enormous tiny artshow

last year i paticipated in nahcotta gallery's enormous tiny art show and it was great fun! i like working small scale anyway so it's no hardship to make pieces 10" or smaller. anyway, it gets hung next week and this morning i had a lovely congratulatory email from jan from poppytalk giving me the link to a post they did about nahcotta yesterday. oh, excting! it's funny how you make stuff, it takes over your life for a while, you send it off then promptly forget all about it. one day, i'll make it to the opening :) you can some of the completely amazing work included on nahcotta's flickr photostream here.

in my lovely workroom...

i have finished my nahcotta pieces! yay! they have been made so that they work on their own as little pieces of work in their right, but i also wanted to create a piece out of all the little pieces that will work well together in a gallery environment too. (although i want them to be displayed with a little space around them rather than how they are here) i'm obviously heavily influenced by old patchwork designs, this one is based on 'sunshine and shadow' one of my favourites. right, *rolls up sleeves* what's next?

stacked

i'm going to be a bit quiet over the weekend as i've got to paint and wallpaper my workroom...remember that leak in there months ago? well the insurance cheque has come through and i've ordered a new one which is being laid on tuesday. so i've gone all out and bought some wallpaper for the back wall to make it into a really nice room. will show pics when it's done. i'm rather excited by the idea of having a 'nice' workroom as opposed to somewhere that gets all other random crap dumped in (tents, airbeds, bikes, paint cans with an inch left of paint at the bottom, old paint rollers, buggies, kids car seats, you get the picture)

i'm busy working on my pieces for nahcotta, (see evidence above) i love being stuck into a project! have a great weekend all...

me, maps, and more work

sam and i have been on a trip to norwich this afternoon to order a sliding bi-fold door for the kitchen at the farm...you know the type - flush to the ground, so when you open the doors the outside comes inside and the like...anyway, i printed out how to get there and i also had an a-z of norwich, i was well prepared and reasonably confident that i knew where i was going, after all, i'd lived there for two years. how wrong could i be? it turns out that the roundabout that for the last 10 years i've called the cringleford roundabout is not what everybody else in the world calls the cringleford roundabout. which was rather a large spanner in the works from the beginning. fairly standard crapness as far as me and maps are concerned. i just turn into a wobbly wreck...anyway, enough of all that. doors have been ordered...they're lovely, just deciding on colour...

this morning i worked a little more on a piece for nahcotta...slightly different to the pink piece i made earlier - a bit too guitar-y like (thankyou sam and anna for pointing that out to me!) so i cut the threads down the middle and i'm rather liking!

layers...

i'm doing the enormous tiny art show at nahcotta gallery in september and i thought it was about time i got on with some work. the only 'rules' are that the image size is 10" or less in any direction and it must be original, no prints allowed. so...i got to thinking about the paper quilt i was working on back in april for 'quilt 2008' but missed the deadline for...opps! it was never finished and i thought it would be perfect to use elements of it for the eta at nahcotta. so out it came this afternoon, and i tried out some slightly different ideas, with which i'm pretty happy so far...

opening

friday night was the opening of nahcotta's enormous tiny art show , oh how i wish i'd been there! it looked very busy and exciting going by the pics on the nahcotta photostream. in one of their photos you can see my work behind a couple of people; i have cropped it and it is above. it was nice to get an impression of how it looked, it's hard to imagine when you're so many miles away! oh yeah, i had a sale too! yay!

can you spot me?

this is the postcard produced for nahcotta gallery's enormous tiny art show ii can you see me? i'll be impressed if you can, they're so tiny! (just if you're interested: first row, second in; second row, second in; fourth row, seventh in; seventh row, first in)

googling

i've just googled myself (yeah, i know i'm bloody vain - i prefer to call it curious) and found two very interesting things (well, interesting to me, anyway); firstly, i've discovered why i sold so much in my first week of etsy - i was blogged by cuteable, which is very exciting!

the other thing i found was the above pic from the nahcotta blog. it's of the package i sent them full of my paper quilts for the enormous tiny art show. very strange to see it on someone else's floor all the way over the atlantic sea!

ow, my finger hurts...

from stitching all the velcro on the backs of the nahcotta quilts. the labels are now done too, an enjoyable evening was had stitching in front of a csi double bill! so i've just got to package these up and send them on their merry way at last. isn't it weird how the enjoyable bit (making the collages) doesn't seem to take long to do, but all the binding and label making and stitching seems to take forever? by the way, you can just see a tiny moo sticker peeking out, top left.

i got me some moo!

yay! after the problems i had the other week with trying to order my moo cards, they have arrived. talk about great service. god knows what i'm seeing on my monitor though, cos although these are fine for what i want (hanging on the back of my noths work) the colours are somewhat muted. i'm glad i trialed them, i want to get more with the nahcotta and birmingham quilts on, and with this superfast service, i'll get them in time for the festival of quilts and i will moo everyone in sight! got some stickers on the way, can't wait. oh dear, what a loser.

bound

i've been busy binding the nahcotta quilts and they're now all done. you have to be in the right frame of mind to do a mass of binding i always think, and yesterday was exactly the right day and i was in the right 'mood'. i got a production line going and they all went together pretty well. now for all the velcro. (they're having velcro stitched on them, top and bottom, then the other side of the velcro goes onto small flat battens, you screw the battens into the wall then the quilts to the velcro, and hey presto! really professional-looking quilts slightly hovering on the wall! it's magic! none of those nasty sleeves and poles for me, i've said it before, i'm a damn classy bird.)

