The Bridge

I went out this morning to photograph the railway bridge just outside our house. I've walked under this bridge to walk our dogs for almost 19 years now so I know it like the back of my hand. It's a lovely piece of Victorian architecture and I'm showing it in black and white for the MonoMonday challenge on the Blip site. I wouldn't normally have it on show here as well but I want to take the opportunity while our broadband is working to warn you that our telephone line has some serious issues. You might remember that I've been offline quite a bit lately. In fact every time someone rings in it knocks off our broadband. So please don't call!

I did a lot of research and discovered that it probably is a High Resistance Connectivity problem due to a problem somewhere in our line, probably the old copper cable bit near the house but it has proved near on impossible to convince our service provider to believe I know what I'm talking about (after all, I'm only a humble and technically ignorant woman!). They send us all  kinds of new routers and filters but surprise, surprise that made no difference. Finally this morning we managed to persuade them (Utitility Warehouse) to pass it on to BT engineers, but I expect to have to go through the whole rigmarole again with them. In the end I know they will discover a fault somewhere in the line but I have the strong suspicion that it's going to take quite some time.

All this tedious information is here only to tell you that I might not be able to be here as regularly as I love to be in the coming days (weeks?!)  as writing blog posts on the iPad using Blogsy from a lay-by is not as easy as doing it sitting behind my laptop in the studio. When we have broadband at home I will continue to do what I can, however frustrating. I have discovered during all this that I'm an internet junkie and not ashamed to admit it! I love being here and interacting with you all on this blog and on Blip and I only hope that normality will be restored before too long. I was feeling quite guilty about my reliance on this modern way of communicating but took myself to task over it. Life moves on and modern life is becoming almost impossible without being able to access the internet.

Just our bad luck that we are in a black spot for mobile broadband too so that's no alternative here at home but it is in that trusty lay-by! And we have very good neighbours whose wife I can borrow occasionally.

Enough already! If you made it this far I'm deeply grateful! Back soon, one way or another. And now I come to think of it the title of this post is so very appropriate, even though I never considered that at the beginning.

Bird Hotel

It's Sunday and thus time to work on the latest challenge set by The Documented Life Project, which is for this coming week 11: Draw, photograph or collage a bird. As you can see I used more than one bird and collaged, mainly because I could cut out birds to my heart's content last night while watching television. This morning I made the background using my gelli plate and a leaf stencil. All the birds were then gathered together on this background and I added the Bird Hotel sign, also found in one of the magazines.

I outlined the birds with the Stabilo All black pencil (just love this pencil!) and the leaves with a sepia Pitt pen. Then I added more colour to the leaves using water soluble oil pastels. The edges of the piece were vintaged with a stamp pad.

I also played with the words of Bird Hotel, outlining them further with various markers. I attached the page with a bird washi tape. It's still morning (only just) so I have lived up to my personally set challenge to do these pages fast during Saturday night/Sunday morning, so that the page is ready for the upcoming week.

Exciting Stuff

We've had quite a lot of excitement in the last few days. First of all some of my work has made it onto the StencilGirl blog and you can see that here.

Then I had an e-mail form the German quilter Gudrun Heinz who organizes travelling  exhibitions featuring small quilts, on a theme, every few years, the latest one on Boredom. She wanted to let us know that the exhibition is featured in the Spring 2014 issue of Burda Patchwork, a magazine that is published in both French and German. I managed to lay my hands on a French version online but in the meantime Gudrun was good enough to provide us with a picture of the spread. Above right is my little piece featuring my father and our cat Roxy. I wonder what he would have made of the fact that he is featured in a magazine now. The exhibition has already been to lots of places, starting at the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham last year, followed by outings to St. Petersburg, Moscow,  Murmansk and Riga and will be going on to Prague, Solothurn, Karlsruhe and Bremen and no doubt many other places. Gudrun is very good at finding venues to exhibit as well as keeping us informed.

The next excitement concerned the annual 2nd hand book sale held in Peebles where I found a veritable treasure trove of books. A set of 3 wonderful books about Venice, a book with a beautiful red/gold cover about Scallops (which I will take apart to use that cover), images (copyright free as published in 1919) in a book about Saint Francis, a guide book about Venice (in which I discovered postcards and a map after bringing it home, oh yah!), some old maps (all for collage fodder) and a French book with a gorgeous cover that I will use to alter. All for the princely sum of £16. 

