love is in the air...

such a lovely day in my home town of Whitley Bay on the North East coast of England. You can see St Mary's Lighthouse in the background. I feel so lucky to live in such a beautiful part of the country and to spend my day sewing in my loft to the sound of the sea and the sea gulls. I have been adding the finishing touches to some love tokens I started making yesterday because a gallery I supply in Hexham has sold 

out and customers have been asking for them. Romance is alive and well in Hexham....how lovely!!!

Yesterday I wet felted the tokens and used scraps of silk and cotton scrim to decorate...

hearts being the obvious motif.

While I was doing this my friend Jayne was making beautiful necklaces using pieces of previously hand dyed linen and lace, she fondly describes as 'me scrats'.

Here are examples of the basic tokens

ready to be embellished.

And here are  are some of them

decorated with embroidery, needle felting, ribbon and buttons

and ready to be sent to 'Artful' to spread the lurv......

new look blog

I'm quite pleased with it considering it was all changed at 2 o'clock this morning. I was happily surfing the net last night and went to my blog only to be met with a scary warning message not to proceed as my site may be infected...OH NO!!!! It seems that some content I have used from an external site was the problem. I checked my site using Google Webmaster Tools, it was clean but I removed the offending content anyway, which was my template, and then had to make it look reasonable before I went to bed. Tired this morning but relieved it's sorted and I apologise to anyone who tried to look at my blog yesterday and was greeted with the scary message. Will be sticking with blogger templates from now on, third party ones look so pretty and colourful but I would advise not to be tempted by them. Anyway, all squeaky clean now, thank goodness

here are a few pics of stuff ...

I've been working on.....

this week to send to Artful in Hexham .....

a day to dye for.....

Wahay!!! reached over 1,000 page views this week. Thank you to everyone who has had a little look here.

Such a lovely day yesterday, bright and breezy, perfect for having a go at some dyeing. I am obsessed with cotton scrim at the moment and couldn't wait to see how I could transform a plain piece into something more exciting. My friend Jayne (Jayne Hewison Textile Designer) offered to show me the ropes. This is how we did the first piece.... 

 ... soaked the scrim well in water, transferred to a dye pot of  pinky-coloured dye and left on a low heat on the stove. Rinsed and squeezed out the scrim and layed it flat on the table. Mixed up small containers of  blue and purple dye of varying intensity. Splodged (technical term) and brushed dye on randomly.

 

 Rinsed well again

 and hung out to dry

 in the warm breeze

 Here is violet sporting the finished article

And this is another piece with more subtle colour tones. Think I could become hooked on dyeing. Thanks for a fabulous day Jayne !!!

introducing violet...

 finally I have one... after months of searching charity shops in the hopes of finding an interesting, old battered one (no chance!, everyone kept telling me...and they were right!!), I had an idea to ask for one as an early birthday present. So now I have my own tailors dummy (thank you Jayne for letting me borrow your Betty for weeks at a time), her name is Violet and I just love draping things over her.

 Here she is draped with some gorgeous cotton scrim I bought from Raes Rags on Etsy. I just love the colours she has used to dye this piece... 

 so I was inspired to make a piece of felt using similar colours and then made these flower brooches.

 Here's Violet again, sporting a necklace I made this week.

And, still on a pupley, pinky, turquoisey theme I made this piece of felt yesterday using oddments of silk and cotton and made several heart brooches from  it....

....and embellished them with a few more scraps and a bit of needle felting.

 Hope everyone enjoyed a lovely Easter break!!

think this lovely weather is confusing me....

earlier in the week I decided to make a light, floaty scarf in lovely golds, oranges and greens

...so I began....laying out the fibres...

then wetting out the fibres, then the felting process... but somehow I just wasn't happy with it until I had felted it to within an inch of its life!!!

 resulting in a scarf not light and floaty at all, but warm and cosy!!

 however, sanity returned yesterday when the hand dyed scrim I had been waiting for arrived...

... melt in the mouth summery colours of lime and raspberry crush....

 ...couldn't wait to get cracking on this lovely summery scarf, perfect for the gorgeous warm weather we're having at the moment...of course it could be snowing next week !!!!

it's the easter bunny!!!

 had a lovely day on Saturday at Springwell Community Venue, lots going on....raffle, biscuit decorating for kids, lots of tea and gorgeous cake, grand appearance of a very photogenic easter bunny, and....customers!!!

...always find it inspiring to chat with other makers

                                              but probably had too much tea and cake...as usual.....

what is it about craft fairs that makes me just want to consume everything in sight??

easter things...

really enjoyed making these stripey egg cosies with added flower power... 

... millie can't decide which one she likes best, but she loves to be in on a photo

think this one is my favourite, I like the summer meadowiness of it

....also had the urge to make some birds

....hoping to sell some at Springwell at the weekend.