Yorkshire Travelling Journal

I spent most of Sunday finishing stripping the spindles on the stairs so that DH can paint them while he is on holiday this next week.  It also rained on and off all day so I could not get out in the garden.  As I cannot post the latest entry for the YTJ that I have almost finished I decided I would post an entry from last year.  It was one of my personal favourites and was based on a Celtic legend.

Home to Roost

I went to the second lesson of a printing class at Malvern College this week.  We are doing monoprinting and I seem to have got the hang of rubbing the ink off the plate with a rag and white spirit.  The print above was made using a roller press and cartridge paper.  The one below was put through the press but is on tissue paper.  A first for me and you do get quite a different image.  Further marks were added using a piece of card dipped into the oil based printing ink.  Some of it is still not dry, hence the shiny bits on the pictures.

War Poem

I have been messing around this morning trying to add some detail to the earlier piece based on an Edward Thomas poem and the above print was an accidental result.  I used a piece of artist's canvas that had previously been primed with gesso (or something similar).  The barbed wire is a thermofax screen from a drawing and the fence-like structure is from a piece of mountboard with elastic bands stretched over it which was rollered with fabric ink.

The skyline was the biggest surprise.  I had not noticed it until I folded the fabric to get it in the scanner.  It is from where I cleaned the roller and it has given a surprising image which fits well with this topic.

Still not happy with the other piece thought, so may start again.

The words are:-

... watched the plough narrowing a yellow square of charlock. Every time the horses turned instead of treading me down, the ploughman leaned upon the handles to say or ask a word, about the weather, next about the war.  Scraping the share he faced towards the wood, and screwed along the furrow till the brass flashed once more ...

Running Stitchers Project

Talk about winging it ...  I have no idea what I am doing with the above piece.  It started off with me painting the background onto a piece of Silk Noil with Inktense bars.  The idea was that it was a square of Charlock with ploughing being carried out in a circular direction.  I then added some snippets of coloured chiffon to the sky.  Now I am stuck again.  If this piece ever gets finished in time it will be a miracle.

Garden Flowers

These bearded iris were in the garden when we moved in, but they are not really in the best position anymore to enjoy baking sun as the new house next door and its boundary fence shade them.  I got a lovely surprise when I walked around the corner and saw that several of them had lots of flower buds waiting to come out.

This Montana clematis is one that I planted since moving in and it is 'Mayleen'.  It has a lovely perfume which fills the garden.  Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it) a lot of the flowers appear to have gone over the other side of the fence where it enjoys full sun and therefore our neighbour gets the benefit too.  The flower bed in front is full of large daisies (which always remind me of the Queen mother's hats - their petals go in all directions), inulas, marigolds and huge shaggy red oriental poppies, all of which seem to have put on a spurt of growth this last week.  We also have an honeysuckle (Graham Thomas) which is trying its best to get to the other side of the fence to flower.  Another plant with great perfume which travels all over the garden on the evening air.
 
Surprised to find that the sweetpeas, nasturtiums, cosmos and broad beans I have planted rather late have all germinated now.  Just hope they manage to mature to reward me with flowers and beans.  Also growing some sunflowers for fun and for the bees next door.

Yorkshire Travelling Journal

As I have not been doing much stitching and I have recently received another Yorkshire Travelling Journal with some of last year's work in it ...  I thought I would post some pictures from that instead.

My friend had been to see the David Hockney exhibition and was so inspired that she used this picture to produce the piece of work below for the June 2013 Yorkshire TJ.  I thought it was brilliant.

However, this person is a very tardy blogger so we do not usually get to see much of her work.  I suggested she join the 'Slow Blog Manifesto' and even threatened blackmail to increase the frequency of her blogging ...  I am not a nice friend.

She does do some very inspired work at times and the latest YTJ entry is equally brilliant, but I cannot tell you what it is as it will spoil the surprise for the other 8 participants.

Room Book

Last weeks book was fairly easy to make and would make a nice present for someone.  It has a little pocket in each 'room' for slipping things into.  All the paper used has been printed in various ways by me.  It is lovely when you find that a piece of a sheet you are not particularly keen on turns out to be very interesting in smaller pieces.

Creative Bookbinding Class

Back view

 We started off the new term making slit concertina books.  These photographs do not really do the book justice.  It folds up to a fairly small, tall, oblong book.

I covered it with one of the sheets of paper I had made using acrylic paint and a stencil.  The central panel was sponged through a homemade stencil with Lumiere paint and then given a wash of Koh-i-noor dye.

Front view

Side 1 view

 This book is a Triangular Concertina made from a sheet of A4.  Once you have folded and cut it, pages are stitched into the centre to form little books.

I added a piece of cut out decorated paper into the centre of the back page, also making some stamped out circles glued over a piece of thread to form a tassel.

Adding some words or pictures to the little books would improve the book but by this time I had run out of steam ....

Front view

Back of Book

Battle of Tewkesbury

 DH surprised me on Monday and took me on a mystery outing.  I could not guess where we were going and this is where we ended up .... Tewkesbury.  These two wooden sculptures have recently been erected on a roundabout there to commemorate the Battle of Tewkesbury in 1471.  It was one of the battles of the Wars of the Roses and the Yorkists defeated the Lancasterians.

Yorkist Knight facing Lancasterian horse

Yorkist Knight

Garden Wildlife

Apologies for the quality of this photograph, but I did not take it!  This is the second time this week that this beautiful creature has been seen in daylight in our back garden.  This morning it lay in the sun enjoying the warmth, washed itself, stretched, went near the garage and dug something up which it then ate, then sauntered off further up the stream.

We have also been having problems with our cat Sox this week. He has become intent on catching a wood mouse that is living under the bird feeders at the front.  I have seen it at close quarters a couple of times as it peeped out from under a paving slab.  Sox has managed to kill three up to now and is determined that he is going to get this latest one.

Lots of blackbirds in the garden front and back too, plus a little wren who regularly visits the flowerpots on the step outside the french door in the kitchen.