Ancient Faces

Why is it saying Thursday? Today is Friday, isn't it?
Just a quick post today to keep my habit fed. Chrissythreads I love your puppy. So wish we could have a dog again but we are away too much and it might not survive puppyhood with the ferocious cat. Good luck with the degree.
Marjorie - missed your comment the other day, sorry. Yes the metal piece is a scan of a drawing based on a most wonderful book called Ancient Faces. I have used it a lot for inspiration. It has everything from mummies to shroud portraits, some of them wonderfully distressed..
I have used the book as a basis for lots of work - usually I do a pastel painting to start with. I love pastels for faces as you can smear and smudge to get the shading. Then I put it through a filter called contour lines which highlights the different tones. I print this on tissue, place that over black felt and stitch the contours. Then fill in with heavy machine embroidery. If I need fine detail I put it in at the end with a black textile marker.

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I have sold most of these pieces of work as this seems to be a popular subject. It does take a long time to work one of the heads but it is very soothing. Except for one, where I did the eyes first and the woman seemed to be staring at me malevolently all the time I was working on her. Now I do the eyes last!
Isn't it funny with blogging? I had no idea that I was going to write about the Ancient Faces series and I was wondering what to put up as a pic. This thing has a life of its own. Scary.

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We had an excellent Quiltwow meeting yesterday. Carol is proving a wonderful editor, very resourceful, and she brought with her some of the articles for the December issue. They are just fantastic. She's got some really big names lined up, too. Lots of work to do so Fiona and I will do more web work to help Clive out. I don't write code like he does, so we will let him do the final tweaking. This is why I need to finish the book next month. Nearly there now - if we don't have any more power cuts.
I am going to Steeple Langford to see Jane Lemon today. This is our final meeting before the exhibition and we are going to be checking through all the work, making sure that we have ordered enough cabinets etc to display everything. The bead Society had a lot of Val's work and they have kindly let us borrow it so I'm looking forward to seeing that.
I woke up at 5am this morning and decided to do the emails instead of creeping off to the spare room to read. This is also because there is work for the embellisher course all over the spare bed. So, an early blog but now it's six am and time to get the coffee on.