Thirty year old school artwork

A friend nominated me to join in the #ArtChain challenge were over a stretch of 5 days you show and tell with 3 images of art a day. I'm sure some of you have been doing this also.

I decided to start the challenge in some sort of arty chronological order which started with work I kept from school days. When I was in the fifth and sixth form art was the only subject I really enjoyed, which is probably why I still have my old portfolio with quite a selection of work in. It does smell rather fusty and musty from being in parents attic and now living with me for 7 years in damp, cold, rented properties and the fact it is over thirty years old now.

Anyway whilst I was digging through the fusty old bits of paper I took the opportunity to photograph some of my favourite pieces before moths or other such nasties eat into it which is always a danger with living here.

For my own record I am displaying the pictures here with a brief description.

Pencil drawings were always a big part of art lessons and there was much encouragement to get contrast and different line thickness in there. I used to love collecting a good range of HB pencils for doing my drawings. I didn't particularly like doing the 2 pieces below, rather boyish subjects of tools and an old engine but I persevered!

I was much happier drawing plants.

Or trying to do something a bit more surreal, I did a study of a shoe first and then had the idea to do a shoe coming out of a gramophone, it's a bit rubbish but there must have been a reason for it!

This was quite a large painting I did, 4 sheets of A2 stuck together and the idea was to explore human form and we also made ceramic figures to go with this project.
I've never done much in the way of figurative work since.

Something else I haven't particulary pursued since school is working with pastels, for no other reason than it seems too messy in my already messy world.
Going from the dates on these, I completed them just as I left school in '83.

I used to enjoy doing pastels in a limited colour palette, the first pic is the Market Place in the Old Town, Hull.
Next we have rooftops in a German village from a holiday snap and lastly Piccadilly Circus. 
I do still have a soft spot for the naive charm with these.

Moving on to work which I suppose we call mixed media today. I've always been and still am a big fan of collage. You can see my musical taste of the time with this top ensemble.

My work started to take a more graphic approach in the sixth form as I took images and deconstructed them and reconstructed patterns, probably a hint that I would end up doing graphic fabric designs today.
The bottom pic is a red pepper, I seem to remember doing something similar with a tomato but that hasn't survived.

Finally, to finish off with, this is a piece of work from '82 which I still quite like and it took absolutely ages because all the colour is made from tiny ripped up pieces of colour magazines. It is a scene around the marina area of Hull, looking across the dock to some old warehouses.

A weekend on Skye

It's a long way to go, 9 or 10 hours drive up... hit the hay for a few hours had one full day meeting up with people and doing things, then drive all the way back the next day. We must be mad but we love it.

Not many hotels open this time of year so had to opt for something a bit more extravagant than our usual bargain basement accommodation. We stayed in a lovely suite in the turret of this hotel, the Cuillin Hills.

The hotel does indeed look across the bay to the Cuillin Hills, this is the view from the dining room, it's early morning so a bit bleak and misty looking but you can just see the colourful buildings along Portree harbour.

I like this hotel, they have a proper full veggie breakfast on the menu and it comes with veggie haggis, yummy :)

I also liked the hotel because it had that one thing I always long to find in a country hotel in winter, a roaring fire. I can honestly say this was the warmest I had been for weeks, maybe months and I didn't have to wear vests and long johns for 2 days! Plus, they have a most interesting and extensive whisky menu.

Now I'm no connoisseur but I do find the tastes and smells of whisky as interesting as single estate coffee. Just look at some of the prices per glass, we are talking rare and unique drams.Talisker is the local Skye whisky, we have some origins and tasting notes here

This is the cabinet of all those rare spirits.

There was a nice dusting of snow on the mountains with a windswept and interesting view around every corner.

I just had time to visit friends in Skye Batiks who I'm currently doing some more design work for and I picked up a square scarf with my design on. They had some patchwork packs of batik remnants, not the hand loom fabric, and I think you got 1.6m worth of fabric for £10. I think they had some hand loom fabric to buy per metre but I didn't actually see it which was a shame, I forgot to look, I was so engrossed with their other lovely clothes.

Back here and back to the cold conditions, hope it's not too cold or snowy where you are this week.

January making and buying

It's been ridiculously cold in the house the last fortnight and I've been making 'house scarves' and buying more long johns. Honestly I think I could set up a shop selling long johns I have so many pairs!

With it being so cold I drop into the same routine at this time of year by doing less challenging crafts whereby I can wrap myself up in layers, not think too much and just knit or crochet very simple things. You can't get much more simple than loom knitting and I started some neck warmers on the circular loom.

There is something quite satisfying about the speed you can create something and here is my first neck warmer.

This pink neck warmer was quickly followed by this bluey one, although not done on the loom but hand knitted.

I'm not much of a knitter but I have got this item on the go also at the moment, it's some sort of scarf / cowl with some interesting wool I bought in Whitby.

Continuing with scarves, this time crochet. I found a Youtube video showing how to do a type of moss stitch for crochet, it was a very good and easy to follow tutorial by Olivia at Girlybunches who has some great crochet videos.

http://girlybunches.com/

A scarf in moss stitch is a good way to use up small scraps of wool.

I didn't want tassels on the end as it's a fairly short scarf to tuck into a coat so not the neatest of finishing off at the ends but it's a nice stitch to do.

Had some of my fabric back from the printers, the Scandi Trees design, and I've sold a bit on ebay.

With some Christmas money I bought myself a nice quality rotary cutter. Previously I had a £3.99 one and it was useless but spending a bit more on this Olfa cutter is proving great for accurately and neatly cutting my fabric.

