Deep and crisp and even...

 An astonishing amount of snow has fallen here in the last 24 hours. It started yesterday morning at about 9am and stopped at 7ish yesterday evening. I have never seen so much snow in my whole life. Not even as a child when I  used to go sledging down the hill behind my house. I have been up there this morning to see the children enjoying themselves but they are only sledging down the south bank and have left the steeper, north side untouched. Wimps.
Yesterday, everything was quiet and everybody stayed tucked up in their homes, today the whole street is alive with the sound of shovels scraping the pavement and excited chatter.
I plan to spend this afternoon finishing another Christmas present, the embroidered fabric below is going to be another wintery cushion cover. The last one turned out quite well and now I have the stitching bug. It's funny how I always prefer to stitch in winter and paint in summer. I think it's because I find stitching a quiet, repetitive process whereas painting requires (I think) a bit more active participation which I don't seem to have so much energy for in the fallow months.

This will probably be my last post until after Christmas so I wish you all a merry and restful Yuletide and I'll be back soon with my resolutions and new year crafty plans.

A wintery weekend

It has been truly bitter here for the last couple of days. Last night and this morning saw the sharpest frost I have possibly ever seen. It was thick like snow. The air was filled with tiny ice crystals that looked like glitter floating. It was really quite magical.

I have been busy trying to make at least some handmade Christmas presents, I try to do this every year and usually end up frustrated, in a temper and out of time, but this year I vow to make at least three. I will post some pictures tomorrow of a little hand stitching project I have underway.

In other news I have been trying to make the flat look a bit more seasonal, I am aiming to have my own handmade twiggy tree rather than a bought one but it's really been a bit too cold to go out collecting twigs. In the mean time I have settled for some ivy on the mantle piece. It all looked lovely until I accidentally set fire to it with one of my lit candles.

Mushrooms, more mushrooms and ghostly children

So, can you guess what we were doing in class last week? That's right. Mushrooms. I'm having so much fun with the watercolour students right now, just painting things you find in the fridge. For the next session I have asked them all to bring along two objects from home to paint. The only stipulation is that it needs to be non perishable as we will be painting these objects over two weeks. I wonder what they will bring...

Below is what I have been making with the ton of mushrooms I had left after the class: mushrooms stuffed with Danish blue and goats cheese, toasted walnuts and thyme served with rocket salad and toasted date and walnut bread finished with a drizzle of garlic oil. I've had this three times since Wednesday and I'm not even beginning to get tired of it.

In other news I'm still reading Wolf Hall (loving it) but did take a brief break to read The Small Hand, Susan Hill's new ghost story, mainly because the library had a queue forming of people waiting to read it after me. The Woman in Black remains one of my all time favourite winter reads and I hear Hammer Studios are filming it with Daniel Radcliffe in the lead role. The Small Hand is only a little book but thoroughly creepy and great for a rainy afternoon, under the duvet, with chocolate.

I also have a lot of new ideas for art projects, like making some mini stitched concertina sketchbooks using up all of the layered, painted wallpapers I made as class samples last term. I also want to try a Citrasolve image transfer- I read about this recently (I'm afraid I can't remember whose blog it was) and it seems to be quite a good technique for transferring images to fabric without the mess of using a gel medium. They seem to look quite distressed and vintage too, I will post the results when I've tried it which will be after I've figured out how to get Citrasolve in England as it's an American cleaning product.

Snow fatigue

I know it was only a week ago but the snow feels like it's been here forever. I am an unfortunate individual who lives within walking distance of her place of employment, hence no snow days, not one. I have trudged in and schlepped home and spent 30 minutes everyday trying to get my wellies off. It's just so draining. There's a smidgen of the January blues in there somewhere but, today, I feel them lifting.

I have been having the most fabulous time making class samples on how to build up texture and use different materials for collage, not with the purpose of painting some image on top, but just to play, for itself. I found myself, at 11pm last night, elbow deep in mod roc, plaster, acrylic paint, PVA and bits of lace. It was great. I think (tentatively) that they may become pieces of "proper" work as class samples often do.

I have also started thinking about what this year will bring, particularly in terms of where I will be living in a few months. I have started checking the paper for that roomy period apartment that just happens to be in my price range. It might sound silly, but I am so excited at the prospect of buying my own sofa.

I hope you all had a fabulous Christmas and New Year. Hopefully I'll post regularly now, and not just about food, but, y'know, actual art n stuff.

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.