Blurry

This is how my eyes feel at the moment.
I've had my head down working for the weekend and am pinning my hopes on this Craft Market


I should know from experience that they are never what you hoped for so on monday brace yourselves for a dejected Dogdaisy and a full etsy shop.
Actually I put some tweed brooches in my etsy shop last week and have sold two already!
I had another 'idea' two nights ago, that I would make some brooches from just velvet, small and precious like sweeties. No tweed, no silk,


I intended to make 20 this morning but only did 10.


I have been so focussed lately on the craft fair that I have onky just realised that all over blogland people are sending and receiving presents .
I haven't had any time to make presents to send but I have been so lucky to receive one from one of my very favourite bloggers Green Phoenix.
I had been e mailing a friend who has just lost her Mum and was saying that she must be feeling terrible at this time of year, when we always remember lost loved ones, which got me thinking fondly of my father. Then she told me about her mother's cat who had run away from his new home, and she had had to take him in, which her own cats didn't like.
And then I opened my post and found this...



..all wrapped in purple tissue paper inside was this heavenly little creature


and when I turned him over he has the same name as my dad!
Which is funny and lovely and sad all at the same time.



Needless to say I am absolutely thrilled.
Thank you so much Nichola.
Please have look at Nichola's blog not just the cats, because all her work is exquisite.

My work is in a heap in the hall..well that which is finished is anyway.

All I have to do now is make 10 more brooches, 6 little purses and some more tweets, which I hope to hang from these branches drying out on the radiator, which have yet to be painted white.

Last episode of Littel Dorrit tonight.

''This week I have mostly been making.......

....gold and red.''

These are by far the most sumptuous versions of my cuffs and brooches but the pictures are so disappointing.
The red is deep, deep, shimmery, subtle so I have chosen the pictures on the basis of colour not sharpness.


I just wanted to ask you dear reader, to ask all your blog friends,

to leave me your wrist size and preferred width of cuff

on my survey post which you can click here to visit.

I think to be a valuable survey it has to have about 100 participants.

If you have already done it, thank you, and please leave a comment here instead.

I love to hear from you.

I am doing a craft fair on Sunday if anyone lives nearby pop along to The Old School, Ulnes Walton near Leyland.

Porky and Blodwen will be there.

A ''This is.' and a 'these were...'

This weeks theme for the 'this is' game was chosen by Flightless boyds.

We could choose between 'This is ... what gives me goosebumps' and 'This is ... what scrambles my brain when I try to understand it' so as I showed you the goosebumps thing in this post I thought I'd try the second because there's certainly a lot of scope for it.

This is the first thing that scrambles my brain..I have recently set up Google reader to view all the lovely blogs I enjoy so I don't miss anything, but then I found that it wasn't picking up some of them, so I subscribed to my own to see what happened...this happened:

and it wasn't even a real post, just a test I did when I first started, and the previous post from my blog on Google reader was from weeks ago, with nothing after it.



The second blog related thing that scrambles my brain when I try to understand it is this:

Now lets be honest, we do like our blogs to be read.

We can look at Technorati now and then to massage our fragile egos, (well I do at the moment but I'm relatively new to blogging so it may wear off) and having learnt how to 'ping', and even how to configure a ping, I am often checking back and forth, and I now know that 'authority' means I have a lot of links.

I have no idea what rank means but its nice when it goes up..gives me goosebumps in fact...but sometimes it says I have an authority of this or that and one day last week it said 'No authority yet' and rank down in the zillions.... and the last post it picked up was last Sunday's, despite me pinging all week.

I do not understand!

But do I need to understand? Its really not important, but if its there it should work.

Anyway a bit of sewing relief since there was a glimpse in the 'snip' above I will now bare all and show them in their full glory. These are some silk purses like ones I made 10 years ago when I had an offer of an exhibition the showcases of Pendle Art Gallery. I had to think of something small and sellable so I started playing with my favourite material, silk dupion, and produced these little bags which I thought were totally my own idea but I have since seen similar elsewhere so I'm not sure. Maybe two people can have the same original idea, who knows?

I didn't sell any there but they were later accepted by another Gallery which led on to other things, and they were all sold.

I later discovered that 6 of them went to a man on Christmas Eve who was giving his coin collection to his Children or Grandchildren and he bought the bags to put the coins in. Isn't that gratifying...they have become heirlooms.

Anyway since they are no longer unique to me I now offer a workshop which is quite satisfying for a day because you do a bit of machine embroidery, a bit of construction, as much decoration as you like, make your own cord and tassel, and sew on a few beads.

