Reading challenge

Lured by the chance of book tokens and goodie bags, I've joined the Six Book Challenge that Stockport's library service is promoting. It isn't really pitched at people of my reading level, but it's nice that it is inclusive enough to encourage people like me to participate.

Considering that I have four books on the go at the moment, I shouldn't find it hard to read 6 by the end of November, but I also want to get a lot of other stuff done. It gets hard to find the time to enjoy a book, but as I'm between crafting projects, spending my commute reading sounds like a good plan.

Finished project: embroidered rock pool postcard

I was finishing the backing on my way to the guild meeting last Saturday, but I did get it done on time:

The good: I liked using the plastic confetti and sequins, which isn't something I would usually think to do, but the request was for bright pieces of work, and they did make it positively sparkly. The satin fabric was fun, too, and I do like the way it folds. The folds are just scrunched and held in place with either two small stitches or a bead. I might try the technique with different fabric someday, maybe on something machine washable.

The bad: My good intension of using several different stitches quickly turned into lines of mainly running stitch. It would have more interesting to look at and demonstrate embroidery with if I had used more stitches, but I'm not skilled enough to stitch without concentrating. So, "done is better than best" and using running stitch means it got done!

The ugly: Because it's now in the guild's keeping, I can't show you how bad the back and edges are. I should have used a larger margin around the edge of the displayed part of the work, to give more to work with when turning and lacing the back. The folds could have done with filling that wider margin as well. It did all come together, but it really was a bodge job.

So, now that the postcard is finished, what am I up to? Well, I've put my sketchbook back in my bag and I am occasionally doing a bit of drawing. My dream of making a comic book refuses to die, even though I don't do much but dream.

At the moment, I'm sort of put off crafting by the state of my craft table. How many times have I whined about what a mess it is, and how I can't do anything when it is so piled with stuff? Enough times that my manager seriously suggested I need a clear desk policy for my craft table.

My report on the Festival of Quilts

Need to start with a big thank you to all the people who made quilts, organised the show, or just attended the Festival of Quilts. I know it's a commercial event, but I still feel I should thank everyone involved.

It's been four years, but I finally got to go to the Festival of Quilts again. It was really nice, lots of great quilts and a really good atmosphere. I went on Saturday, and it was Tuesday before I felt recovered from the event, and it took until Friday for me to upload all my photos. So a big event for me. I'm just putting a few notes here, to act as reminders rather than give a full coverage of the event. I don't think I could write enough to do a full coverage!

I was surprised at how much I liked the quilts in the Pictorial Quilt category. Generally, I tend to think quilts should be quilts, and when a quilt is too representational, it tends to annoy me. But not at this show; I really liked a lot of them, not just for the technical skill in making them.

The way quilters used prints also really caught my eye this year, especially how prints were cut up and re-combined:

I also liked seeing how the back of patchwork was used, either as a second side or as a design element in its own right:

Something I didn't see a lot of was frayed fabric. I suppose quilting has its fads, but the absence of fluffy strips reminded me of how much I like that technique.

I took loads of pictures, maybe too many. At one point I felt like I was looking at my camera more than at the quilts.

The nicest thing happened on my way home: I was sitting in an aisle seat on the train, working on my embroidered postcard (despite having forgotten to take my scissors- I think I've already blogged about my reluctance to have different bags because of my dread of forgetting to put all the things into the current bag? Well, I was limited to using threads I had already cut because I switched bags to go to the show and left my cutting tools at home.) A troop of people who had been to the show (I could tell from their bags) were getting off at an earlier station, and one of them nodded to my work and told me "That's beautiful" as she passed by to leave the train! How sweet!

Here's how it is looking now:

Can't take the heat

I gave up knitting because it of the heat wave! I'm not sure if it actually was hotter than just sitting on the bus not knitting, or if psychologically I just associate knitting with stuff that keeps you warm.

Instead, I've started a hopefully quick bit of embroidery. The Manchester branch of the Embroiders' Guild is putting together a display piece of postcard size embroidered rock pools that can be arranged to link up with each other. I'm sort of slacking on the embroidery work lately, so I have a feeling of obligation rather than enthusiasm about this. Still, once I got into it, I am liking how it's looking.

