More recyled storage

Minature Storage

My daughter Jessica has been clearing out the  cupboards as is her wont every time she returns from uni. She threw away all the time expired herbs, and there were loads of them. As  I make lots of things I own loads tiny bits and pieces and am never sure where to store them . So I sorted out, sequins, buttons, clips, pins, staples etc and put some of them into  the very useful pots.

More storage jars

I started with these

Doily decorated table cloth and a muddy dog

A table cloth

Tablecloths can be transformed by this simple method of fabric decoration, stencilling through a doily. You can use the same method to make matching table napkins.

Materials:
Piece of linen/cotton fabric big enough to make a cloth for your table. (You can buy sheeting for this purpose)
Paper Doilies
Sewing Machine
Fabric Paints
Iron
Scissors
Pins
Masking tape
Stencil Brush

Instructions

1. Measure out the piece of cloth and cut to the required size. Press flat. Choose paper doilies with a pleasing design. The larger the holes the better.

2. Place paper on the work surface and lay the cloth on top. Place the chosen doily onto the edge of the cloth and hold it down with masking tape.

3. Stencil the colour through the doily moving the brush in an up-and-down notion to stamp the colour through it. Leave the design to dry and press with a hot iron on the back to fix. Proceed in the same way until the required design has been achieved all along the cloth.

4. Turn under the edges of the cloth to neaten and machine sew all the way round.

Doily print

I have mentioned my morning walks  with my mutt on previous blogs. Here is an example from this morning’s walk.

Dog in the mud

Buy of the week or in my case, Make of the week

A flowery felt headscarf

In the ‘Times’ today, on their fashion pages, they were showing sprigged print lawn scarves as worn by the fashion assistants in Liberty. They sell at £25 each! So I rustled up a few from remnants, an old frock, and bought out the two I had put on my blog,  with instructions, last November  and December. Here they are being worn by my daughter Jess. The first was made from an old frock . The darts were removed first and then a triangle was cut, and the raw edges were turned under and hemmed.

Start with this

Do this

End up with this.

I made one from Gingham  trimmed with white lace, leaving the ends long  for tying. The button on the felt one gives an alternate way of fastening. Liberty lawn is soft and forgiving as a fabric and works well as a scarf  fabric. The fine cotton on which I did my tie dye is also great for draping.

A little bit Heidi

A neat fastening

Liberty lawn peacock feathers

A piece of tie dyed fabric

Has summer eventually come?

Every morning I take my dog Jazz for a walk. Well it is often a route or should it be root march that involves a great deal of mud. Jazz is a Labrador  and loves water of all kinds which is just as well as I usually have to hose him down on our return. But the weather is changing so all is better now. When it was winter and all appeared in monochrome it was great to see the  bright green Parakeets  against the snow. Most people consider them vermin chasing away our  indigenous  bird population but i like them even though they are cheeky. See the picture I took yesterday morning whilst walking, I am sure the owner of the bird feeder didn’t put it up for him!I am off to take some photo’s of my garden as it is changing so rapidly. Here are the photo’s

apple blossom

Apple blossom close up

A first strawberry plant

Everything in the garden is lovely, the shallots are coming up and the potatoes, little gem lettuce , wild rocket are all pushing up shoots. the birds are singing and all is well in this bit of London.

A weekend on the Isle of Wight

As well as lots of lovely sailing, I went to my favourite Gallery in Cowes. www.pelhamhousegallery.co.uk Below are some of the goodies available. They buy crafts from all over the place but most  of the makers are based in the Isle of Wight.

