The House of Chaos

I am writing this blog under almost impossible circumstances as young Smudge has taken up residence. In an effort to keep him company and still get something done, I’m sitting on the sofa with my laptop. Not a good idea, as he is alternately attacking the mouse or jumping on the keyboard, chasing my moving fingers. I have just deleted a page of carriage returns. Clive once nodded off while typing a report on his laptop and when he woke up he had 64 pages of the letter S. Well, it was late evening.

If you wish to skip the cat part of the blog, textiles will resume at ***below.

In addition to the Smudge hassle I am not a well person as I have a nasty tummy bug. So this post will be written in intervals between rescuing the kitten and other necessary dashes.

We picked him up late yesterday afternoon - delayed due to one of the worst drives of my life. I was coming home from a Wessex Textiles meeting in Salisbury and went through a cloudburst. The roads turned to rivers - really scary. Took ages to get home and, boy, was I glad to get there. Picked up Clive and we collected and carried home our little treasure.

He seems to be satisfied with the equipment provided.

He has wrecked my house, terrified Stevens, chewed my Sebastian Faulkes paperback, attacked Clive’s beard, knocked over the furniture and caused chaos on an unimaginable scale - but he’s ever so cute!

The cats have sorted out their eating arrangements - he is eating Stevens’ chicken and she is eating his kitten food. They both seem happy with this.

On the plus side he has a fine eye for a photo opportunity, as you can see. He is eating well and is using the litter tray. He cried a little last night but seems fine this morning.

"If I stand on this handy embellisher machine I can eat my way through the wicker".

The biggest problem is that he keeps attacking Stevens - he puffs himself up, arches his back and runs sideways at her. He looks like a smallish dragon and I can see why she runs away. Stevens sits on the highest windowsill we have and looks at me reproachfully.

He does wear himself out quite quickly, so there is a brief respite - as you can see, below.

*** Stitchy bits

I see that lots has been written about the Urchfont open day. It really was wonderful and below are a couple of pics that you may not have seen. This you will have seen - Anna's wonderful rusty garment - find her on http://www.annanowicki.blogspot.com/

Janet Crowther and Lynn Horniblow were very brave to carry on with Val’s classes and she would, I know, be delighted with the results. I loved doing the Heirlooms C&G course as it is possible to do your own thing within the syllabus with just enough structure to make you concentrate on the research etc. I do hope this course runs on. I think this piece, below, is by Margaret Wester - apols if wrong. Don't know about the bottom one, but I loved the book.

Jane Wild has been on a painting holiday to Italy and brought some work to show us. Clive couldn’t wait to see it so he dashed off with Jane to her car to see her etchings. (Well, that's what they told me). I caught up later. Here’s a carved door interpreted in charcoal.

And then a further free exploration. Brilliant.

Jane had some of her 'Whispers' series on display at Urchfont. She is a member of Textiles 21 which meets at the college to allow members to progress their own work. I am hoping to join them - the thought of a weekend of just getting stuff done is appealing. Nothing to do with the Urchfont grub, of course!!

Thanks so much to all who responded to my last blog, asking for your views on blogging. This is to be made into a piece of work for the Cyber Fyber exhibition. Your replies made very interesting reading. Still time to leave a comment, if you haven’t yet done so. I do want this embroidery to contain a part of all of us - there is such a strong community feel to blogging.