18 May 2012

stamps


I've been playing around making my own stamps. The bullrush at the top and the goose were both cut on lino and the trees were cut on a soft, rubber material. I was really pleased with the goose but the shading was pure serendipity - it should have come out as a solid colour but for some reason the acrylic paint I used decided to do its own thing and make it look like a proper goose! The trees came out better than I thought they would as there was some quite fine cutting involved but the softer material was much easier to cut than the lino. I suspect it won't have such a long life as the lino though.

I'm beginning to think about trying to make a proper lino cutting on a block that I can make several prints from - say for Christmas cards. I think I need to practice for a while first on the small stuff and at the moment I have two fingers that I've cut quite deeply so I need to try to avoid that. What we suffer for our art!!

I'm getting excited about this which is a bad sign!

16 May 2012

the name escapes me!


I know what this flower is because I have lots in the garden - they seed themselves everywhere. I have these pink ones and some blue ones but I can't for the life of me remember what they're called. I'm sure it will come to me eventually so I won't agonize over it!

13 May 2012

chives


How wonderful it is to be able to go outside with my camera with no fear of it getting drenched in the rain. I wandered round the garden in the sunshine and found lots of new growth to photograph. These chives are so delicate, balancing at the top of their sinuous stems.

7 May 2012

stitching finished for first page


This is the first page with all the stitching finished. I scanned it this time rather than photographing it and the colours look much better. Can't seem to get the hang of photographing this sort of thing - the light always seems wrong and the colours don't look good. I'm not going to finish making this into the properly backed page yet because I want to do a few more before I decide on the backing colour.

2 May 2012

Stitch Sampler


This will be the first page of my stitch sampler book. It's two thirds finished and the stitches used are wave stitch, raised chain band and bullion. It will eventually be cut out around the silk rectangles and mounted on another piece of silk to form a page. When all the pages are finished I'm going to make them into a book, maybe making a cover of needle weaving on canvas, an idea I found in Jan Messent's wonderful book 'Celtic, Viking & Anglo-Saxon Embroidery'.