Just look what Macclesfield Embroiderers Guild did! (Scroll down to the bottom picture.)

About 5 years ago I took a lot of these to an Agricultural show Craft fair and decided to name them 'Reticule' purses. My first browsers were an elderly upright couple and the husband asked me what a reticule purse was, so I said it was the name some purses had in Regency times, Jane Austen heroines may have carried them.

He went off quite satisfied, I thought, but about 5 hours later he was back with the important news that these were not reticules as a reticule was a netted or crocheted bag.

I tore up my sign, but now know that it was correct in the same way as we say we are Hoovering the carpet and we use a Dyson. (I have seen that referred to on many a blog but I had often thought it myself)

Anyway it was a lousy day for my stall . It rained and my friend who came to help me was wearing jewelled flips flops, and a cheescloth skirt, and when she got back from looking round the show ground she had mud up to her knees.

I would say that in general in this part of the world, people who visit Agricultural shows are there to look at pigs, sheep and bulls, watch the tractor pull, and drink beer, and not buy crafts.

But right at the end of the day a young couple came up to the stand.

The woman was very pregnant and the husband was the most handsome, blue-eyed, black curly haired, wide smiling, rogueish looking farmers boy you have ever seen, eating fish and chips out of bag, with a can of beer in his other hand.

His wife wanted one of my bags and he forked out a sizable sum and bought it. Or rather, she forked out the money and he looked on. (It was one of those occasions when you forget how much you need the income and almost want to give it) I felt as if I had just been part of a Thomas Hardy plot.

Since then I have avoided Agricultural shows .

There weren't even any puppies.

These are some more items from the same era.

"Oooh, my daughters getting married next year/I'm going to a wedding but I haven't got my outfit yet, when I know what colour/ my little girl is going to be a bridesmaid.. can I take a card and we'll be in touch?"

followed by " "

Musings of a domestic slobbess.

Isn’t it amazing how you can go for weeks with not much in particular happening and then a whole lot of things you want to do happen over the same few days?

For instance this weekend is the Traditions Folk Festival near here. On Sunday I am having a stall and doing two feltmaking workshops at the festival during the day.

Thats good. And I’m looking forward to it.

I’ve made a few more brooches and some hair barrettes that I thought might appeal to Traditional Music Festival goers.





When I go to a craft fair/workshop I sew up to the last minute then leave the house looking as if its been burgled. After the event I have a good tidy and clean.



But this weekend we are providing accommodation for two of the festival artistes, so I have to clean the house, and get ready for the event at the same time.



On Friday during the day its the last meeting of my embroidery group till September so I was hoping to go to that.

On Friday and Saturday its Woolfest



I could do with some wool tops for the felt workshop. I was wondering which day I could hope to go(..its about 2 hours drive so I don't think I can go on Saturday because of our guests..) when I received an invitation to an exhibition at a local college from 6.30-8.30, yes on Friday, with a personal note from the teacher hoping I could make it this year. (I couldn’t last year)

A lovely lady in our parish died last week and the priest rang today to say that the funeral is on Friday and I promised to do the flowers in the church, collecting them from the supplier on Wednesday, and arranging them Thursday, so it looks like the cleaning has been brought forward!

And when I say cleaning I don't just mean a quick flick of a duster, but moving beds, re-arranging the ‘spare room’, washing sheets, towels, rugs and throws which have been sadly neglected during the run up to the previous craft fair and left ‘till nearer the time’ of this one.

You know its bad when the dog refuses to get in her own bed till its been changed.

And when we emptied the junk from the cupboard space under what was my son’s bed so we could move it, I noticed this lovely and very appropriate box for my Celtic wares. It was empty. Now its mine.

You can probably tell from this.. the hoarding gene has been passed on to the next generation.

Why do some pictures load the wrong way round?

Please tilt your head when viewing the above.

Velvets

Silk fibres and plain velvets dyed in oranges, pastels, and dull shades to complement the bright ones I bought. I used mulberry silk tops, tussah silk tops and silk noils as well as soya bean fibre.

And these are the ones I bought from Wingham Wool Works, along with all my other irresistible buys.

Dyed and ready for action

The great push begins soon for Art and Garden 2008, and the Platform Gallery Open Textile exhibition
So fabrics are bound and dyed and effects marvelled at.
This was the result of one syringe full of Kemtex dark brown, followed by a syringe full of plain water on silk velvet.

footnote: The Mistress of Longears made a comment on flickr that this looks like a Chrysalis and a butterfly.

I wish I'd thought of that.