Lots of Art, Lots of Stitch, Too much Eating

Thanks for all the comments. The sketch book I was using here has pages that are about A4 (letter) size. I don’t work well with anything too small as I like to have plenty of room to be splodgy.

Penny - this fossil is pretty good but the one I used previously was bigger and better. That was the one that the grandson dropped - which is now several fossils. All those years and then….Toby!

A good trip to Art of the Stitch on Saturday. Traffic was light, parking was easy and we arrived at the gallery spot on opening time. I was impressed with the exhibition and, although I agree with Sue that it was very arty, I thought that this was arty in a good way. There weren’t too many installations of the dripping tap persuasion and there was lots of lovely stitching, especially hand stitching. I’m not going to say much more as the review will be in the free access part of Workshop on the Web in June and will have lots of photos. Here are a couple of pics to be going on with.



This is Durer Stitching - a lovely 'take' on Durer's Hand drawing by Rosie James.



And Personal Space by Scott Ellegood. Amazing hand stitching.

On the way home we did the 'National Trust for lunch', routine (this happened a lot last year) and went to Charlecote Park. Such a lovely, sunny day and we had a good walk and ate too much. Look at this fantastic rustic door.

Plus a detail.

Must tell the wwsil about this.

I can feel a bit of an interest in all things Tudor coming on. There were some great patterns in the stonework. Don't think they were very aged but they did look like true copies of some of the interior patterns.

I went to Highcliffe Castle to pick up my work from the exhibition and found that I’d sold some more pieces. My mixed media piece had gone. I had planned to use it for the book but will happily make another one in the series. So good to sell work - there is something special about other people liking it enough to part with hard earned cash. I hadn’t even taken a proper pic so it was just as well that I put one on the blog.

Today has been a very exciting day as I have been over to the wood working son-in-law for a meeting with Michael Wicks. The guys are doing a book on hand-made wood-workers planes (not the flying kind) and Michael had to take some photos in the workshop.

Michael and I are hoping to do some books with other textile artists and it is all very exciting. More news soon. He bore off a lot of work to photograph, including my sketchbook so I shall have to work on torn out pages and stick them in when it comes back. Very into sketch book stuff at the moment. I think I may have a sketch book section for each technique in the book and talk about the materials used in the making of that as well as the resulting piece. At the moment I am using Liquid Translucent Sculpey. I used it in the Image to Stitch book for image transfer and that got me interested. I think it's a good idea to include all manner of experiments in the sketch book and write up the method. So easy to forget.