May your days be…
Merry and Bright
I wish for all of you…
A Very Happy Christmas!
First of all, thank you to everyone who has been looking in while I’ve been absent. December has been a bit of a rollercoaster for me. I started out bursting with creative energy and so many ideas for things I wanted to complete. And then various not so pleasant events stepped in and these have kept me from my computer this last week. At least now we’re all looking forward to Christmas. I hope you are too – and that your month has been better than mine.
Leah’s theme for Creative Every Day this month has been recycle, and as I said at the beginning of the month this fits right in with where I am just now. I’ve been making a conscious effort to use some of the craft supplies I’ve accumulated over the years and have come to the conclusion that I really don’t need to buy any more stuff unless I have a specific need for something. It’s been really enjoyable using things up, and clearing some space in the process.
I’m going to show you some cards I’ve made and also some altered CD ROM Christmas decorations. But since this is Christmas I’m also providing you with a little music to listen to while you’re browsing – recycled, of course, from a previous Christmas! In 2001, when my sons were 8 and 5, we did a ‘Singing Christmas Card’ and as it happens I’m rather fond of it! So I thought you might like to listen to it. Well, whether you want to or not, here it is, just a click away:
Of course, we’re all older and wiser now…!
So – if you’ve recovered from that – here are the cards: These are all made from Christmassy fabric glued on to thick recycled card (the kind that forms the back of students’ writing pads) and then attached to the front of my cards. The Christmas tree also includes offcuts of quilters’ wadding to give it a little bounce. These fabrics were bought several years ago with this in mind, but somehow never used until my present ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ state of mind kicked in. Apart from the actual cards which are new, all of the little mounts and stamped embellishments are made using scraps from my card offcuts box, and I do believe the ribbons were wedding favours at a wedding I attended a few years ago. (This is not just recycling; this is cheapskate crafting!)
Apologies for the blurry stamped text. My scanner doesn’t do ‘depth of field’!
I’ve also been collecting old CD ROMs with the intention of using them for altered art. These are my first attempts at doing any sort of altered art. So first, some Christmas decorations – photographed this evening hanging from a beam in the conservatory:
I’m very pleased with the way these have turned out, and will definitely do more. Again, all the embellishments are made from scraps of card from my box, but each CD is backed with a complementary (new) paper to hide the original printed words.
And finally – this one’s not quite finished. It’s waiting to be attached to a second CD ROM and will be a Christmas card for one of my sons. I typed out the letters in Word using a suitable font, then increased the size and changed the colour to blue. (The black background is my chair, not part of the card.)
So – that’s me almost ready for Christmas! Now, if only the marzipan on my Christmas cake had turned out as well….
If you click on the badge below you’ll be able to see what others have been doing with the recycle theme. You can also sign up for Creative Every Day 2010 if you’d like to do that.
Nothing particularly special about my batch of Skywatch photos today. Except that they were all taken within three minutes of each other, between 3.40 and 3.43 this afternoon.
This one looking north:
This looking south:
And this one showing what’s in store. See that on the horizon…? Snow!
Wherever you are, and whatever your weather, I hope you have a great weekend. And now, if you’d like to join in with Skywatch Friday – either by posting your own photos or by visiting other skies around the world, please click on the badge below.
It isn’t pretty, is it? And if I’m honest, it got much worse than this.
Preparing for Christmas can be such a messy business, can’t it? But someone has to do it…!
Just after the tide goes out on a sunny day, reflections in the the wet sand make for beautiful photographs. Here are a few of my photos of reflections at Sandown Bay, Isle of Wight.
First, some beach huts. You can find out a little more about what they’re used for in my previous post about beach huts, and the comments for that post.
Lucy, bathing in reflected glory…
These steps are part of the revetment that borders the beach. Care has to be taken using these as the seaweed always makes them very slippery.
Man and dog go forth together…
You can take a peek into other people’s worlds – or even join in and show us your world – if you click on the badge below. Many thanks to Klaus, Wren, Sandy, Sylvia, Louise and Fishing Guy who keep it going for us every week.
* Pssssst! I don’t want to say this out loud – but it seems to have stopped raining! *
Thanks to Skywatch Friday I now look for beauty in every kind of sky. So when I noticed this definite ‘freshly washed’ look about the clouds, during a recent pause between torrential rains, I dashed out with my camera.
This is the view from the end of my garden. Over to the left, behind the cliff, is The Solent that separates the Isle of Wight from the English mainland. In that direction lie Portsmouth, an important and historic naval city and Southampton, one of the foremost cruise liner ports in the world. Straight ahead, below those freshly washed clouds, is the English Channel which separates England from France.