decor8

well, fancy that! i wrote to holly of the wonderful decor8 blog today, just to really thank her for posting the call for submissions to the nahcotta show and she did a beautiful post, along with four of my paper quilts! talk about excited, i just about peed my pants. so if you are over here on a visit from decor8, welcome! help yourself to a drink, a few nibbles, perhaps? please mingle, and can someone turn the music up? thanks! (yep, i feel it's pretty safe to say i've lost my marbles.) thanks holly, i feel pretty popular today!

harry the happy horse

a vision in lilac for today's nahcotta piece, with a delightful drawing of a horse by me circa 1982. this is actually the last piece, so i've got a ton of binding to do. what a thrilling saturday evening i have to look forward to! :) (actually, at the risk of sounding like a tragic dullard, i wouldn't want it any other way.)

have a happy and restful weekend, y'all!

b,d,h&l are tall letters

orange and brown for today. and yesterday i did speak too soon, this was a pain in the ar*e. it has been reworked, unpicked, reworked again to get here. now i like it. it's quite simple and that's what works with these pieces. right, onward and upward...

i've got a very stroppy kid. frank has finished pre-school today and has come home with a tiger painted face which he keeps forgetting. he then wipes his face and smudges it, then gets upset cos it's all coming off, starts to cry, his nose then runs and we have rivers of snot and tears and tiger face is no more. yuck.

this girl is running away

a peppy new red paper quilt for nahcotta, i'm so loving making these. this one was quite tricky, (it nearly ended up in the dustbin more than once) but i persevered and i think i got there in the end. i'm on a roll now (although i bet i get stuck having typed that out loud) but i've got some difficult colours coming up. (difficult in that they're not colours i use often.) finger's crossed!

on sunday i saw a little cat

blacks, greys and creams for this piece today. it went together so nicely, it was a pleasure to do. the 'little cat' in the title is referring to our first ever family pet; she turned up on our doorstep and never left, much to my dad's horror. not a fan of felines on my paternal side - there's a family horror story about a feral cat shut up in a cupboard and my grandmother's aunt's father's second cousin five times removed was very badly wounded when she opened the cupboard door and out sprang the half dead cat. my father has a tendency to exaggerate wildly, (not a trait i have at all, *wink*) so i have always treated that story with a large dose of skepticism. anyway, we called the little cat 'diana' - and guess what? it was 1981 and charlie and di had just wed, what a bunch of royalists we were. or replace 'royalists' with 'saddos', whichever you prefer.

once upon a time i found a key

this is nahcotta number four - a little yellow offering of which i am quite pleased. yellow is not a colour i use often, so i went out of my comfort zone, and i'm so pleased i did. as with the other paper quilts in this series, it is based on a piece of writing from my 25 year old school books (clue in the title on what the story is about!) and i have a tiny vintage key with two rather handy holes in to stitch on after it's bound. hope your day is as happy and sunny as mine has been today, i'm feeling smug because not only have i quilted all the quilts so far, i've stuck a casserole in the oven and i've got two happy kids playing in the garden. life is good. (as i write this i can hear frank...no arthur, you do NOT hit! it's naughty. mummy, arth's hitting me...better go.)

get used to them, there's more to come

these are probably getting boring now, but i'm loving making them. again, this is unquilted and the pics of these are coming out rather poorly. i think it's the time of day i'm taking them, it's been hot, humid and grey today. anyhoo, this is called 'do your corrections' and has once again some of my school work as background, this time maths and my very, very awful work. every page on it had 'DO YOUR CORRECTIONS' scrawled across it, i swear i only got about three correct per page on average. 1985 was obviously not a good year for me and maths problems. if frank comes home with this sort of work in 6 years time, i'm gonna get him a pivate tutor. shame on you, mum and dad, why didn't i have a private tutor? oh, yeah, that's right i did. and i'm still crap at maths.

UPDATE: 18th july: the above pic is pretty poor, i have retaken it and it is available to look at here

one and two (or possibly two and three)

well hello there! i've been beavering away today, and have created the above collages for nahcotta. they are as of yet unquilted. the blue one is entitled "poorly mrs morley", this is because there is an example of my handwriting in an old school book as a 5 or 6 year old child used as part of the background saying: "today mrs morley is off sick and we are in mrs gibsons classroom, we must be good and quiet." (i can't help feeling that was something written on the blackboard for us to copy; i can't for the life of me imagine my 6 year old self being that pious.) the pink piece is called "spring bulbs need water to grow". in the background (very pale) is a beautiful (?) drawing from another of my old school books of snowdrops, daffodils and tulips. i still don't like the previous pink piece, don't know why, it just doesn't make me happy, so "spring flowers" will take it's place.

today i had to take my eldest son frank to have his starting-big-school injection. i had warned him that it would "feel like a sharp scratch" and may hurt just for a second, but i didn't actually tell him they stab you with a needle. until of course my mother (bless 'er) mentioned to him that they stick a needle in your arm and he turned to me and said: "a needle? don't be ridiculous grandma!?" and turned to me rolling his eyes as if to say, "crazy old bat, where d'you find her?" needless (oh, that was an unintentional pun!) to say he got a bit of a shock at precisely 3.45 this afternoon. but he was very brave and got a sticker with a drum on and a chocolate button. my kids are so easy to charm when it comes to stickers and chocolate buttons.

have a good evening/day/night/whatever, i'm off for a bag of crisps and a pimms! jeez, i'm a classy bird. chin chin!

UPDATE: 18th july: the above pics are pretty poor, i have retaken them and they are available to look at here