A beautiful yacht picture taken when racing on Saturday

An instant make

Today we were sailing and doing a series of races.  We left the mooring with plenty of time, only to discover that we had the wrong flag up and weren’t carrying the one we needed . Each class has a different flag to differentiate them from the other classes. We were leaving before most of the shops were open and we needed to be at the race on time. So the two dyslexics on board, I am including myself in them, instantly thought of adapting an existing flag, whilst our skipper ran off to try and buy a new flag. Below is a picture of the adapted Q flag that is yellow with the addition of blue spinnaker mending material that is blue. Huw, our strategist did this, Judith our bow babe is holding it.

yours truly flying a spinnaker

Quilts

I love quilts, so much so,  I wrote my dissertation on them. I have collected and acquired some interesting examples of them over the years. They are not in particularly good decorative order, but there in is a dilemma. Do you mend and fundamentally change the feel and authenticity of the original quilt or do you leave it to disintegrate further. There are a few rules that are worth following. If you want to keep the colour don’t expose textiles to direct sunlight or even much light. Store between sheets of  acid free tissue paper. The sections shown above are all from the same quilt, made by other half’s grandmother. The final image shows a section of the quilt that was mended with a section of a hexagon.

Jessica’s version of Eaton mess or eating mess!

Eaton mess usually looks like its description, but my daughter Jessica made a version that looked like fruit sundaes and tasted delicious. If you don’t have a sundae glass use a wine glass instead.

You will need for 6 people

A pudding fit for a Queen

4 egg whites

115g of caster sugar

115g of icing sugar

1 or 2 punets of strawberries depending on how greedy you are

5-600ml double cream

A  few drops of port

grease proof paper

Instructions

1.Turn the oven on 100 degrees

2. Whisk the four egg white until they stand in peaks

3. Add the castor  sugar a little at a time until it is mixed in

4. Fold in the sieved icing sugar a 1/3 at a time

5. Using the back of a spoon, spoon the meringue in dollops onto the baking paper. This quantity should make between 16-20 meringues.Bake for between 1-1 and 1/4 hours.

6. Chop up the strawberries, leaving a few aside for decoration,  and add a few drops of port.

7. Spoon the strawberry mixture into the sundae or wine glasses.

8. Take the meringues out and leave to cool.

9. Whip the double cream in a large bowl.

10. Break up the meringues and mix with the cream.

11. Add the meringue cream mixture on top of the strawberries.

12. Cut the spare strawberries into a fan shape, by cutting down to nearly where the leaf end is and then fanning out and putting on top of the meringue mixture.

Enjoy !!!!

I didn't eat all of them!

I upcycled, dyed, some silk and was given roses

My significant other bought me some significant roses for a significant celebration. They are so beautiful I photographed them on some silk I had dyed flamingo pink. The silk had originally been beige and it was left over from some curtain making. I want to use it to make a frock but feel that with my colouring, not English Rose, beige, cream, and variations of  taupe are not the colours for me. Wild extravagant Flaminco pink is  my colour. Dylon make it  dead easy  to dye using a washing machine; and NO my significant other is not now wearing pink y fronts. Set on the pink silk, the roses look as though they are made from Velvet.

A Visit to Tate Britain and Chris Ofili exhibition

This exhibition is going to close in less than a month and I felt I had to see it. Chris Ofili was born in Manchester in 1968 and studied at Chelsea art school and the Royal college before winning the turned prize in 1998 and representing Britain at 50th Biennale in 2003. The printed leaflet that one is given when entering the exhibition describes, ‘these richly layered paintings  pulsate with the colour and energy of the artists intricate art brushwork, to which is added glitter, resin, map pins, and collaged magazine cut-outs. He also applied elephant dung balls to the canvas and used them to prop the paintings on the floor’.

The work is moving, fast and exciting but for me the elephant dung is irrelevant and has an element of emperors new clothes about it. It got him, and thus his work,  noticed but in my view  it does nothing to enhance the paintings, which stand on their own merit without the addition of merde.

My just having written this, I looked at the leaflet and all is explained! In the artist’s own words

‘using dung balls is a way of raising the paintings up from the ground and giving them a feeling that they’ve come from the earth rather than simply being hung on the wall.’

Whilst I was in the exhibition I had what felt like a Thomas Crown Affair moment. I took 1 photograph. I stood behind a wall so I would not be seen. There weren’t any  signs saying do not take photo’s or none that I could see,  but the hidden eye was upon me and obviously the observer rang through to an attendant  who came and told me off! So here is the evidence of my crime, one not very good image and it isn’t even particularly representative of the work as a whole. If you get a chance visit the exhibition. If you look carefully, the all seeing eye is in the centre of this painting!