Works in progress...

This week seems to have lasted a month!  Not only have we had heavy snow which has come and gone,  but other events seem to have strung the week out.  My sister flew to New Zealand on Wednesday for an eight week break!! She and her partner are staying with friends of his in Aukland. Of course the snow situation at the beginning of the week meant a lot of weather web-site watching and  nail biting.  She and Bob are not seasoned travellers, and neither have taken on such an adventure before, so it was with great relief that I followed the flight information to establish all connections had gone smoothly.  Even more thrilling when she rang me yesterday evening.

I have at least four stitching projects on the go at once for my City and Guilds unit on appliqué.  None of them are finished.  However I have sat down and done some machine stitching. Now I need to go back to a needle and thread.

The sunshine shows up the texture of these samples.

These two are exercises in shadow appliqué. A bit of hand stitching should liven the bottles up.

On Saturday afternoon I thought I would sit for an hour with my sketchbook and RSPB sheet for the Big Garden Bird Count.  Marvin joined me at an upstairs windowsill ... and then nothing! All week we have been watching three types of finches, fieldfares, three types of tit, up to 10 blackbirds, as well as the usual sparrows, dunnock, robin and pigeons. Sometimes I have refilled the feeders twice a day. It must have been because the thaw had set in, we hardly saw anything - not even a blue tit!

We both got rather bored, and my sketchbook page mainly empty, except for some rather poor renditions of house sparrows.

This week on my iPad I have been recording Gustav Klimt. We had a Klimt calendar last year, and as Mr T won't let me cut it up. I thought I would try and record some of my favourite patterns on the iPad.  It really does lend itself to this sort of thing as to trying to capture all these colours with paint would be a major undertaking.

"Dreaming of Gustav"

I love the shapes, and so adaptable to a bit of appliqué. 

The other bit of news, forwarded to me by Cathy, was of Gretel Parker's loss of her partner Andy.  If any of you follow her blog Middle of Nowhere you will know about her and Andy's adventure in buying their first home together, which turned out to be rather more of a task than they bargained for.  They christened it Bodge Cottage and Gretel's recent posts have been about how much work they were going to have to do, along with her cheery optimism and delightful needle felt creations.  Andy's sudden death must be devastating, and now she faces the possibility of losing her home. Her friends have set up a relief fund for her - you can read about it here. I'm not campaigning on her behalf, I'm just moved by the generosity of the (relative) strangers who have donated. Such sudden losses touch many of our lives, I know they have mine. In many cases I have felt inadequately helpless, as I have not been needed to do anything practical to support friends, so in memory of those lost I pass on this information.

The snow has gone and the sun has been out today. Who knows what the next week will bring. I do hope yours is a good one.

Jill