Bread and blueberries

My Monday evening post work post is becoming quite regular. It seems to be an ideal time to upload photos of the weekend's crafty activities and mull over what the coming week will bring. Above are the results of my little natural dying experiment. I cannot tell you how chuffed I am with the results. I particularly love the piece of blueberry dyed silk in the last photo. It's come out a moody, storm grey colour. All the fabric pieces have been washed in hot water with detergent until the water ran clear so hopefully this is how they will stay, at least for a while. Time will tell how colourfast they are I suppose. I already have plans for a series of small, stitched winter landscapes. My instinct with mixed media work is to start mixing paint with fabric and paper, building up collages and imagery but I want to keep any work I do with this fabric as pure and clean as possible. I am also keen to try something where I use no machine stitching at all but stick to hand stitching.

Below is my other little weekend project which worked quite well. This is the first time I have ever made proper bread without the help of a bread maker. The recipe is one of Rachel Allen's from her Bake cookbook. It worked beautifully, the smaller rolls were delivered to my parents yesterday whilst I kept the small loaf for myself. Tonight I am making white chocolate and peanut butter blondies. Just to make writing my class plans for the week a little sweeter.

Love in the Mist

This is a work in progress, I'm using a new type of paper and, though it is lovely and allows the paint to granulate and create wonderful effects, I'm not sure it's getting on very well with the masking fluid. Every time I try and peel it off, some of the paper comes away too.


This is my painting corner. I still think I need to have a bit of a move around of furniture but last night, sat here with the candles burning, felt good. The flat has been well and truly man-proofed with flowers, fairy lights and bits of fabric draped everywhere.

Yesterday afternoon was spent at another family do, this time saying goodbye to Jenny and Ben who are off to Hong Kong to live for two years. It's going to feel very strange without them. There was too much food as per usual but where we really excelled ourselves was with the puddings; Boozy Chocolate Mousse, Chocolate Mousse Pie, Eton Mess, Carrot Cake, Apple Pie, Red Velvet Cupcakes and, best off all, cupcakes made to look like panda bears. Consequently I spent most of last night slumped on the sofa in a sugar and Prosecco induced coma. I even dozed off during Sherlock.

Routine seed heads

A little bit of a surprise this one, acrylic paint not being part of my comfort zone, but there you go. Again, this is a class sample, showing how different collage textures work. There is fabric, sheet music and parts of a Henry James novel glued down under this painting of some fennel seed heads. We're making concertina sketchbooks in my sketchbooking class, a two week project based around some frosty, wintery imagery I have collected.

I find that with the nights drawing in and the days becoming chillier that the motivation is going. It's a real efffort just to drag myself into the studio to paint. I think i've become stuck in a bit of a rut recently as well and it has lead me to muse upon the nature of routine and my contradictory reactions to it, I feel slightly fraught when things suddenly change and I feel myself adrift but no one panics more than I to find myself in the middle of the never ending drudgery of work, classes, sleep, painting.

The Mill is having a craft fair in approximately one month and there is a call for work on the private rooms of a new cancer unit at the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford, so, time to get busy. I have started a painting for the open submission but it's really not going well. I have a large sheet of Bockingford watercolour paper which is usually lovely but the paint is not behaving as I would want it to. I will post photos tomorrow of this disaster. I get quite bloody minded when things like this happen, i'm inclined just to plod on until I can make it good!

Right, I think i'm going to give myslef an hour to read a book and then i'll have another bash- see if I can't make it into a decent painting. Miss Congeniality on tv tonight. Love it.