The final excitement was felt by John (well, it was about time he had a treat too!) when we discovered a massive tree felling in operation on the Shiplaw road going home. The sight of so many trees was almost too much for him! It will be my blip for the day so I got something out of this too!

Love the patterns of those stacks and I know I'm not the only one!

Affirmation Cards

As I mentioned in a previous post I have been following Kiala Givehand's book making videos on You Tube and have even made some of them. In fact I'm about to tackle another one shortly. All the YouTube videos and further instructions (to be found here) are entirely free which is very generous of her. I always feel such a gesture deserves some sort of thank you and the only thing I could think of was to join one (or two!) of her to be paid for online classes.

My first choice was her Artful Affirmations class which is ongoing at the moment. That means that not all the class is up just now. Kiala is adding more videos as we go along. So these cards are in the very first stage of development. The affirmations will be added at a later time on the other side of the cards.

I had SO much fun with just doing this. And as you can see it gave me the opportunity to search out all my rubber stamps and use those ones that spoke to me. In fact, I could make another set of cards to use all the other stamps that I loved but for which I had no cards left.

Now there is a thought I just gave myself. I might just do that while waiting for the next videos!

La Linea d'oro 3 Journal Quilt

It's time to show you the third Golden Line (La Linea d'oro) Journal Quilt sized 8" square and made for the series of Journal Quilts this year featuring a golden line. The line was part of the requirement of the Contemporary Quilt Group  (although the choice of gold was mine) as was the size.

I made all the backgrounds for the 12 I'm making (one for every month this year) in one go, using fabrics I had painted using my gelli plate and a huge variety of circular stencils. If I was in any doubt how much I love circles I only have to count just how many of such stencils I possess and still whenever I see a new one appear on the market they prove impossible to resist. The fabrics were then patched onto an iron on interfacing and machine appliquéd. I then cut pieces to the 8" square size, layered them with wadding and machine stitched over the previous appliqué lines. The rest of the quilting is done by hand as you can see above.

After that I ran riot with the sequin embellishments. It was about time I started using that collection too and I'm making a definitely dent in it. Hopefully the sequins will last till the final quilt in this sequence has been made.

I'll let you in on a little secret: I am in the process of making all these quilts and have reached no. 8 so far. The reason why I'm doing this is that I hope to put them all together into one large quilt and for the design sense of cohesion it's better to make them in one big go so I can keep my eye not just on how each individual quilt looks but also on the bigger picture of how they will all form one piece eventually.

Gelli Play

When stressed, take out a gelli plate, some stencils and acrylic paints and play! However it's probably not the best idea to do this on a day when you're giving a talk in the evening. I am contemplating my hands at the moment and trying to figure out how I'm going to make them presentable in time for tonight when I will be talking about my Sketchbook Challenge inspired Journal Quilts to the Tweeddale Quilters in Peebles, at the Leckie Memorial hall, at 7.30 pm in a presentation entitled: Let's Journal. Pop in if you're in the area.

By that time I should have a better idea of how to remove acrylic and spray paint from my fingers. I think Swarfega is called for. I first came across that industrial product, when at sea with John. It removes oil from anything and shouldn't really be used on your skin but hey, it works and that's what I need just now.

Snowdrops in Dawyck

After the disappointing weather yesterday I was still hankering after snowdrops. So when today dawned bright and sunny we decided to make the most of it and visit Dawyck Botanical Gardens for the first time this year. And we weren't disappointed! Spring was in the air and we spotted many male pheasants strutting their stuff such as the one above.

I'm not sure what  particular variety of snowdrop this is but it was gorgeous. The flowers are larger than normal and have a sort of bell shape with green dots at the end of the petals.

It was lovely inside and out as you can see above.

And just look at these snowdrops displays! They were everywhere in huge numbers covering the earth in whiteness.

Now and again the sun came out and made them sparkle even more reflecting from the remaining raindrops. It was so pretty. It was still quiet in the Gardens so I didn't feel too awkward virtually laying on the ground taking pictures.

And miraculously some rhododendrons were out already such as the one above, and the other bushes had big, fat juicy buds that look oh so promising for the future. I always love the first visit after the garden reopens. There is so much promise everywhere of another beautiful spring and summer in this amazing place that it fills my heart with joy and anticipation of all the visits still to come.