The Day of The Hand Approaches

Well, tomorrow is the day of the hand op and I am racing around like a mad thing. Not only trying to do all the stuff that I won't be able to do left-handed (this includes the dreaded housework) but also working on the book. This is running late but looking good. Should be around in another couple of weeks.

Our lovely designer Liz, in Australia, pulled out all the stops to give us a chance of getting it done before the op. It always amazes me that I send off a file of text and Michael sends some pics and back comes a book. In digital form, but unmistakably a book. A couple of spreads are showm below. Although it's on dissolvables I have managed to get quite a bit of mixed media stuff in as well, so I think it is a good mix of stitch and painty stuff - or in this case rust.



.

.
I am hoping to have a giveaway of a special water soluble film for three-dimensional work soon, so get your name on the 'let me know' list for Dissolvable Delights at www.d4daisy.com. Winners will be drawn from this list and there is no obligation to buy.

Isn't it great that we're having such wonderful weather, well we are in the UK. All the spring flowers have gone mad in the sudden warmth. This Camellia was one of the few well established shrubs in our garden when we got here.

.

But this clematis and the Snake's Head Fritillary, below, are part of our remodelling. I love the checkered effect of the fritillary. They grew well in our old house and I'm hoping they will get established and spread here. It's so good to see everything bursting into life.
.

.

At last we managed to get to the Hockney on Sunday, in a book lull. It really is as good as people say and I'm so glad we made the effort. My head is still full of all the colour.

Hopefully I shall be able to blog lefthanded pretty soon and will be back very soon.

Giveaway Winners

I seem to have become a Monday blogger so here is this week’s edition. I am after the sympathy vote as my thumb has become very painful so I am trying not to type too much, hence this quick post. If it goes on like this I shall be so keen to get it done that I’ll be sprinting down to that operating table next week.

First, the results of the giveaway. The following two names have been added to the Facebook gang and a couple more books have been added to make five in all. Both Joke and Jean (Singer) have won books. Not sure which ones, as the great packer of books (Fiona) is in charge, but they are all good. Let me know your snail mail addy - just email maggie@workshopontheweb.com

I have too much material for my book so the following pics will make a good subject for one of the free lessons.

.

.

I’ve been having great fun with a form of water soluble flm that makes pieces really hard – great for jewellery and 3D stuff. These brooches feel like metal.


We have been getting quotes for work on our drive which is in a sad state. First thoughts were just to replace the tarmac but who knew that, as an oil based product, it would become so expensive. For five thousand pounds I expect sterling silver! I guess it will have to be gravel instead.

Remember this chap, wallpapering our bedroom?
.

He made a lovely job of it and it is nearly finished. I shall show pics in the next blog.

Girls, goddesses and a bit of embellishing

Thanks for kind comments on the singing. It was such a lovely day. I had to miss the Saturday session this week this week as I abandoned Clive and Smudge and had a sneaky girlie weekend with my friend Peggy in London. My other friend (see, I have at least two!) Sally drove me up there and we had a great time – mostly eating and talking. We all worked together twenty five years ago and have kept in touch ever since. Peggy lives near Hampstead Heath so we had great walks and enjoyed lunch at Kenwood House. Great paintings and it is free to go in.

It does you good to get away and when the sun came out today Clive and I had a bash at the garden. There was a blank spot in front of the new fence that needed a focal point so we popped to the garden centre and bough a Hebe. No, no, not the plant, but a statue of the goddess Hebe.
I read somewhere that, to make your garden look longer you have to place a small statue at the very end, so here she is.
.



She will look better when the climbing plants inhabit the arch.As the goddess of youth, I am wondering if she will start to look old while I get younger. The Dorian Grey effect. I will keep you posted.
,

the construction work around her is not quite finished but it is coming along.

I prepared a little workshop for the Beyond Stitch group last week and thought I would show you. It's based on the embellisher machine. You will need felt, webbing, transfoil, acrlic wax and some painted tissue paper. First take a piece of dark felt and iron on some fusible webbing. .


