fabric friday

Wishing you all a great weekend.

Going to seed.

That is what is happening to my patch of rocket and pretty much the rest of the garden as I don't seem to have had any time to spend there this summer. (The appalling weather didn't help!)
It is also representative of the state of my house and my work space/shed at the moment!

It's all good though. Over the last couple of weekends I have been busy teaching and talking and having a lovely time with Region 3- Hampshire, Wiltshire Isle of Wight and The Channel Isles, and Region 12- South and Mid Wales -my home crowd :) of The Quilter's Guild of The British Isles. Thank you all for making me so welcome.

In between that, I nipped up to London to The Knitting and Stitching show at Alexandra Palace. It is a few years since I have been, and I wanted to see it again, but it was also an excuse to go and spend some time with my best-est friend (without the rest of the family in tow) who conveniently lives just down the road from the venue.

No pictures to show you because, quite rightly, there was no photography allowed of the things I liked best, which included a Nancy Crow curated exhibit that the quilting side of me loved, along with so many fantastic embroidery pieces.

I am now looking forward to some quiet time to spend stitching and creating, once I have tackled the domestic chores:(
I will leave you with some photos of one of my kits that the lovely Ganey Jones brought along to show me on Saturday.

I love seeing how other people put the kits together, especially when they put their own spin on it. Ganey entered this into the craft section of this year's Eisteddfod, along with a poem by her daughter about pebbles.

I just love the embellishment.

With apologies ...

...to those of you who are thinking that they have seen this before, you would be correct, but I did say in my last post that I would show you where the inspiration for the Beach Fences had started.

It wasn't until I began this post that I remembered!!!

So if you are seeing this for the first time there is a bit more about it here.

It is still not a piece that I am particularly keen on, but it has been improved.

Now this should be a before and after shot, but I have searched my photo folders and it seems that I do not have a photo of the before, or if I did, I cropped out the bits that I didn't like.
So you will just have to take my word for it that this had a pieced binding and that one of the foreground slopes was green. I was not happy with it and my solution was to cut off offending binding and face it with some hand painted scrim. I also used some to cover up the green that was jarring.

I first had the idea when trying to find the solution to these pieces, and guess what?!?  I don't have a photo of them finished (not doing too well today am I?).
I can assure you that they are now all edged with the same grey scrim!!!

I am going for a lie down... but keep the scrim in mind to use as a different type of edging, or as a way to hide something undesirable!

And there is more...

You can see that my fascination with the Beach Fence started a while ago as shown these old sketchbook pages. I even sold a few paintings based on them.

Here are a few more versions I have done.

These are available as a PDF pattern in my shops (links in the side bar) if anyone fancies doing one of their own.

As a small piece this last one is probably my least favourite, but next time I will show you how and why it developed., and how I improved it...to my mind anyway!

Don't fence me in...

Thank you for the comments on my last post. I discovered I am not the only one that has a thing about fences. I have done a few like this, even though there are none like this along my bit of coastline.

Finishing Touches! (almost!)

Thank you for all the suggestions about what to put on these backgrounds.
Of course this one has the ubiquitous bird. Those of you who are familiar with my work over at thebluehare will know what I mean by this.

Then again I suppose hares are a bit of a recurring theme for me too.

This is where the "almost" from the title of this post comes in, as these were added using Photoshop. It took me so long to erase the background from the hare that it would probably have been quicker to stitch them!

So, for the last two, I resorted to Paint, which I know is not ideal but I am so keen to get on with other things at the moment, and I haven't really decided what I want to put on these myself yet.

So I will leave you with my juvenile attempts at digital art, while I ponder some more on how I am going to finish them. Rest assured I will show you when I am done.

Linking up with Off the Wall Friday!

Landscape Backgrounds continued

I have been meaning to post about the stitching that I added to the backgrounds for days. Every time I sat down to do it I realized that there was one I had not taken a photo of. I would then get distracted by something else. Finally got my scatty brain into action!

The pictures speak for themselves. Lots of easy straight line stitching. The colour and the choice of thread do the work.

I did change the stitch size on this one. Making it bigger as I moved towards the foreground, to try and portray some depth. Not sure if it works or not.
Next time, the focus of each piece.
What would you put on these backgrounds?