In need of inspiration????

I seem to be being bombarded by ideas at the moment, not complaining you understand.  Rather that than sitting scatching my head.  Having had sparks fly at Textiles in Focus on Sunday this moning I found this on Neil Gaiman's journal


Intrigued I headed here and then here for the stories.  I have only read two but WOW.  What an amazing ideaand what an imagination he has.
Reading the January story I suddenly had an mage in my head, I wish I was properly able to interpret what I saw in my mind's eye.

I called it Happy New Year.

More trees.......

Over the last two years my participation in the Calendar Girls swap has brought me many treasures and non more so than the card that arrived this morning from Pippa. The envelope would have been a more than saitisfactory interpretation of this months picture by Arthur Rackham chosen by Jenny

This is the envelope

Looks like a walk through an enchanted wood, but this is the card.

Click on the picture to get just a little feel for the wonderful texture of this little work of art.

And as though that were not enough these came scattering out of the envelope, found on the forst floor I'm sure.

North East memory

Sharon has been reminiscing about a holiday in Whitby in the north east of England. Being a mixed media artist she has some good pictures. She has a beautiful photgraph of Rievaulx Abbey
This is a photograph I took when we visited some years ago, someone from English Heritage, with great imagination, had placed this figure of a monk in the grounds, it had no face it was just the shape of a figure draped in a monks habit, it stood under the trees just "watching". Very effective and spine tingly!

This is a page I did in an altered book, the background of the "chapel" is a digitally altered photograph of some of the wonderful arches of the ruins.


Thanks for the memory jog Sharon.

Question?

Why do we like the needle arts so much? I think this morning , for me, goes a long way to answer the question. After Sharon's round up I went to my workroom to tidy up a bit, after my marathon tidy a couple of weeks ago I don't want it to let it go just yet, (it will happen I'm sure!!) Tidying finished I picked up a piece of cheap duster I had painted. I bought 12 in a packet in the 99p shop because they looked like felt I thought they might be worth experimenting on. So this morning I reached for my new felting needle and I started what was intended to be a sort of landscape. I took the piece to the machine to add a bit of texture with free machine stitching and suddenly there was this bird. I ditched the landscape and went with the bird and here he is, sort of the last swallow. There are two scans because I suddenly realised that the scanner light had caught the bead of his eye and just to see what would happen I re-scanned it the other way round and sure enough it gives him a different expression. Marvellous!

Once upon a time........

.......there were three eyelet stitches,they lived on a small piece of canvas. Two of them plodded on, doing what eyelet stitches do, though they often dreamed. The third one was always a bit of a rebel and kept trying to be different which caused him a lot of problems.

Time went by and then one day something amazing happened. They came to the edge of the canvas! The rebel jumped for joy, jumped right of the edge, gave a couple of twirls and turned himself into a butterfly, which he thought was very clever. The second one stretched out in all directions and suddenly found he was round, he rolled away and probably visited TAST people all over the world. The third one stretched out and found that he could fly, he found a place he liked in the sky and became a star which shone happily ever after. THE END.



Don't ask, just indulge an old lady!!!!!!!!!!!

Incidently, now it is February, the birthday stone for this month is amethyst so that is my TAST colour, quite a relief, really, after all that dark red.



Just to prove I am still drawing.