.
Then let the iron cool a bit and iron some foil on top, a la Lynda M.
.


'
Now place pieces of the tissue paper on top, turn it over and embellish from the back to drive the felt through the painted tissue..
.

.
Then work from the front to show some od the foil and knock back the lines. be careful not to destroy all the tissue. Stamping on the tissue is fun, too. Stamp before embelishing. When you have finished paint it with acrylic wax and it will not be fragile. Allow to dry.
.

,
I made some motifs to go on top by repeating the webbing and foil on felt and then cutting out shapes from a piece of embellished silks and chiffon. These were placed on top of the foil and embellished to bed them in. This is gold foil but the flash makes it look silver.
,


.
When cut again they have a border which I turned to the back and stitched.

.


.
These will be applied to the background, with other shapes.
.

.
Let me know how you find this technique.

Three go mad in Dorset

Well, we had the most fabulous day on Saturday. You will remember (because I have given you no chance to forget) that it was the day of our singing group's concert, part of a series called Chalk Legends. We started off driving to Jane Wild's house and leaving our car, then we all set off to Sturminster Newton for the usual Local Vocals workout. We haven't been singing the performance songs for very long but we gave quite a good account of ourselves and it is always good fun. Out teacher, Lesley, chooses well for us and the range runs from gospels to sea shanty with a side trip around Georgian (the country) drinking songs. Considering that this group has only been running for six months, we do pretty well. There are other LV groups and we numbered about sixty at the concert.

Then it was straight to the pub for lunch, as we three had been invited to a private view of Yvonne Morton's exhibition at Slader's Yard, West Bay (still in our lovely Dorset). My view is that when the rest of the day's grub opportunities are uncertain, a good lunch is essential.

The exhibition was lovely, with Yvonne on top form. Her inspiration was the Foundling Museum where all the 'given up' babies were renamed but their admittance was marked by the handing over of a piece of cloth so that the mother could identify the child if she was able to reclaim it. Yvonne encapsulated the feel of these ledgers of scraps by holding them in a protective layer of stitched and felted silk and flax with raffia.

.


.
It was at this point that, attempting to photograph Yvonne for Workshop on the Web, my camera gave me the dreaded messsage 'no memory card' and it was apparent that I'd forgotten it. No internal memory on that camera and no iphone camera as I thought it might be better not to take valuables to the concert. So no photos for the rest of the day. Grrrr!

However, I had some pics of the other major artist at the gallery and her is Marzia Colonna's work.
.



.
These large scale collages work perfectly and the compOnents are carefully considered and built up into a textured whole. Look at the lovely marks in this piece. I remember, when teaching City and Guilds, how folk used to pull faces when we did mark making but this shows how powerful it can be.

All in all this is a lovely venue and a well planned exhibition. West Bay is a super sea-sidey Dorset village and this gallery is great. I am told the crab sandwiches are a legend but we were still stuffed after lunch.

We had just the right amount of time to look around and then we were off again to Sturminster Newton for a pre concert practiCe. The sun came out, the Dorset countryside looked spectacular and Jane did all the driving. Bliss. We should really have been singing our Dorset song about Bob the Fiddler (written by William Barnes and all in Dorset dialect) but we were afraid we would peak too soon.

At the venue we were impressed with the fact that we had a dressing room but less impressed with the fact that we shared it with the Swing band and their instruments. It was fun though. A quick gargle of tea and we were soon having a practice with Kokuru, an offshoot of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. They could only spare us a few minutes and the tempo had changed from the soundfile they gave us so it wasn't our finest hour. There was also the small problem of having the choir on the stage and the conductor below us, which made coming in on time something of a challenge. The swing band were lovely and we did much better, but when we did our own stuff, unaccompanied, we really did well and the experience of being in the middle of a huge wall of sound was so uplifting. I have never been involved in anything like this and it was a fantastic feeling.

After the practice, it was soon time to get lined up for the real thing and Lesley lined us up in the right order. It was quite a long wait and we were supposed to be totally silent: a tall order for most of us.

