I'm here

Thank all of you for your support and good wishes. Mr T should be home from hospital tomorrow. But we are not counting on anything until he is in his favourite armchair. 

Meanwhile I have been busy and I have had to do a bit of vacuuming up of snips and scraps of cotton and fabric which formed a colourful layer under the dining table.

Amongst other projects, I have been working on a larger version of my crazy patchwork purses - a small shoulder bag. I have stitched down the patchwork and added some free-sewing machine stitching and it is now ready for some hand stitched embellishments.

Meanwhile I snapped this rather colourful Six-spot Burnet moth ...

... and my new penstemon  is a rather more vivid blue than I anticipated....

...but it looks great with the wonderful cerise lychnis coronaria.

Hopefully I shall be 'on-line' again soon, and will be able to catch-up with everyone's posts.

lavender blues

Things have been eventful so I thought I'd keep you up to date. Mr T had a bit of a set back yesterday as he has developed an infection, which could mean another op. So today I have been touching wood and keeping my fingers crossed. I have been looking for good luck signs all day - they opened a check-out at the supermarket and I was first in the queue, three green lights in a row, saw two robins and it rained enough to make watering veg unnecessary but I was cursing myself for looking forward to a few days to myself.  When I saw him today he was up and smiling - pumped full of antibiotics. The infection was no worse so every bit of my will power is on overtime hoping that tomorrow it is on the retreat.
I have been stitching nearly all day- and hopefully will have a few things to share with you soon. I'm lunching with friends tomorrow so that will be good. Life always seems in suspension when you are waiting for hospital visiting time to come round.

Thank you

Thank you all for your kind wishes - Mr T's op went well so he should be home before too long. I am SO tired but cannot relax enough to take a nap and certainly am not up to doing all that crafting I was going to do with the house to myself. I will catch up with you all later. I am going to try to find a soppy film I can watch and fall asleep in the chair and miss the ending!
I hope you are enjoying your weekend,
Jill

All round the garden....

Rose Gertrude Jekyll

I feel as if I have been round and round the garden this week. Mr T is going into hospital at 7am tomorrow for what should be a routine op. But he has a horrible habit of being different and we have got all our fingers crossed. He should be out in (3, 5, 7, 10) days depending on who you speak to. I shall be happy with 7. So I shall either be on-line a lot in the next few days with time on my hands or just too busy filling the house with my projects before I have to retreat back to my work room.  I have been very busy and I shall be sharing what I have been up to later, but meanwhile here is a tour of my sister's garden on the Isle of Wight.

 

Janet is a tireless worker and as you can see she has a beautiful garden absolutely bursting with gorgeous flowers and shrubs, as well as a flourishing vegetable garden. This was when I visited last month. Now she says the dry weather is taking its toll so I am glad I managed to capture it at its best. I am sure you will agree that it is worthy of any gardening magazine and I must let her know her garden is here on-line as she hasn't seen these pictures yet, due to her sisters tardiness in getting a disc together for her.

Up the garden path - I believe Janet laid all these slabs herself.

Water lilies

Janet had a pond dug when she had builders in adding an extension - I think they got carried away with the mini-digger.

The pond is raised as her garden goes up-hill. Here she is doing a bit of dead-heading.

This lovely archway divides the garden.

It is a average size suburban bungalow garden, but by creating lots of different areas the garden feel larger than it is.

Climbing Rose Handel

A shady spot by the pond.

A bumble bee enjoying the kniphofia.

The veggie patch

Climbing Rose Ice-berg

Looking back towards her bungalow.

I am sure she won't mind me mentioning that she is a widow bringing up two teenage boys on her own, as well as working three days a week and constantly crafting in her 'spare' time. Her energy and resourcefulness leave me speechless, so this is dedicated to my little sis.

The Evolution of the Paper Moth

Last Saturday I photographed these Eyed Hawk Moths and dyed some paper for another project...

... and I just knew something was going to happen.

First I made this large cut-out moth in my A4 Journal.

But something was not right, it was too large and neither one thing or another. So I cut out lots of small moths.

As I had decided they were 'paper moths' they needed to be on a paper background. I felt these small versions looked much better.

