Cascade

I forgot to share with you tales of my Ikea trip. Hmm, well, there aren't many actually (unless you count my complete ineptitude on the trolley front) but my favourite purchase has to be this duvet cover. My, that is one sweet sweet pattern, and fits so nicely in our spare room.


It seems to have borrowed quite heavily from a design called Cascade by Evelyn Redgrave for Heals (circa 1965)...

...but that's ok, I did the very same a couple of years back for a commission. The brief was for a stained glass panel to go in a lightbox as a wedding gift (the happy couple were due to move house, so it needed to be portable) They had a love of all things 1960s so the idea was to recreate a fabric design in stained glass.

This is the result. The effect of having it in a lightbox was quite incredible. The room literally filled with joy when we turned it on. When we turned it off, we all felt just a little bit sadder somehow.

I have to say, I LOVED making this window. The construction was very complex, and there was no margin for error in the cutting of the glass, so it was pretty intense stuff. But so enjoyable and satisfying getting those smooth curves in the lead.

I would love to do more of this kind of window.

Birdies and Beasties

Hopefully, by the end of this evening, I will have finished all the various bits and pieces in the workshop that have been gathering dust for the past couple of weeks. And when I have, I will then have enough items to make a trip to the "Room of Doom" (or the Cementing Shed, as I believe it is sometimes known) worthwhile. Cementing is the process of filling the gaps between glass and lead with a black gloopy mixture of linseed oil, white spirit, whiting (powdered chalk) and plaster, which then sets to make the window strong and watertight. It is also very messy, dusty, and tedious. But I don't mind it too much as long as I have a few pieces to do at once and some trashy high-energy pop on the radio (this is not the time for erudition). As a result of my infrequent trips to the cementing shed, it becomes the place of choice for freakishly large spiders.

And....relax....

Aaah Brighton. Reminds me of a great big wedding cake covered in white icing and marzipan and sprinkled with glitter. The weather was perfect. There was mucho mooching. The Lanes (North and South - where we came across a rather gorgeous cake shop), the seafront, the grotty area at the wrong end of town where we lived as students (sigh), 2 carboot sales... I could go on. But I think the highlight for me was the wonderfully camp dancing robot, made by friend, which had been a hideous dancing pink fluffy poodle in a former life.

The only place I didn't get to visit (but would very much have liked to) was the amazing Booth Museum which is packed to the roof with stuffed birds and animals.

I saw a fantastic exhibition held there about, oooh, 15 years ago by an artist called Len Shelley. I'm not sure if he is still creating his brilliantly creepy yet funny little story boxes, but his work has always remained with me.

Finally, in my absence, Nelly produced a piece of work which proved what I had long feared: that she has more talent in her 5 year old little finger than I have in my entire body....I mean look at the knees, the pattern on the dress, the worry lines on her forehead - so much going on, yet so simply drawn. Or am I just having a proud mum moment?

Brighton calling

I can't wait. I'm going on a solo mission. And I'm going to one of my favourite places. To meet up with 2 of my best girlfriends. What's not to love? Plus it's a great excuse to put up this fabulous Edward Bawden linocut.

I haven't been to Brighton (without kids) for about 6 years. I went to Sussex Uni, so it was my home for 3 years. I'm looking forward to just meandering about the streets aimlessly, stopping only now and then to eat, drink or browse.

It gets better...I'm stopping in at Ikea on my way back home. I have to try and contain my excitement, else it might all just get too much...


Meanwhile, things are picking up here on the work front - I have got the go-ahead on a fantastic repair job - restoring 2 former church trefoils featuring some angels. I'll post some pictures next week once I've received the windows.

Spooky coincidences

WEIRD. Just plain weird. See the front cover of the book in my last post to see what I'm on about.

Back to school

Having had the past 2 weeks to have a lie-in in the morning, Nelly decided that today was the day she would sleep in until 8am. Or maybe she was just hiding under the covers, lurking in the hope I would forget all about her and the fact it was the first day of term. With Nelly safely despatched into the arms of Reception class, me and Isla did what we do best - off to the cafe to eat some cake.



Later on, I managed to get a bit of work done, and I got these pictures scanned in that I've been meaning to do for a couple of days. The first is a totally out-there children's book that I picked up at the Car Boot sale on Sunday. It's the adventures of a little girl called Poppet and her gang of animals who live on an island. The pictures are rocking my world at the moment.



These are some Hungarian playing cards that we also got at a Car Boot sale a while back that we played with a couple of times over the Easter hols - it's basically Old Maid, but with funky little Hungarian kids and animals. I love the way the kids have a "stained glass" look, with that dark outline around them.

Old job, new job

Yesterday, I finally got round to photographing this job that I completed recently. A 1930s door panel that was in a pretty bad state of repair when I received it, with 2 of the middle squares completely missing, and a fair few border pieces gone too. Luckily, the client managed to source a good glass match for the middle squares, and although they also found some Small Artic (the glass used in the border) it was everso slightly, but alas noticeably, more textured than the original. The only solution was to replace all the border glass with the new glass. The finished window came up as clean and shiny as a new pin!

I also went to look at a new repair job yesterday - a simple set of Victorian door panels that looked as if they would fall apart if you coughed at them. Other than the bad state of the lead, the glass was generally in good nick - a few broken border pieces and about 2 coloured squares missing overall. The client was happy to take them out themselves - so I advised several miles of masking tape and a couple of bucketfuls of patience!