Then we were on, and into the Bob song, known as Bob the Builder to most of us. Due to the tempo problem and the not seeing the conductor, we soon showed the orchestra a clean pair of heels and finished a good two lengths ahead! Luckily the guys who were recording it for the BBC asked us to do it again later and we managed a really good performance.

Our own stuff was very well received and we got a huge clap. Singing with the big band (they were great) was fun.

All too soon it was over and we were allowed to sit on the stage and watch the second half. Home very late, with all the music ringing in our ears. Wonderful day.

If you want to hear us go to the BBc's iplayer http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01cvmdw/Music_Nation_Concert_Highlights_from_Across_England/

I recommend that, after the first bit (we are on early), you move the slider to 2.50 to hear us with the big band. I wish they had included our own, unaccompanied singing, but maybe that will happen later. We have been asked to participate in more of these Chalk Legend gigs but for the big one at the Lighthouse in Poole, Clive and I are away doing a series of talks up North.

Back to the normal stitchy blogs later this week. I am doing a paper and embellishing thing tomorrow so will take photos of the technique for the blog if it all works out.

Giveaway and the Big Day

Before I launch into the latest happenings ‘chez grey’, I have to tell you that there is a book giveaway going on – we have copies of Stitch, Cloth, Shimmer and Shine, the new Sarah Lawrence book (so sad to think that it is her last), Stitch Magic from Alison Reid and Creating Felt Pictures by Andrea Hunter. If you haven't already done so on Facebook, just leave a comment to be placed into the hat.

I am working on the free classes for the Dissolvable Delights book and getting excited about solubles and rusting powder.
.


.
Combining them with metal shim and rusted toffee papers is creating some great textures. It is so useful to be able to overflow books into classes as there are always more explorations than one book can contain.
.

.

Gilby found the ‘let me know’ button for my new book before I knew there was one. Clive had just uploaded it. I think that merits an extra prize in the giveaway – let me know your snail mail.

Anyone who hasn’t already found it, go to www.d4daisy.com and we’ll tell you when it is ready. No obligation to buy. I do hope the video idea works – Michael is deep into the pics for the book so I won’t know for a few weeks, but I am hopeful.

We have a very exciting day tomorrow. First we have a rehearsal for our evening singing do – Chalk Legends at the Corn Exchange Sturminster Newton, Dorset. Since we discovered that it is being recorded by BBC3 we have all become much more focused, but it is also rather nerve wracking.

We are singing with an offshoot from the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and also doing ‘Sway’ with a swing band. It is a big choir when all the little groups merge, so hopefully the others will all be better than we are.

After the morning rehearsal, we are going to the private view of Yvonne Morton’s new exhibition at Sladers Yard, West Bay, Dorset. I am so looking forward to that. Following on from her previous themes of protection, she is now focusing on the old London Foundling’s Hospital. I can see the relationaship and I shall report back in next week’s blog. Here is a piece from her new work.
.


.
From there, having grabbed lunch, we head off for another rehearsal, with both the bands. Then comes the performance. Quite a day, eh? Jane Wild, whom we dragged along to singing, is also going to all venues so she has nobly offered to drive us ‘oldies’ about. She has offered us rugs! Jane, as I’m sure you know, is a great artist and now has proved to have a lovely voice. So much talent in one person!

Will be back when recovered. Could take a week or so.


Comments from last post

We had a dog who smiled too, Heather. Frightened the paper boy, no end.

I do look a little static in the pic, Dorothy – rather solemn, too.

Julie – good luck with the bathroom. One of the worst rooms for us as we had so many problems, mostly to do with all the fittings not fitting. I think the plumber has since retired!

Smudge has become nocturnal since he had his new door, Wabbit. He is now even more of a hard case and I can tell when he has been fighting as his ruff gets chewed, presumably by the other cat trying to bite his neck. Or perhaps it is a vampire.

Jordi – glad you enjoy Smudge – haven’t seen much dog action lately from your blog. Our son in Oz has a Portuguese Water Dog - must be related? Also enjoying your song lyric journal, especially the Cohen. Clive reckons that he is the last poet standing and has just got his new album.