A Love Affair with Water Soluble Paper

A major panic kicked off last night when I was offered two extra pages in the Textile Translations book. We felt that one of the pages was too crowded and it wasn't possible to see the detail clearly. As you can't just have one page there was the great decision of what to put on the other one. I don't like to have 'it'll do' pieces in a book, so I set to to make another piece and discovered that judicious use of the heat tool will dry even a thick coating of gesso - eventually! I have written in the book about using moulding from the do-it-yourself shop with water soluble paper (I can't get away from this material it gives such wonderful fine detail, I love it) so I used one of the strips from my moulding as the border for this piece. Here it is - colourful or what?.

Considering the lateness of the hour it turned out OK. Even managed to do some stitching on it.

I have had such a giggle, thinking of you all putting out your catalogues and thank you for those who took blog photos of them. It could be a wonderful hoax, I agree, Janeo (did you know there was a man with a camera behind you)?

Some people were puzzled and sent emails asking for the exact sizes and number of pages, but it really doesn't matter. They are better with a bit of colour and they need some text, but the fun thing is that they will be different. We should probably have photographed them first! They will take some time to disintegrate so we will be using them later in the course.

PurpleMissis tells of rusty old cloths on the line and this reminds me of hanging out some painted mulberry bark, while staying with son and his wife in Australia. Helen asked me to bring them in as she didn't want her neighbours to think she had dirty dishcloths! Btw roadmaps sound like a good idea.

Destruction by dog could work well, ibbygee - go for it.

Welcome yarn girl. Hope we continue to inspire you.

I know what you mean by the unmentionables. The s word. We'll use gloves and a blindfold when we wash them off at the end. Photos of that, please.

Sharne - come and say Hi at Ally Pally. I'll have lots of work from the book and I'll be demo-ing. More on that next week.

Maggi - I'm not at the NEC so will be launching the book at Ally Pally.

Gill. I am going to do the Perth show next year and I think Dale will arrange a workshop while I'm there.

Now for a bit of stitch stuff. Jill Packer made a lovely chenille bag with space dyeing techniques, in the latest Quiltwow. Here it is.

She also brought two other colourways to the Festival and I took photos. Didn't have a chance to get them in Qwow so here they are.

Love the handles on these. Jill makes lovely things, as does her daughter-in-law Sam, who writes lots of the WoW product reviews. Sam's mum is stitchy, too - how lovely that the three of them have such a joint interest.

Finally, I stole this pic from Anna Nowicki's blog. http://www.annanowicki.blogspot.com/

The caption said 'Something has crashed on my computer'. Who does it remind you of? I've been laughing all day.