New Cards.

 Having been a member of the Firestation Print Studio for a few years now, I thought that it was time that I joined in with the fund raising for the organisation by submitting a few of my designs for their annual card printing effort. The card above was called Japanese Dreams by a friend, as she thought that my hand carved flower stamp looked like a chrysanthemum.

I called this one 'Butterfly Blues' for obvious reasons. I used geranium leaf prints in each card and the butterfly is also a hand carved stamp. These cards and many others are beautifully printed and are for sale at the Firestation Print Studio for a very reasonable price, much cheaper than the commercially available mass produced cards.

First Wildflowers of the Season.

 Usually the first wildflower to appear, the Hardenbergia is just lovely with its profusion of purple flowers. A white version is also available in the nurseries, but although pretty, it's just not the correct original wild colour.

         A little rosette of a Honeydew plant hugging the ground. No flowers just yet though.

                     The Yellow Star flower with it's plants dotted all around the open ground.

Shadow-Wings.

Now that the exhibition is up and running I can show my completed piece which I called 'Shadow-Wings'. Here you can see the shadows formed on the back of the piece behind the acetate sheet on which are mounted the textile components. Unfortunately at the exhibition it is hung in a darkish corner and there are no shadows to be seen! However, the piece did win a Highly Commended certificate in spite of the lack of shadows.

Country Letter Boxes.

 Sixteen years ago when I first started driving past these letterboxes, there were only 3 of them, including the Singer treadle machine base one. Now there are 8, and the old Singer base is still there.

    I think that the box on top of the old wrought iron base is an old munitions box perhaps.

                         The whole contraption is slowly sinking into the leaf litter and soil.

I wonder what Mr. Singer would have thought of using one of his wonderful old treadle  machine bases for this purpose.

A Chilly Morning.

                  After a very cold night the fog hung about for quite a while in this area.

I'm so glad that the powers that be haven't put in concrete footpaths on both sides of the road, it gives a lovely rural feeling to walk on the grass under the trees.

Final Book Post!

 This is an old bit of applique and embroidery that has been sitting around for ages. It's a little bit of machine embroidery for the sunflowers and the leaves and a little bit of iron-on silk stencil for the butterflies. It will make a good end 'paper' for the book cover and use up another left-over.

 The cover is finished! Here the back flap is folded over to show the outside and the inside front cover. If you look closely you can see that the butterflies now have bodies and antennae.

                                              The front cover all top stitched and finished.

Book Cover Continues.

 The cover for the handmade book is in a wrap around style, hence the long narrow format. The cover is lined and for that I have chosen a piece of hand dyed fabric in blues and purples.

This section will be the inside of the front cover, so I rummaged around and found 3 silk butterflies that I made many years ago. They don't actually have bodies as yet, so now that they have been bonded to the dyed cotton I can machine embroider their bodies and antennae.

More Colour Mysteries.

 The photo above was taken on a wooden table top and the colours are really blue, whereas the one below, taken on a black cloth is a lot closer to the mauve/purple of the real piece ...most interesting.

 I have joined the strips of flower stamp squares with a sashing of my hand dyed fabric in a purple colour. I did measure everything, but even so it's a surprise that the whole thing is exactly the size that I wanted it to be!