Too many blogs...

I've blogged about the background story to this illustration here already, but I like it so much that I'm putting it up again, and you can't stop me!

Stitching away

Another one got finished. I liked using that fancy lace stitch on the rectangular bit. It's quite cool. The monster itself turned out a bit hmmm. Not quite sure. But Mike assures me it's cool, so I'll be going with his opinion.

The fabric I used for this one is different from the first one (slightly thicker), and was an enormous stroke of luck. Back in Germany on holiday, I dragged my mum through a few antiques shops, and in one of them (the local one), I rooted through the basket of linens and eventually came across what looked like a bolt of plain linen. It was very yellow with age, but seemed in good nick (and yellow just means it's *vintage*, anyways... :^), so I took it home for 7 Euros! I guessed it was about 4m at first glance, so considered it a bargain.

Now, imagine my excitement when I got home and measured it and it turned out to be 13 (thirteen!) metres of lovely (and after a quick stint in the wash white) linen! It's only 75cm wide, but still, that's a whole lotta fabric.

So ye, as I said, it's a bit coarser than the cotton I used for the first hankie, but it feels really nice and soft.

Also, yesterday I came across, like, the best vegan lemon sugar cookie recipe, like, ever. I adapted it slightly as I didn't have all the ingredients the recipe called for, but I'm totally in love with them.

Here's the recipe (my version):
Mix
1/8 cup soya milk with
4 Tsp lemon juice and set aside.

Mix
1 1/4 cups flour (I used wholemeal)
Pinch of salt
1/3 Tsp Baking soda and set aside.

Beat
1/3 cup sugar
(bit more than) 1/3 cup margarine
Zest of 2 lemons
(and 1/2 Tsp lemon extract, if you have/ can be arsed)
until light and fluffy.

Add soya milk mix and beat a bit more, then mix this with the flour 'n' stuff.

The dough should be quite soft and silky. Make balls and roll them in sugar, then bake 10 mins at 200C.

Yummy!

Lacy days

(Yes, yes, ok. I apologise for that god-awful pun in the title. I hate coming up with titles.)

Anyways, I mentioned before that on holiday I tried whitework for the first time. I was quite honestly surprised I stuck to it until the end. I kinda would have expected to run out of patience, but I found it really quite relaxing to be stitching away at it whenever there was some time.

So, when I had the idea of combining this with monsters, I just went for it.



By my standards, this took a loooong time to finish. I worked on this almost every day for the last two weeks. I had to have a couple of days' break in between to not go completely nuts. But I'm so pleased with the result!

Spontaneously...

...I'm having an exhibition. I wonder if I should just give in to the fact that long-planned things come to nothing, and that last minute works best for me. Not that this is particularly last minute, in the scheme of things, but given that we were planning to organise an exhibition for the festival at the beginning of the year, and then gave up on it because nobody really had the time or inclination, this came as a bit of a surprise to me.

I've been wanting to find a way to use the Glasite Meeting House for a while now. It's such a lovely building. But the space, unfortunately, is a bit unwieldy. The upstairs room is perfect for exhibitions, but used by yoga and dance classes. The hall is full of pews (which are lovely in themselves, some with graffiti from the 1800s!), and even if I had more stuff to hang on walls, I could never dream of filling the vast amount of space available in there.

But then, suddenly, it struck me: there's quite a large toilet on the ground floor, supposedly accessible for the disabled. I say supposedly, because the building in itself is hard to get into if you have trouble with steps, as all the entrances have stairs on them.

So I liked the idea of using this, but then forgot about it again. Until I mentioned it at work, and it was rather more enthusiastically received than I expected.

So, there you go. An exhibition. In a toilet. Why not, it's the Festival, after all...