Weaving

Trying out some new cotton yarns on the tiny loom to see how they might go together. Will also try a more balanced weave to see how that goes.

Stitching

I'm back to stitching tonight - working on a textile map of one of our daily walks. This is the field that sometimes has linseed growing it with the beautiful blue flowers but this winter had a mix of plants to help the birds through winter.

Outdoor sketching

A sunny afternoon so we went up to Barbury Castle, an Iron Age hill fort on the Ridgeway, and I spent the afternoon doing exploratory sketches. The scratches and blending of colours came from pieces of hard chalk found on site. Not my usual way of drawing!

Weaving

Trying out 2 heddle weaving patterns from an old Dryad booklet from 1971. Quite fun to do but the cheap yarn I used for the samples was a beast to warp up.

Bookmaking

I'm repurposing an old, falling apart, book. My intention is to make a sketchbook to take out for drawing outdoors. Now it's part way assembled I think it might be too heavy to carry far! The pages are all from recycled papers to give a variety of surfaces to work on. The cover of the book was removed and strengthened and I've just stitched the signatures together over linen tapes to try and provide a bit more strength to the whole structure. I've used French link stitch over the tapes to again provide more rigidity. But I can see that I did not allow enough width between the holes to allow for the tapes to lie flat. You learn by your mistakes!