Annual leave- progress, and relaxation

Hi there, The weather is not being very kind to me on this weeks annual leave, it is very dark and dismal and sometimes rainy, however, I am progressing with decorating my lobby, have now got all the paintwork rubbed down and repainted, ta daa!

It isn't showing at it's shiniest because of the lack of daylight we have today but believe me, it is shiny!, now I have to keep both doors open until its dry as I have painted in the door jambs, so I am hoping it won't rain too hard---or thunder! !

Well whilst I was waiting for coats of paint to dry today I decided to look at my new coffeee table book I bought from a book club some time ago and have been too busy to give a ' proper look at ' yet, until today in fact . It is a lovely sewing technique book by Ruth Singer with loads of good info and some make-its between the pages, I'll give you a little peek of it now whilst I have a well deserved cuppa.

There are pages that show different hand embroidery stitches, I know how, and have used these stitches loads of times in my life but when you haven't hand embroidered for a while then decide to do some it's surprising how you forget just exactly what to do, so this will be a good reference when I need to do some more at some stage.I'm sorry about the poor quality of the photo's, again because of the poor daylight today, but if you click on these photo's I think they enlarge somewhat, (not entirely sure as I am still very new to this blogging lark so please forgive me if they don't).

There are also instructions on how to do lots of different seams, decorative and functional, so again good reference there.

And this is my favourite section at the moment, an article about felting old wool sweaters and things to make felt! I decided a while ago to have a go at this and then make the felt up into all kinds of crafty things. So I went into charity shops on monday and bought two lovely cashmire sweaters for about £8.00 and took them home to put them into a hot wash to felt them. felt a bit guilty as they actually were beautiful sweaters but one was a size 8 and one a size 16 so they wouldn't have actually fit me!, anyway it's all in the interests of crafting so that's ok, isn't it? I will show you what I make with them in a later post, I have lots of ideas, but am not going to share them with you just yet, -- I will just say it will involve lots of free machine embroidery, which will be a bit of an experiment as I have in fact never tried before, and hotfix gems and --oh lots of techniques which I will try and put all together and come up with something nice and eye catching. -- I hope!

So all that to come, have also been making dolls clothes for Barbie to replace the ones I sold but have been so busy haven't yet had time to photograph them , but they will be coming, and what else?- oh yes my rug for winter, have been busy crocheting away in the evenings, so will show you some of that soon too.

Well if you have stayed with me till the end of this post thanks for listening to my ramblings and would love to hear from you too, anything at all, what you have been busy doing/crafting lately or anything that takes your fancy, it doesn't matter if its six hours or six months from now, although I would prefer six hours as it gets awful lonely in blogland when one is talking to oneself! and one starts to feel one is getting a little eccentric!

Bye till next time! x