Sea shanty

Been a while since I last blogged! Have made a few things in the interim, but haven't got round to posting anything. Trying to get my sewing mojo back into action, so I'm starting up a new mini project. Hopefully I will get round to posting it by bit. I've taken inspiration for this one from a visit this weekend to the Mersey Riverfestival on the Liverpool waterfront where I took lots of photos of the beautiful tall ships in the harbour. I want to try and have a go at doing a photo collage embroidery. Following some instructions I'd found on line I ironed some calico onto an A4 sheet of freezer paper and trimmed it down to size. Then I copied the photos I wanted to use in to Microsoft project and used the artistic filters on one of them to give it a pencil drawn look. If you have a program like photoshop then the world is your oyster for manipulating your photos, but for this one the microsoft project while basic did the trick nicely. Original photo: Having got the base image, my next step was to start embroidering over the black pencil lines: Will post more when it's done. One last bonus pic - managed to catch one of the tall ships as it was leaving the dock on my way back home tonight:

Wild Dying

Last Saturday I had the pleasure of attending the Eco Spectrum Natural Dying course held by Justine Aldersly Williams at her studio The Wild Dyery based at Carrs Farm garden centre: http://thewilddyery.com/

Orkney Views

I managed to squeeze a little time for some crafting in during our recent family visit to Orkney in amongst all the visiting to the in-laws relatives and a bit of sight seeing. The plan was to make some pictures to use as a base for embroideries, but I'm almost tempted to leave them as they are. I've always thought of myself as someone who can't paint or draw for toffee though I love crafting activities, so I was pleased they worked quite well.