Another ideas that has been going around my head is to make some Lotus Flower books which I had first seen on Heloise blog. It was for these that I had coloured the paper, but I hadn't decided on a cover theme. The paper moth seemed ideal. I used the moths on the front covers.

The background is a scanned paper bag from The Chattanooga Choo Choo museum in Chattanooga and an old style publicity newspaper from Niagara Falls, both souvenirs from my Greyhound trip round the USA in 1977. (Rummaging around all the bits of paper I brought home cost me several hours of reminiscing). I added a bit of distressing ink, pen and pencil work and a bit of glitter. The results are here and I am pleased with the way they have turned out.  The pages are folded 10cm squares and the covers just over 5cm to allow for an overlap.

Linda at Blue-eyed Girl was my inspiration here and she gives a super tutorial on how to make these pretty little books.

 

I tried to be aware of my creative process here; the initial idea of wanting to use the image of the moth, then the frustration as it didn't quite work out as I first thought. Then the connection of different inspirations and influences to complete the final design. Now I feel no desire to repeat the pattern, but may well try some variation.

I am still staggering from the amount of 'stuff' I have manged to  create in the last year or so since retiring. I want to feel that I am not just madly running from one novelty to the next, but following my own 'art foundation' course and hopefully somewhere along the  way I can feel I am truly on an artistic journey.

Thank you for sharing it with me.

A new month

Where did June go?

 It is hard to ignore the passage of time when you are filling these in, but I started last July and I must say I enjoy looking back at what I wrote.

Here is July 2010.

 

I hope you like my new Blog layout. This way I can post larger photographs, it was quite easy with the new design tab.

SWIFTS

Here is something I have been thinking about for some time. I did a page in my journal last year devoted to swifts, but I wasn't quite happy with it so I thought I would have another go. Some of the dyed paper I made earlier in the week was just the background I was looking for. It is not a great piece of art, more a poster, but it expresses how I feel about swifts, they speak for themselves.

I learned some new facts about Swifts from this BTO page.

• 
  
  In spells of bad weather Swifts can foray for food hundreds of miles away from their nesting sites so those on the south coast could be feeding in northern central France.
• 
  
  Their eggs can survive long periods of chilling while the parent birds are away.
• 
  
  Young birds can also survive chilling to the point of torpor, reviving quickly when the parents return with food.
• 
  
  The young can survive up to three weeks without food whereas adults swifts become weak after starving for two or three days and usually die after four days without food.
• 
  
  Swifts are related to humming birds.

Swift lino print

I already knew;

• 
  
  Swifts sleep and mate on the wing.
• 
  
  When they leave the nest they have one chance to fly as they cannot take off from the ground and will then be airborne for three or four years until they raise their own family.

I find the life of these birds which grace us with their presence every year truly wonderful, and if I were to have to choose an animal existence it would have to be a Swift for me

For moth lovers...

You know who you are...

Yesterday afternoon as we were getting ready to go out I took a walk round the garden and  to see what bumblebees I could see when I spotted what a I thought was a dead leaf caught up in the valerian and knautia. A quick scramble for the camera and the moth book quickly identified a pair of eyed hawk moths. They were huge and perfectly still. They will flash their pink 'eye' on the lower wing if disturbed but this pair were unmoved. I didn't want to hustle them too much. Here are a couple more pictures.

They're dedicated to Lesley of PRINTED MATERIAL, a lover of moths and all things beautiful.

The wings are amazing and although I have seen these moths before, I haven't had such a  good view. I love the way they look like a dried and twisted leaf or flaking bark, it is hard to believe your eyes and that their wings are smooth and flat. I definitely feel a bit of art coming on. 

As you can tell my mood has lifted, thanks for your kind words. I spent the afternoon mixing up lots of Brusho powder colours and then layering paper in different colours. I then laid it out on the lawn to dry. It was even too hot to sit in the shade out-side. (Well, for me it was)

 Could there be some moth wings in there?

I shall be busy for a couple of days so time to mull over a few ideas and the end of the month is drawing closer, so another journal page is also calling. I will leave you with this photograph, which my dearly beloved was not amused by, but I was...

(watching England beat the Aussies at cricket)