2 exhibitions and a Christmas card

Just to confirm I'm still in Blogland, but have been soooo...... busy for the last few weeks that I just haven't had any time to post and barely any time to read anyone else's.


The Allen Gallery, Alton, Hants


The Forestry Commission, Hants

I've been involved in staging 2 exhibitions, one with a friend and the other with my OH and another friend.



Plus my DD2 saw a couple of PC's that I'd made with some of her left over fabric from the baby slings, one of which you can see the method of contstruction for on the CG blog here, and promptly commissioned me to make her business Christmas cards for Connecta, so as you can imagine my feet haven't touched the ground.

We also had DD3 and her baby son to stay this week as she's having her bathroom and kitchen gutted at home, so I'm afriad our latest GS who is now 9 months old was rather a delightful distraction.

We're off to see DS1 and his DF this w\e so after a lovely chill out I hope to be back to normal next week :-)

Lovely day

I went on line this morning to check my emails and found one from Karen, she'd thoughtfully sent me a link to a super little freeby preview for an apllication that organises your 'to do' lists, sorry guys I think it's for Mac users only!! Thanks Karen I shall enjoy playing with this.

I then went to work for my daughter making more straps for her baby carriers and we had a great catch up chat as she's just been to Centre Parks with her children and has come home exhausted after trying all the ativities, including scuba diving!! It was so nice to enjoy each other's company and have a laugh with her and her OH, even if we were working.



When I got home the postman had been and left this wonderful post card that Carol sent me. It was a wonderful surprise RAK, thank you so much, Carol. It was one of a series that Carol made for the Calendar Girls' challenge for January. If you'd like to see the whole 13 post cards and a very impresive set just posted by Lynda then pop across to the CG blog.

To finish the day off I had a visit from my GS, Ben , who wanted to download the pics he took at the car show, Piston Heads, in Birmingham on Sunday.







Judging by the look on his face, I think he had a super boys day out with his dad, LOL.
Needless to say he took 50 shots and knew the name of every car! Funnily enough, this picture of an AC Cobra (see I was listening) was my favourite as well as his, how's that for 'Nanny synchronicity'

Module 4 and other directions

Back to normal at last after all the Christmas festivities! And what a lovely family time it was too!
Now down to the serious business of the creative direction for 2008. Well! The first thing in the 'to do' pile is the new module in my C&G embroidery Certificate curse, (whoops, a bit of a Freudian slip there!!!) course.
As this one is colour I have high hopes of it being a bit easier going than the last, texture, as colour is probably the first decision I make about a new piece and is often the first thing that sparks my imagination in whatever it is that inspires me.

The first task in this module is to begin 'building a portfolio collection of colour'. The first part of this exercise is to make a 'Colour collection of colour stories'. I hope you're following the gist so far! The idea is to work with the primary colours to start with, (i.e. red, blue, yellow) and explore with the aid of magazine cuttings/photos, fragments or squares that reveal as many of the different shades and tones of these primary colours as possible. These are then to be glued to a backing sheet/sketch book in such a way as to show the story or flow of the above.





As usual it's sometimes quite difficult to interpret what is meant by the written instructions when you're doing a distance-learning course. So as you can see I've started with red and moved on to pink. I don't know if I'm on the right lines, but I just felt it was important for me to create a colour story that would inspire me in the future, and I think these might. There wasn't much time pre Christmas to do a lot but with my new timetable in place (Tuesday and Thursdays as creative days) I hope to get on with this a bit quicker than my previous effort of 6 months per module!!

My second priority this year is to make artwork to sell at future exhibitions that our fledgling group will be hosting. We plan to have one in the spring and one in July, so far, and I’m also exhibiting with a friend as a joint exhibition in a local gallery in June, so I’ll definitely need my two dedicated days.

By way of light relief I have my monthly commitment to Calendar Girls, which I love, as it gives me that much needed contact with other like-minded people.

Finally I want to build in more time for experiments with new ‘stuff’ that at the moment I know nothing about, get to grips with my embellisher and refresh my composite work on Photoshop.

Did I mention that part of my New Year plan was to reduce my nightly hours of sleep quota to 4 per night LOL?

Have a happy and creative New Year!!

Party, party, party! hungover

Well ! yesterday was a bit of a blur and today definitely did not go to plan!!!
I started work at the canteen where my OH works at 9.0am, which is something I do on a very casual basis, just doing holiday/sick cover. But yesterday was their xmas dinner day, so I was drafted in to help the permanent staff of two get ready for 70-80 guests. The morning was fairly easy going as most of the work had been done already, but the actual serving is another matter. It's somewhat frenetic trying to serve 80 odd dinners in a space that normally serves about 30 on a good day, and we did end up with a few brussel sprouts and tin foil in very strange places!!

Once the speeches were all done it was down to the never ending round of rinsing crocks and filling the dishwasher. I think I'm getting too old for this now, it's my 4th year on the trot and by 3.30 I was even too tired to be bothered with any lunch, let alone the post dinner festivities. So it was off home for a nice cup of tea and a slice of toast, in the peace and quiet!!!
BTW, I wasn't responsible for setting the tables, spot the deliberate mistakes!!!

