I'm on holiday!

Well, just not going to my 'weekend' job this week, which means 2 whole days extra in the studio ;) So of course that made me a day later than usual posting with no threat of a 9am start. I momentarily lost my 'sieze the day' attitude! Well, we did unusually have  B&B guests, great weather for them & very welcome indeed, so there's my excuse.

So, a while ago I got a commission from the landscape artist, Pam Carter - she has a lovely holiday home a few doors down from us - & thought it was about time to stop provaricating (sp?) & get on with it. Thing was she asked for a gauntlet cuff & I haven't done one of those before so lots of thought & procrastination necessary before getting down to it. Glancing at the very gory Sparticus that the boys were watching - the Middlest came up for a visit - I was inspired by the Gladiator's leather gauntlets! Then I couldn't find the measurements, Heaven's sake. That meant picking up each item on my desk & table in the studio, putting it in it's place (& a place for everything!) & about 150 items later, after the Youngest said it would have been clever to have clipped it to the bundle he was holding, but never mind (he's so PATient! The DH came in, took one look & left again!) He went over to a box & I said it would unlikely be in there but wondered if I HAD  been clever enough to actually put it in the box (my tidying off the shared table to give the DH space box) & there it was.

In the first pic I fused purple silky fabric to an old guest towel, the likes of which people of my mothers generation would have put out when they knew guests were coming - my interpretation of batting. Then I laid whispy yarn all over, then I tried to get between the yarn with bits of magenta silky fabric & poked at them with the tip of the iron to fuse them down, then tried to get between all that with little bits of bondaweb that I could stick I mean fuse gold foil onto. I know, a about t but that's how I work;) Otherwise how whould I know what went where? ;) The pic immediately above had a piece of pink organza laid over & I've stitched along the yarn & around the magenta oblongs. I started the piece as one big piece before I found the measurement & would you believe that a guest towel, lightly trimmed each side is the exACT width required for this cuff? (bearing in mind I wanted the stitching to go top to bottom) cool, huh? It's a good thing I made a paper template as I'd no idea a gauntlet would be this shape, surprising how much fabric a 'tube' takes up.

Not so cool was that when I decided to free motion embroider some little circles here & there, to balance up the linear feel of it, garnet stitch I believe it's called, just before I got down to making some loops out of the magenta 'ribbon' & 'buttons' out of the spare fabric, I dropped the tiny screw that changes the feet of the machine, onto the floor. Well I just wasn't going to go there & came in to talk to you guys, instead. I will find it.

In my clearing up parts of the week I wondered why I had so many plastic bags in a large pile. I realised they were for ironing into 'paper' & figured if I got on & did that the pile would shrink dramatically &  could be stored in the 'paper' drawer. Result ;)

I mentioned to the youngest that life was about moving things from one place to another & he found it a rather depressing thought. I must also mention to him that it's what you do inbetween times is the important thing. I think he knows that. He was cheered up by the rugby - in this house where we're English, Welsh & Irish by blood, live in Scotland,  honeymooned in France & also love anything Italian, we don't really mind who wins ;)