And yes, I am doing it totally backwards by putting down the sequins and beads before the stitching. There isn't much of a plan for this project, and all I knew was that I wanted it to sparkle. So I started with the sparkles and I'll just put up with the thread catching on them while I fill in the rest. I have a definite deadline for this: 7 September, to hand over a the next guild meeting. Hopefully, the weather will be cool enough to pick up the knitting after that.

less sketching, more knitting

It's the end of June, my deadline for sketching on the bus. I looked over the half filled sketch book last night, and it's not a sucess. I have proven to myself that having a sketch book doesn't make my sketching improve.

I'm now rearranging my bag to fit in my next bus craft project:

This is a spool of thin cotton velour yarn that was going cheap at the embroiders' guild meeting a few years ago. I have been knitting it up for quite a while now, usually just when I'm doing my minimum 30 minutes of Wii Fit. (Exercise is easier to do if I can do something else at the same time.) It's 4 meters long at the moment.

What is it going to be? It's going to be the edging on a quilt. Have you seen the stellarquilts? I love their textural qualities. Originally, I was thinking of trying to make one myself, but the amount of stitching was too intimidating. I started thinking about how to make a simpler quilt, but focusing on texture. My current idea is to put together a selection of different textured fabrics, including some swatches of knitting, in fairly large pieces without following a pattern. If the totally patternless sewing is too difficult, Plan B involves sewing patternless strips, then sewing the strips together.

For the backing, I have an old king size duvet cover in my fabric stash, so it will be a large quilt when it all gets put together. I know the knitting will shrink, but I'm not sure by how much. If it shrinks to just the right size to edge the entire quilt, I will be very surprised. Since the whole quilt is planned to be patternless, I'm not bothered if I need to splice in a different material for the edging. The important thing is to have something that feels good, and I'm certain that this bit of knitting will be wonderful to touch.

The need to assess my use of time and what goals I have is still building. My natural inclination is to stop doing something if it gets hard, but if I want to ever get something done, I'm going to have to find a way of managing the frustration and working through it. Or, change my mind about what I want to do.

Time to time box

I am admitting to failure here. Instead of building up to drawing more, I'm still struggling to draw at all. And that's really bothering me. I feel like I ought to try to figure out what's going wrong, how to get motivated, blah, blah, blah. But really, I don't want to think about it. Besides, in my experience, thinking about not drawing never solved the problem of not drawing. (Though I have to admit, thinking has solved other problems.)

So, I've decided just to time box the problem. Rather than just giving up now, I'm going to try to sketch more, but only until the end of June. Come July, I'll start some sort of fabric craft. I don't know what it will be, but I'm looking forward to it already.

Oh, the irony

The other day, P did a google images search for his name and found loads of sites using his CC'd pictures, including this picture of me on a career guidance site:

image by BinaryApe (CC)

I have no idea what the site is like, but I found it literally laughable that a picture of me was used on anything offering career advice. I'm happy with my job and all, but it was just luck that I got it. I had a temping job, and some friends there saw the ad for the job while I was off and requested an application on my behalf. I was the only applicant, and the interviewers thought I was alright, or at least a better option than re-running the ad. So I'm still at the job 6 years later with no plans to further my career until they make me redundant.

I wish I could say my lack of focus on a traditional career meant I was more focused on the creative fun stuff that I do, but that would be a lie. I've been feeling especially un-focused lately, and I've not been doing much to speak of, much less blog about. But in one of those happy coincidences, I picked up a book at the library called Crafting Creativity: 52 brilliant ideas for awakening the artistic genius within, and, though at initial glance it didn't look promising, I couldn't see where on the shelf it had come from so I checked it out anyway. It's actually quite a good read (better than the other two books I checked out, which I will mention no more about), and I'm hoping that I'll be implementing some of the techniques soon. I'm especially interested in the idea of visualizing to improve crafting skills, like the way athletes visualize as part of their training. It seems a very do-able exercise, and I can sort of see already how it could be helpful. Some of the others sound a bit too professional to me, but others sound fun. I don't think I'll actually do that many, but it was interesting to just read about them.