But that wasn't the end of the day's jollifications. I'd been invited, along with all the other members, to the Callendar Girls virtual party! and what a hoot that was! We all bought each other wonderful virtual presents, which included fantasic holidays, dates with gorgeous men and brilliant course workshops amongst other things. We had lots of lovely vitual food, music and games. It was a mad hour and a half with most of us furiously trying to keep up with the pace of the posts, but it was all great fun and we found out a bit more about each other into the bargain.



Anyway I went to bed very tired and a bit mussy from the glasses of wine consumed at the party, ( real ones this time LOL).
I was supposed to be going to the 'Golden age of Couture exhibition' at the V&A today, but woke up to a humdinger of a frost outside and as my GD couldn't go, and it was meant as a treat for her, I took pity on my OH and let him off the chore of accompanying me, and didn't go. The truth was I was feeling a bit worse for wear after yesterday's excitement, but I didn't let him know!!



By way of compensation I bought a neat little gadget called a bind-it-all. it looks as if it's going to be a great little machine for all these lovely colour studies I'm going to do for module 4 of the C&G embroidery certificate, which I have started today with the colour red, aptly for Christmas, so it wasn't a bad day after all , even though it didn't go to plan!!

Mixed bag

Not much personal creative stuff done today, bar a bit of musing over the rust project after a very helpful session with a good friend of mine yesterday, but more on that later.

I went to work with my daughter today producing the new line of winter corduroy baby carriers which are taking the web shop by strorm and giving us plenty of work to do.

I delivered my daughter's new picture that she bought from her Dad at our exhibition and she has hung in her work area to add a sense of calm on those frantic work days!!



This afternoon, Bethany, one of my granddaughters, came over to work on a very exotic outfit that she has designed to wear at the Clothes Show Live in just over a week! so no pressure, Nanny, to get it finished in time!!









She has been beavering away at FMEing lots and lots of hearts to decorate a black net tutu, I shall say no more! But will post pics when it's finished.

Having a little break to spend time with our son and his fiance, so will not be back on the blog till Monday

Bread and butter

I had a productive, if worky, sort of day today. I have started to mount a collection of very small pieces that I have been working on for a while now and decided that they might make good ‘bread and butter ‘ pieces for our exhibition.

I started these with a very dear friend who was running the odd workshop at the time. She started the day by getting us to make sheets of BG papers to a colour scheme of our choice and using all her lovely different acrylics and special effects paints.



We cut these pieces up into squares, making a 9 square layout ( the designs I have shown worked here are marked with a red star). Once we’d stuck these to black paper we then placed them in a plastic wallet and made stitch marks on the designs with a black marker pen. I’m sure many people will recognise this technique. but for me it was a revelation, as were many of the other skills my friend taught us over that period. She was one of the few people who made me feel comfortable with incorporating stitch into a design, and who made exceedingly good cakes!



The resulting small samples were done after the class and I thoroughly enjoyed doing something so small and glittery, not at all my usual thing!





I found these delightful frames in my favourite shop, Hobbycraft and will be mounting 4 more for the show, so let’s hope people like them.

Baby wearing Gran

This morning I went to work for my daughter, making straps for her baby carriers . We thought it would be fun to see how Nanny modelled one of the special silk Dupion carriers, so here we are, Sylvia and me! Proving that Gran can do baby wearing too!

I had a great morning hearing all about dolly and monkey’s extraordinary adventures from Sylvia, I think she’ll be ready to write a book about them as soon as she’s mastered using a pencil!

When I got home I had a lovely surprise in my emails to find that I had won Julie’s prize for her 100th post, I will post a picture when I receive it.

I’ve been busy all afternoon on the canvases for the ‘rust triptych’ so watch this space for the recent developments.

De-cluttering

How is it that however many times you have a clear out of the textile stuff you accumulate, there still seems to be the same amount of it in the cupboard next time you look!

I started the day yesterday with about 3 hours of much needed housework, Yuk! I know, but when you start finding dog hairs in places they shouldn’t really be, you know the time has come to give in!

The trouble was that once I started I couldn't stop, you know the feeling I'm sure. I had planned a nice afternoon on the embellisher, yes that again, more delaying tactics on the rust project. I suspect that's what started the HW blitz in the first place.

Well it wasn't all bad I cleared a huge bag of fabrics dating back to a time I'd rather not admit, and they’re ready now to pass onto my daughter, so she can guard them for the next 20 years. Anyway I did discover some little gems to use with my latest toy and I even organised my work area especially for easy access to colour coded jars of little scraps! Oh dear I think I might be hooked, thanks Helen

Work at home Gran

I had no time to post yesterday as I was busy with my home work, well that is producing the straps for my daughter Hannah's baby carriers.
She has an online baby carrier business called Connecta Baby Carrier, which she runs at the same time as looking after 6 children. This is no mean feat as she makes the carriers herself with a little help from Mum. But it does mean that we both have to burn the midnight oil occasionally when demand hits the roof!!
Still the upside of this is that I get lots of lovely offcuts, sometimes silk, which she uses for special collections and plenty of wadding, plus some money to put away for the expensive items such as my new Embellisher, and of course my beautiful Horn sewing cabinet, seen in the picture above.
One of my other daughters, Nicola, is moddeling this caarrier with Hannah's youngest daughter Sylvia.