Meanwhile, other projects on the go are slowly and virtually imperceptibly nearing completion. The silver stain (a metallic compound applied to glass and fired in the kiln to produce a yellow colour) on the border of Cake Boy came out the most pathetic, anaemic yellow colour... so back in the kiln for a second blast. Now it's a beautiful amber - I had forgotten that green coloured glass is often a bit resistant to stain and needs a firmer hand!

I am just a little tiny bit excited

I just found out that the Where the Wild Things film is coming out later this year! Big fans of Mr Sendak in our house (although strictly speaking we are Mickey fans rather than Max). I had a little sneaky peek of the trailer and although it looks pretty cool, I'll reserve judgement until I've seen it in full.

Okay, better get out to the workshop and get these panels finished and photographed. I sold one of my items from the Folksy shop yesterday (Thanks Stu!)



...which leaves me with precisely one thing on there:

Don't you hate it when...

...you discover something about 24 hours too late? I was just mooching the web, looking for some pdfs to download for Nelly - colouring pages, paper dolls, dot to dots, whatever - when I came across this bunny-tastic little basket to print out and make. How our Easter egg hunt could have been improved by a few of these to pop the eggs in!

The site also has lots of other great things to print out and make:

The Toymaker

I also found a cute-as-a-button paper doll pdf at this lovely site:

Wee Wonderfuls

Tales from Easter

Phew! At last, 5 minutes peace to catch up with things here. It's been a whirlwind the last few days - a very lovely and fun one - but nevertheless it's nice to get back to some kind of normality. Guests have all been despatched, beds have been changed, chocolate has been consumed in rather obscene quantities and so on we go...

So, where were we? Ah that's right, nothing much was being achieved other than entertaining the troops (i.e. two kids). However, we do now have PETS! Well, ok, 20 tadpoles (or pollywogs - great word - as I believe they call 'em across the pond) which we "liberated" from a (much smaller and not at all salty) pond. 48 hours later, they are still alive and kicking - er, wriggling - and munching on the finest blanched and shredded lettuce (their favourite dish apparently).




Have had very little time to do much in the way of work. I so want to finish all the pieces I am working on so I can finally list them on Folksy and get the Etsy shop up and running, but one way or another I keep getting thwarted in my efforts. The only thing I've been able to do is a bit of doodling and thinking, while the girls are doing their drawings at the table.

One of the results of which is this (rather shockingly unprofessional but topically themed) scribble, which still needs a bit of tinkering with to make it work as a leaded panel, but I'll get round to that in the mists of time, whoops, I mean near future :)



Next up is another bit of Work in Progress... a small panel which has it's origins in one of Nelly's drawings. The boy is called Pierre. He is her imaginary brother, and he spends most of his time either sick in bed (with a green face) or eating too much cake (resulting in aforementioned stay in bed).



I'm thinking that this might be an interesting direction - "Have your child's masterpieces turned into a stained glass window". I guess this idea is not strictly original - a stained glass artist called Jane Littlefield has completed several commissions for primary schools using children's drawings and paintings with stunning results. In fact that quick scoot round her website has been quite a joy.

Hey I exist!

Well, the post was written about a year ago, but I've only just found it...
have a look here



The panel was made using recycled glass from bottles, flattened out in the kiln, which makes beautiful glass with handmade qualities. The only downside is that the gorgeous turquoise glass comes from a bottle of Blue Nun...

So thanks for the link Eco-Modernist, have returned the favour.

While I'm here, I'll put up a couple of other pictures. The first is Nelly's finished Easter Bonnet (alright, alright, I did help a little bit) We did not win first prize though, much to my utter outrage ;)



And this is a rather minimalist arrangement of knotty spotty driftwood collected the other day, displayed in my most delicious of jugs.

Hands Full

Oh yes, that's right, I remember now...that's what it's like to have both kids at home all day....lovely, but NOTHING GETS DONE! So I'm imagining that posts are going to be a bit thin on the ground here for the next two weeks.

However, here are a couple of sketches, well, ok, doodles that I did for future paintings while Nelly was drawing pictures of monsters, bears and rather randomly, "people from Japan"....

Super Saturday

Just had to post this picture of the most fabulous eggs we ate today...



They tasted as good as they look, with orange yolks and really gloopy whites...should have taken a picture of them fried - they looked straight out of the joke shop.

Also a few pictures of work in progress....a little panel that I'm putting up on Folksy as soon as it's finished. I've really enjoyed doing it - I've left the leads at the edges a little bit long - one of those happy accidents...it kind of reminds me of colouring over the lines, which sort of fits in with the whole "5-year-old" vibe of the piece.







And finally, the high point of the day - Mike put a quid on a horse in the Grand National for each of us and we won!!! 100 to 1 odds not bad eh?

WWILFing* about

I'm so good at wasting time - somewhere, there is about 3,987 hours worth of quality productive time that has just been squandered (mainly on here).

*WWILFing = what was I looking for? you know... when you walk in to a room to find something and get completely distracted.

Sub-tropicana...

Just got back from a jolly to

Abbotsbury Sub Tropical Gorgeousness

So amazing at this time of year - Rhodedendrons, Camellias and Magnolias all at their peak, not to mention fabulous ferns and palms. Totally inspiring. Next time I want to go without the demanding 20 month old that wasn't sure whether she wanted to be carried, walk or push the buggy around the whole gardens on her own. Sigh.

Da der di da dit da der di da dit Plate News! (do you like the jingle?)
Here is the finished plate.

I like very much.