winter crafting

The one good thing about seemingly endless rain, cold and wind is that we spend more time indoors making things. But it's hard to photograph what's being made because it's too dull. The house feels quite industrious at the moment, even our trip out today resulted in a number of home made christmas cards (quite an achievement for us in November!)

And this was T's first go at pyrography and it's beautiful, he enjoyed it so much that he has just spent the birthday money he has been hoarding for five months on a pyrography set. He is checking the post every day, he just can't wait to set up in business!

hallowe'en after the trick or treating

we took a very late night walk on hallowe'en (midnight, when the veil is thinnest) but we saw no ghosts. Sadly the costumes were gone by the time we took the camera out.

late night park playing and parcouring

and the Exchange gallery is as blue as A's top

A performance

A performance outside the Tate involving incredible noise, music, Linder, our local montol festival band and guise dancers and a beautiful costume

the veiled lady is wearing gold hoofed and cloven toed boots that we couldn't get a picture of

there are antlers coming from the back of her dress, at this point she was shaking to the beat hence the blurr

the mazey/montol horse

some of the musicians

Really impossible to describe but quite an experience!

cold wet wintry days

finding pieces of time to sew

a bobble bag in bright colours for a change

some soup cooking going on (santa hat was for hallowe'en of course)

and some chillin' to Pink

girl with umbrella

girl with umbrella, originally uploaded by glassmountain.

This is my new embroidery design. I've traced it onto linen using a 6B pencil and tracing paper, tomorrow I'll post photos of the sewing, I've made the umbrella handle thinner too. A is complaining that these girls don't smile but it's raining!

Reading

Every so often I find that none of the books I pick up are satisfying and when that happens I tend to go on a crime frenzy. I do tend to favour the Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers type of crime novel where everyone is terribly civilised and no one gets over emotional about a murder,especially not if it's a rich relative that they inherit from. So the Marjorie Allingham novel that I saw recommended by PD James (whose Dalgliesh novels I love when I am in a crime mood) fits the bill perfectly.

But, I do also like the Stieg Larrsson novels, I have finished the first and when I finish my gentle English detective novel I may feel brave enough to venture on to the second. The first was a really good book, surprisingly political. I had been under the impression that Sweden was a very tolerant and civilised country but this novel shows a different side to Swedish policies. It is quite a brutal novel though and, I suppose, more realistic than my quiet English detective stories, so at the moment I'm sticking to a bit of unrealistic reading.

A and I also finished 'The Little White Horse' this week which was fabulously magical and I would recommend it to anyone. The film of the book has had bad reviews and I have to say that the stills we saw didn't look anything like the carefully described Moonacre manor. The book is so beautiful that we have decided not to spoil it by watching a bad adaptation of it.

November weather in October

fog and rain after all the sunshine. It's the time of year when we stop wondering if tomorrow will be warm because winter is on the way. So T got the globe out and photographed it.

Then he photographed the living room, it takes a bit of time to switch to wintery indoorness for all of us

but today he did some pyrography with his friend and painted it at home

A and I went charity shop shopping and she found another stripey top, she is especially good at finding stripey things. This is actually blue but our camera doesn't like low light.

And I bought zips and thread for a new project and J found 'Goblin Market' by Christina Rosetti for me as a bit of inspiration for drawing

I have been drawing this week, inspired by the rain

and by the princess from the princess and the pea arriving at the palace soaking wet in a storm

Hopefully these drawings will become embroideries or possibly even paintings we'll have to see.