Back from my summer hiatus

Hello!

I’m back! I was only going to have a short hiatus for the duration on my holiday in Paris, but since I came home I’ve been recovering from that and dealing with a bad time with my anxiety and depression. Now, however, it’s time to get back to business, as it were. 

In sewing club news, we’ve moved to new premises and a new day/time, and have budded off from the original The Sewing Clubs group based in Grimsby to form Immingham Sewing Club, an independent community group. We’ve had new members join and we’re really beginning to make progress.

I’ve made a skirt using a no-pattern instruction set in a magazine. I’m quite pleased with it; I modified the instructions to add a zip rather than have it elasticated.

I’ve made another dragon, and have named them Ethelbert. (As with Herbert the pattern came from makerist.com and is listed as Yoki the Fat Dragon).

I’ve also made some repairs and modifications to my backpack after the trial run in Paris. It’s now a cross-body bag with a clip closure. The Velcro and draw string wasn’t secure enough. It’s my everyday bag now, I can get quite a bit in it which is useful if I suddenly decide to do some shopping while I’m at the library or walking the dogs.

I started making Christmas stock for the craft stall yesterday. I had a couple of metal hoops that I was going to use for something else but turned them in to rag wreaths instead. I might make some more later in the month or in October. I have to order the hoops in and I might get some seasonal material too. The large hoop used three fat quarters and some bits from my scrap box to make, the smaller one used two fat quarters. I have a couple I’ve made myself in the past and put a jar candle in the centre; it looks quite good, especially if there’s writing on the jar that you want to hide.

I’ve started another corner-to-corner blanket, in the same blue as the last one. I’m going to see what other blues I have so I can complete it.

Special mention crafter: the lady who runs ‘What Shall I Wear?‘, King’s Road Craft Units, Cleethorpes (also online) who makes a lot of the skirts and dresses in her shop, up to a size twenty four and has a scrap bin that you can raid for £1.50 and fill a paper bag. She’s very friendly and makes some lovely retro clothes. I’m going to have a play with the scraps I got. She even gave me some 4 inch squares because she was having a clear out of her fabric scraps and loads of tartan. I might make the tartan in to another rag wreath.

The reason I was in Cleethorpes was to visit Pot Luck, another crafty place where you choose a ceramic item, pain it and then it goes in the kiln to be fired. You collect the item a few days later. My sister goes fairly often and works of some big items. She finished a lovely cottage biscuit jar yesterday and started a Frankenstein’s monster for Halloween. She’s a very good artist, like both of her children. I don’t seem to have inherited the painting skills of the rest of them but I did paint a mug. I’m relatively pleased with it.

Before firing (my photograph)

After firing (from Love of Ceramic Facebook page album Last of the Summer Beauties)

And that’s it for me for this evening. I’m going to be working on a cross-stitch, a freehand embroidery and that c2c blanket for the next few weeks, working on my novel and starting a Masters degree in Creative Writing at the University of Lincoln at the end of the month so I’m pretty busy at the moment.

Bye.