This is my contribution to this week’s Skywatch Friday. Many thanks to Klaus, Wren, Sandy, Sylvia, Louise and Fishing Guy who keep it going for us every week. If you’d like to join in, or if you’d just like to see what skies others have been photographing this week, click on the badge below.
You might be forgiven for thinking what a calm and tranquil scene I was setting before you yesterday as you looked at the photos of my knitting.
Well you’d be wrong! Do you want to see what really happened?
The thumbnails are yesterday’s photos, shown in the order they were taken. You can click on those to enlarge, or click on the link above to go to the original post. The full size photos are what I was being subjected to alongside photographing the knitting. The one of Oliver sitting on the squares is the only one that enlarges. I’m sure you wouldn’t want to see larger versions of the rest!
Hello, what’s going on here? Oh, you’ve laid a scarf out on the floor for us!
Mmmm! It’s so soft and cosy!
Oh FANTASTIC! Knitted squares! My favourite!
Are you going to take some photos of us now? Are you? Are you?!
You see? I look pretty against the knitting too!
Do you surrender yet?!
You know – I’m sure Bryan Peterson never has to work under such conditions…!
When I was little I sometimes used to design and knit clothes for my dolls. As an adult I progressed to more complex stitches and developed a taste for designer hand knits. Knitting these often complicated patterns was no problem for me, but I could never have dreamed them up myself nor calculated all the shaping. My designer days were over …
… That is, until now!
A couple of weeks ago two viruses in quick succession (one courtesy of each son – thanks, boys!) left me feeling quite weak, and my usual creative outlets didn’t appeal. I wanted to do something comforting that didn’t involve a lot of moving about. (More precisely, something that didn’t involve moving from the sofa!) Then I remembered I had a few balls of Noro Silk Garden yarn left over from a previous knitting project and I decided to design a scarf.
Now before you all fall about laughing about how much design can go into a scarf – what with it being just a rectangle and all – I will show you the resulting scarf and explain:
Noro Silk Garden is a blend of silk, kid mohair and lamb’s wool. It differs from usual space dyed yarns in that it seems to be space spun (or something like that) resulting in longer lengths of each colour. I needed a fairly simple design that showed off this beautiful speciality yarn and decided to base the design on cables which I wanted to look like loosely woven plaits (braids). After a trial piece I decided to use larger needles to add to this ‘loose’ effect. Getting the length right was also more complicated than I expected, but I think I got it right. And when all the knitting was done I cut lengths of yarn for tassles, grouping them according to colour in keeping with this feature of the yarn.
So yes, it’s only a scarf but there are a lot of details in it. And it made me think we’re probably all designers at some level. Even me! Who’d have thought it?!
I was very pleased with how nicely the cables drape. Of course, normally I will want them to drape around my neck, not on the floor, but you get my drift!
The scarf took a few evenings to finish, but by then I was on a roll. Actually I was on two conflicting rolls. I wanted to make more scarves, exploring the drape potential of cables knitted in luxury fibres, specifically mulberry silk. But it also ocurred to me that I could use up some of the 25 years’ worth of leftover yarns stashed away in boxes on top of various wardrobes, thereby freeing up some space and making better use of the earth’s resources. Fortunately for the earth, the house and my bank balance, this was the roll I went with.
So the plan is to use up as much of the yarn as possible by designing and knitting squares, some quite plain, some featuring a patterned stitch and I’m also thinking of embroidering a few. When I have enough I’m going to sew them all together, but rather than the usual blanket knitted from squares I’m going to create a lap quilt, backing the blanket with fabric, and using buttons from my mum’s old button box to secure the two layers together. Here’s what I’ve done so far.
What a coincidence that Leah’s theme for Creative Every Day for December is recycle! This is what I’m doing. You can see how others are interpreting the theme if you click on the link below.
Mud, mud, glorious mud
Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood
So follow me, follow, down to the hollow
And there let us wallow in glorious mud
Greetings from England. Yes, it’s still raining.
Flanders and Swann wrote the song from which these lyrics are taken about a hippopotamus (‘The Hippopotamus Song’) but they also seem just right for this little pig in England just now.
Wherever you are, if you need rain I hope you get some; if you’ve already had way too much I hope it stops soon. Oh, how I hope it stops soon!
You can take a peek into other people’s worlds – or even join in and show us your world – if you click on the badge below. Many thanks to Klaus, Wren, Sandy, Sylvia, Louise and Fishing Guy who keep it going for us every week.
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