DIY

 At last the purse tutorial is in my etsy shop. 

It has taken me HOURS!!!!!

At one point I accidentally deleted it.

 I really hope it  was worth it and that it makes sense.

For those who are interested click here.

Yorkshire Relish and a Blog Tour

Good morning to the 'blog tourists' from Quilting Arts. For those not on 'the tour' I'll explain later.

This little hand sized silk purse is one of many I have been making for about 13 years.
 I was invited, all that long time ago, to exhibit in the showcases of The Pendle Art Gallery when the main event was an Exhibition by the renowned photographer Fay Godwin. I had to devise some small embroidered items that would fit in some glass showcases so that's where these purses, and other things, were born. Since then I've had them in Galleries and shops in Lancashire and Yorkshire and even Cumbria, but have stopped making them to sell now and started teaching people how to make them.

UPDATE: There is now a tutorial available in my etsy shop.

So last week I had great fun making more of them as samples for a workshop I had been invited to teach a long long way from home, over the border in Yorkshire.

They are made from silk dupion with the grain going 'the wrong way' so that they fall nicely.

There are several different styles and there's scope for beading fun, as well as cord and tassel making.

Here are some I made earlier which have appeared here before.

So last Saturday with my car boot stuffed, I made an uncharacteristically early start and set off towards the East. It was cloudy at first so I couldn't watch the sunrise (but I'd probably missed it anyway..it wasn't that early) and two hours later ended up in the beautiful Yorkshire Dales and approached the village of Snape.

This is the beautiful lane down to the Village, lined with tall trees growing from banks of snowdrops and aconite, with daffodils starting to appear.

Past the castle

and the raised beds

and strange things

Do you know what this is?

Its a rhubarb forcer. Yorkshire is famous for rhubarb and under this cloche there will soon be delicate palest pink stems with yellow leaves.

The welcome I received at The Snape Textile Group was as good as last time. They are very organised and extremely talented. I was more interested in some of their own work than what I was supposed to be teaching. 

I remembered from my last visit that they provide lunch.

What a lunch. Last time it was vegetable korma with rice, nan bread and chutneys. This time it was vegetable pasta bake, salad, garlic bread, followed by apple and ginger trifle. But it didn't stop there! At four o'clock out came the home made blueberry muffins and tea. 

Then we had a look at the work the group had done. 

They had all made good progress and they promised they would finish them at home!

One of the members even had an outing planned for hers.

If any of the Snape textile group are reading, thank you so much for a really superb day.

Now back to the blog tour.

You remember in the last post I told you I had been featured in the Quilting Arts e mag? 

This is a sort of publicity tour I am delighted to take part in. Each day one of the people featured in the magazine writes a post and links to the next person who is taking part. So if you want to join in the tour, or if you are already on it, your next port of call , Tomorrow, 3rd March, will be the blog of Deb Bates.

If you want to go back to the start of the tour, then visit the tour guide and editor of QA, Pokey Bolton. A most delightful and encouraging person!

Here's the full list

Sunday (Feb 27): Pokey launches the tour!: http://www.quiltingdaily.com

Monday (Feb 28): Jane Davila: http://janedavila.blogspot.com

Tuesday: Lynn Krawczyk( March 1): http://www.fibraartysta.blogspot.com

Wednesday: Jackie Cardy(March 2): http://dogdaisychains.blogspot.com

Thursday: Deb Bates (March 3): http://stitchtress.wordpress.com

Friday: Deborah Boschert (March 4): http://deborahsjournal.blogspot.com

Saturday: Michelle Allen (March 5): http://allendesigns.typepad.com

Sunday: Liz Kettle (March 6): http://textileevolution.com/?option=com_wordpress&Itemid=203

Monday: Lyric Kinard (March 7): http://lyrickinard.blogspot.com  

Tuesday (March 8): A surprise guest on Lindsey’s blog will be the final stop of this tour http://www.quiltingdaily.com

If you pop in on the blog tour please leave a calling card so I know you were here.

EDIT:I have had so many requests for a tutorial for these little purses that I have decided to make one and have it available in my ETSY shop. Please give me about two weeks as I am having a little break and will do it as soon as I get back. I'll blog about it when its ready.

Thank you so much for the compliment.

Strange Monday

Sometimes you just don't get the shape of the day right.
It all went wrong very early.
My husband had been working until midnight on a major report to be e mailed today for a meeting tomorrow.
But the main computer wouldn't 'come on'.
You know these technical problems...the screen was black with white writing with words like bios and cmos and dmi and other stuff with no hint as to whether those are nouns verbs or what.


I wrapped parcels to send to Etsy buyers, clicked a few buttons on the main PC and then texted both sons for help.
One phoned and instructed my husband on the correct procedure after of course asking 'have you switched it off and on again' . Der..
No luck, because the phone is downstairs and the PC upstairs and at our age its hard to remember what you went upstairs for let alone instructions for re booting the PC.

I photographed a few brooches in response to a phone call .
My husband rang the news through that the report wouldn't be ready and went off to cut the grass.
Meanwhile I was rooting down the back of the sofa looking for my favourite pen to address the parcels and I found the long lost cordless phone handset and put it on to charge.


It made all the difference..
So when number one son phoned the instructions I was sitting in front of the PC and could say No when he said' does it say..?'
To cut a long long story short..its fixed.
So you'd think I could get on with some sewing wouldn't you?
No.
I'd tutted and huffed so much about not saving stuff to the external hard drive that then I had to teach himself how to do that.

So anyway...later I made a purse.
It didn't take long because I used a piece I was going to make into a brooch and Harris tweed..
Its just a little one.
Do you think the combination of felt, velvet and Harris tweed works?

What an odd day.
Weather forecast for tomorrow is on ...and I quote,
'the rough weather is going to be over the Northwest'.
and
'the further South and east we go the warmer it gets'.

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?"

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