Well Nancy is packed, plenty of beer and burgers so not long now and we'll be on the road. If anything exciting happens I'll blog some photos. We're only away for one night so will be back soon.
Sadly we've had to leave our little westie with a friend who's going to take her on holiday to the Isle of Mull with him and his curly wurly westie Molly. This is Jem In Perrenporth in July, she hates the water so this is as close to surfing as she's going to get.
Well I finally did it! I've sewn through my finger with the sewing machine. Ouch. Luckily it only stabbed the nail, it's quite sore but doesn't look too bad. Serves me right for taking the foot off the machine so I could get into an awkward spot then shoving my finger in there to hold down the fabric. I'm trying to make some extremely padded quilting by sewing little pads and tubes of muslin stuffed with wool fibre onto pelmet vilene. It looks like a medical experiment at the moment!
This is Tori patiently cutting out letters from freezer paper to use as stencils for the sign going up in the window of Zigzags to advertise their birthday on 27 August from 10 till 5. We're working on some imaginative ways to make the day super special.
I've nearly finished the quilting samples and can finally look at the chenille sample without getting an overwhelming urge to just bin the blasted thing. It's just so flat, so flat and so dull. So I added a few lines of stitch to hold down the layers and then took a fork to it and ruffled the life out of it, good stress relief!!! Still not really happy but I need to leave it for a while so I don't over stitch it.
I have a big thank you to send to Tori who spotted these suitcases outside the excellent charity shop next door. Cost me £8 in total, a total bargain. They will probably feature in my presentation before becoming part of Mani the Campervans restoration.
Another day at the wonderful place called Zigzags. My perfect local fabric and textile art shop, this is were I am studying a City and Guilds certificate in Creative Techniques. I'm at that stage now where all the plates are spinning, I can see the end date but all of my stuff is in a state of half (if I'm lucky) completion.
We are doing the 2 mandatory Design modules: Research for Design (7113 - 001) and Sampling (7113 - 002) and 2 selected modules on embroidery: Collection of Hand Embroidered Textiles (7113 - 200) and Collection of Machine Embroidered Textiles (7113 - 208).
The early days were very painful, learning to play again. Getting messy and making slightly shy pictures made with ripped masking tape and charcoal, then oh my god we were told to make a drawing of some flowers! Panic all round but now it's starting to feel more comfortable. I have my design work in some sort of presentable order and the machine embroidery is ticking along nicely. By the time we started the machine work I'd got an idea of how the syllabus worked and was able to 'build' a sketchbook with labels to organise and monitor my progress.
I've since gone back to my unfinished hand embroidery work and replicated the sketchbook idea for this module too.
Back to today. Its been niggling me that I have started lots of hand embroidery samples but none of them are really completed or in anyway ready to present, so today I've been edging my quilting samples. I have a number of samples that have machine stitching on and will need some hand stitches so they can be included.
I have completed 10 quilting samples from designs I developed based on the floor plans of
the Rolex Learning Centre in Lausanne in Switzerland. I bought an Architectural Review magazine and it included an article about this remarkable structure with huge circular segments that are connected by sweeping walkways and tunnels. These walkways literally 'sweep' up and down, in some places at a 30 degree angle!
In one piece I used photographs of the centre and layered them between Japanese paper and straight stitched some shapes lifted from the floor plans.
Whilst I was edging the pieces which I am going to work into 1 or 2 wallhangings that can be folded into a 'pack' in a concertina way, I was soaking a base I have made using dissolvable fabric. We have to complete a sample on canvas and after getting inspired at a Jan Beany workshop I decided to make my own canvas with wool. I used some hand dyed Rachel Middleton wool which I laid down in a grid shape. Using YLI thread I sewed a cross stitch on each place where the wool crossed and then added some machine zigzag stitch on every third row to hopefully keep the fabric together! The plan is to add as many different kinds of square canvas stitches in a nice light wool.
The sticky stabiliser is almost gone and a couple of good swills tomorrow should have it clear. I probably should have put the canvas stitches on when it was still wrapped in the dissolvable fabric but I so wanted to see the fabric as a canvas.
Just to top off the day I've had my nails done in preparation for my trip to Budapest, not sure what my lovely and long suffering hubby will make of them!,,
I hope this leads to more interesting blogs in the future......and someone might even get to read it if I'm brave enough to advertise it!!!!
Look! Look! I got a photo on too!
