Winter's back

I don't mind a bit of wind & rain, keeps me in the studio working. As soon as the sun is out & it has been off & on this week with beautiful rainbows,  inbetween the sleet showers I've been trying to finish some pruning. My it's a bit chilly tho! There's snow on the hills down to a few hundred feet. The weather has flattened the crocus but I enjoyed them while they were upright. Working in the studio in turn keeps me away from the news. It's not often it brings a tear to my eye but the latest earthquake is devastating. Possibly not helped by the fact the middlest is in NZ & it was put on alert for the tsunami. He's fine, he rang yesterday but who'd have thought he'd be away for 3 weeks & there'd be 2 earthquakes? That's selfish - I wish there was actually something I could do. So I work.

The honesty is almost totally shredded in the garden so I used some seed heads that I harvested in earliy  winter. A few practices for my sketchbook.

gold 'brown' paper, dressmakers tisssue gold leaf & a piece of lace from a top I found in a charity shop made completely of different lace strips. I was happy to pay the £4 or £5 as it was for my work & quite a find but I can't believe the day has come when I can't afford, well, justify,  the prices in a charity shop. Everyone's trying to grab as much as they can before all the money runs out I guess. Rediculous.

More dm tissue, chocolate wrappers gold metallic organza with pattern - remnant bin YEARS ago,slubby silky fabric. I looks like an alien the way I built it so I turned it upsidedown & I think I prefer it. I don't like 'seeing things' in my work, specially don't want aliens creeping in ;)

Haven't used feathers for ages, seem to only be able to use white seagull feathers against the color blue - this is potato sacking, I think, I meant to hand stitch along the stitch holes that appear when ripped open. Need to make some more rusted paper & the background is some papers I stuck down ages ago didn't like it so as everyone was doing, I covered it with a wash of gesso, much better. Very stiff to stitch in tho, need to use weaker pva maybe.

purple burgundy shiny fabric, Liberty print , text, gold organza, little windows thru to the layers beneath.

This honesty collage has a linen ground with the gessoed paper & burgundy purple  fabric, a little bit of text & gold organza. I free machined (yes, me!!!!) around the seed heads thanks to watching a Talking Threads program with Colouricious last year. This episode had Di Wells on who is a quilter, uses 3 or 4 layers of tissue paper & stitches thru honesty seed heads/casings with lots of different patterns - she carefully crumples the tissue paper, rearranging & softening the fibres which is similar to what Cas Holmes calls Momigami, a Japanese process that uses a little oil  to change the paper makeup.  I 'crumpled' some  heavy brown paper normally found at the bottom of a banana box, as you do; nearly broke my hands, wish I'd known about the oil then! Di Wells makes really lovley delicate work. I'm not a quilter, nor am I delicate! I just got totally involed in rewatching the video when I was collecting the links, fatal that! & I forgot about her  suggesting using Acrylic Wax to soften for stitching &  protect the seedhead, much like I was doing with gel medium & the Acer leaf a while ago. Hmm,  who minds a bit of shattering ;) I'm so grateful to Colouricious, too as they are sending out all the episodes so we can see them again........for free. Go check them out, It might not be too late to join in. Lots of video snippets too.

Linen ground, gold 'brown paper & gessoed ground with gold leaf flakes, stitched of course. Oh & that wonderful gold leaf pen. I dread the day when that runs out!