend so much time on facebook that I have been trying to get off and do something more interesting and rushed off a couple of collages in the spirit of a 15 minute workout.

I thought less was more with the one above and thought it had an ethereal quality which I quite like (it looks harsher in the photo).

I didn't allow myself any thinking time with the collage above and pretty much grabbed papers from my box and glued them down.  The little piece of hessian was clamouring to be included. 

Finally (are you worn out yet?), I came across a fascinating artist on Facebook today.  Her name is Amanda Richardson and she lives in Cornwall.  How could I not have come across her work before?  If you follow the link and also find her on Facebook you will see that she is very generous and shares short videos of her technique as well as answering questions about her methods.  She uses transfer dyed satins and velvets and dyed raw silk to achieve beautiful marks on fabric which she then fuses to make beautiful textile paintings.  Do go and have a look.  

Have a lovely weekend and I'll be back soon-ish!