Some Colouring-In

 Apart from cooking, shopping and ironing , this weekend has been mainly spent Colouring-In having selected several potential ideas  for Brentford Boat series

 Some of the materials used - watercolours; neocolour crayons; grey pitt pens; inktense blocks and pencils. First time trying the inktense blocks (I love my pencils!) and I'm not hugely impressed - even with a gripper they're very crumbly, like conte. Nice colour range though - must add indigo and olive green to my neocolour collection.

 Started off with watercolour which was fun but decided really needed tonal studies. So printed out traced sketches onto thick copier paper  and tried some schemes out. Next step collage.

Been A Bit Quiet

The bug I brought back from Malham developed into phyringitis and laryngitis so I've been rather quiet this week apart from a hacking cough and croaky or nonexistent voice. In between snoozes, crunching paracetamol and sucking homemade treacle toffee( only thing that soothes) I've been making some progress on my Tunisian Door quilt.
I'd printed out some photos of door knockers onto fabric but wasn't satisfied how how they blended in with the back ground fabric. Time to crack out the 'inktense ' pencils and try to match the colours/markings of the shibori fabric.

Pleased with the results (top) and the time spent painstakingly glueing the 'nail' patterns on organza with FuseFX - fiddly but it alters the surface of sheers far less than Bondaweb. I used a bit of 'Badger Balm' on my hands while handling it (trick learnt for handling PMC) and that helped a bit.
I'm now auditioning bricks !
My peace was disturbed yesterday by a huge thud on the conservatory roof - a dead pigeon in the gutter. Using rubber gloves I lobbed it over the fence into the unused alley behind our garden but as it was rather a pathetic throw got Ian to apologize next door in case it had landed there. Ed thought it highly amusing but was grateful for the warning . Otherwise the first he might have known about it was Cipher(his dog) bringing him a present in bed.
As Pigeon Tales go, still got a long way to match Tilly the Jack Russell bringing in a pigeon with a bagel round its neck....

Working Through Ideas II

Another productive day - I posted off 'Gythion Glow' for the Contemporary Quilt 'Thin Blue Line' and entry forms for 2 quilts for the Festival of Quilts. One piece is near completion , the other is in the planning stages: I spent a happy morning printing photos and doing several sketches and watercolour studies. The idea or concept and planning what I'm going to do are always the most difficult and time consuming (but fun !) part, the execution is usually much quicker and straight forward. There was much chewing of pencil while filling in the entry form - first of all what category? I'd orginally received a form for 'Pictorial' but as it will probably end up quite abstract, I thought 'contemporary ' was more appropriate and printed off that form from the website. Then what size? I learnt my lesson from 'Strindberg Shore' which while it had impact took a long time to do. I've done several pieces 80-90cm square so settled for that - it's big enough to have a variety of scale of stitching but achievable.
The inspiration is the Town Beach at Paralio Astros - when we were collecting orange coloured stones for our 'World Beach Project' starfish, there had been a storm the day before and the patterns of seaweed , and the banks of sand and stones were fantastic - the next day they'd all gone (along with our artwork!)
I've added to my collection of 'Inktense' pencils - I particularly like the new ' brown madder' one , perfect for seaweed. My favourite mug has been relegated to pencil holder as it very soon developed a crack. It's a very large china one with the text " I am not awake yet, don't even think about talking to me". I'm not a morning person ( at least until I've had my coffee)