I bought some more Harris Tweed last week from the weaving lady on Harris and I'm in the throws of creating some textile jewellery and a tweed needle case.

Another needle case I've recently completed in the book style is this one, made with scraps of hand loom cotton from the Skye Batiks shop on Skye which I believe have recently taken delivery of a new batch of my designs on some garments.

Back to crochet, I found a pattern in a recent magazine for crochet buttons and I turned the basic idea into pin cushions.

Thanks for sticking with all these photos, I'll finish with some food just ahead of Burns Night. Joy of joys I found the veggie haggis had made a welcome return to Morrisons, more of a sausage shape to previous years but will make a lovely, hearty feast.

Hornsea Pottery in Homes and Antiques

Fabulous news for all of us who love Hornsea Pottery, there's a feature in the new February issue of Homes and Antiques, yes a massive 10 page feature which is absolutely brilliant and will do wonders to raise the profile of this often overlooked ceramic company.

Very nicely photographed, perhaps more photographs than words but still a worthwhile purchase if you like the stuff.

I think Hornsea pots are certainly the sought after items for folks creating a mid century feel to their homes.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year friends and thank you for all the lovely festive wishes. I am trying to get myself back into a positive frame of mind and manifest a good year ahead.

A few design jobs have come in already this week to keep me busy and I am using any other free moments to launch a new way of selling my fabric designs. At last we have a great new digital fabric printing company in the UK, it's Woven Monkey and they are about to launch a facility similar to what I had going with Spoonflower. The ability to list your fabric designs and make them available for the public to buy and earn yourself a little commission kickback too.

This will be so much easier than the hassle of ordering from the USA and all the import tax you can get stung with. Of course having bespoke short runs of fabric printed is never cheap but this service is comparable in price to Spoonflower, free delivery for us in the UK and having sampled their service last year it's very good quality printing.

I am currently converting my fabric designs to fit new sizes and I am slowly uploading some of my popular vintage caravan designs onto a selling page.
New designs I create will be going straight onto this website too. The service will be going live some time later in January, it's very exciting and I'm looking forward to seeing how it takes off.

https://www.wovenmonkey.com/

Ten, nine, eight, seven, six etc.....

Well sadly, with hindsight, this one didn't prove to be the year to fulfil my hopes and dreams so lets hope next year is the one.

Wishing all my readers a very happy new year for 2015 :) here's to good health, happiness and creativity in abundance x

Season of Yule

It's here again, whatever you celebrate I would like to wish everyone a most wonderful time over the festive holidays and lets hope 2015 is a great year :)

Harris Tweed sewing needle case and assorted chaos!

I'm not liking December, although touchwood, I'm back to as normal as I can be after the colds and catching up with shopping, christmas cards and chores.
Unfortunately I missed the best time of year for making festive things for my shop, I've lots of works in progress which will have to wait until next Christmas now.

One recent make was this Harris Tweed needle case for Folksy. I have started buying my tweed direct from a lady weaver on Harris. She produces lots of commission tweed orders and then sells some surplus metres through her Facebook page. Very reasonably priced at around £15 per metre, if anyone would like her FB details let me know in a comment.

The inner lining of the case is a fabric from the Downton Abbey range which Makower have produced.

We've been eating microwave food for a few days (yuk!) as I was waiting for the aga man to do a service and he's been today, phew. In 24 hours it should be warm again and ready for some nice cooking over the festive period.

It was quite an eye opener talking to the man about aga's and one as old and inefficient as this one. Maybe like a lot of people I had this romantic image of an aga in an old cottage, part of what drew me to rent this place but over 6 years later the sooner I get away from this costly thing the better.
Rather frighteningly he told me that this one uses 40 litres of oil a week, that means nothing unless you put a cost to it, somewhere between £20 - £30 a week just to run it to cook on. That's over £1000 a year for a crapped out aga, an aga we have to run pretty much all year because there is no 'normal' oven here. There's a lot in the news at the moment about oil prices being cheap, it doesn't make much difference to us as we spend so much on the aga and then the central heating on top.

Anyway there's currently no getting around it as we need to eat and we need to keep warm and I shall try to make the most of it whilst it is newly serviced and at it's peak.

The joys of living here, it's a bit worse than usual at the moment as I feel like i'm living in the middle of a building site.
I really don't like being surrounded by builders, noise and mess, compromising my privacy but that's the current state of play. 
This house is surrounded by old outbuildings in bad states of repair, almost like this house! I informed the powers that be that a roof had collapsed on a shed in summer and they said they would have that building taken down as it was unsafe. They didn't say when or give any details. Weeks, months passed and then 2 weeks ago a team of builders and scaffolding appeared. No one has had the decency to inform us what is going on, the fate of the buildings, whether we loose our coal shed / garage etc. Oh no, as is the way of the landlords, no communication just stuff going on around you as if you don't exist or have any feelings.

I've got banging and drilling going on when I'm trying to work, I'm having to keep curtains shut in the room I call my office or I'll have builders looking in on me. That in itself is difficult as it stops the ever important light for me, the bit of sun that will warm the room and it is making life gloomy. I have a builders van outside my front kitchen window which is also where the sink is so I'm reluctant to spend much time in there. It's pretty much a pain in the butt at this time of year. Oh and you should see the mud that the digger has churned up! Of course I have no idea how many weeks this will go on for, the only let up will be when they pack up for Christmas hols.

Here's a quick look at the mess and chaos and state of some of the buildings.

I think I said this last year, I do hope this is my last winter here.

Ok, rant over. I hope everyone else is having a pleasant run up to the festivities and hopefully the snow will stay away as it would add to the chaos!