
Well, I just visited the Stash Manicure Blog and I was feeling the tiniest bit smug, cos I spent lots of last week moving furniture and making a better workspace and then, then I saw today’s post and it’s a real “look on my works, ye mighty, and despair” kind of thing cos the guest blogger has the MOST organised stash IN THE WORLD! Also possibly the largest….you kind of wonder how much someone can do if their stash is that sorted, but I guess you save so much time on wild goose chases that you can file and subdivide to your heart’s content……? And of course you would clear up every thread and wisp as you went along? Mmmmm, food for thought…
new work station my back and neck have not enjoyed working at the foldout table, so a change was needed. Luckily the dancing dervish came to stay, so things became possible and even easy with her help 🙂 the high workbench came back from the bedroom and into the space where Andy’s workbench was, which moved to where the chest of drawers were, which had moved to where the workbench was in the bedroom. Still with me? Then a big remnant of carpet went down in the living room, with a trim off over the creaky boards in the bedroom. We also swapped my clapped out mattress for the good one in the painting studio spare bedroom. Emilia also offered me a long loan of her good mattress while she is away, so the guests won’t suffer too long 🙂 Altogether, a lot of fuss, bother and itch, many homeless spiders, many disgruntled cat moments, but…………so worth it! My back loves the new to me mattress and working at the right height again. I love having done this, after chuntering on about it for ages. My knees are a bit achey after cutting carpet and I broke my scalpel handle and will have to invest in another one (a whole £1 from the Polish £shop at Broadmarsh,) but I didn’t need to light a fire yesterday, so I’d say the insulation effect was working and the bargainaceous carpet will pay for itself in a few weeks 🙂 and the bedroom and living room are getting so tidy the cats are confused 🙂 and I am starting to know things are in positions they will stay in. Phew! The Shakers defined tidiness as a place for everything and everything in its place and I can see there from here!
It helps of course that things are leaving – another two boxes of Andy’s stuff, mainly photos and slides, and three large shelves with Andy’s hotknifed painting decorations on them went to his sister on Monday; a big bag of stuff went to the charity shop and I actually put some stuff in the bin (shock, horror, collapse of the solar system!) Ok, I exaggerate, I filled the recycling bin almost to the brim, and maybe one carrier bag in the landfill bin. I also filled 4 (count them, 4!) pillowcases with fabric scraps for the rescued animals projects. This liberated some space for stash to be sorted a little better (yeah, she kinda rained on my parade……..:)) and I even got a box of papermaking kit off the kitchen floor and onto a counter I tend to clutter. Why is this good? Well, now if I need that space, I just lift the box out and there it is (as opposed to sorting through a messy pile of gardening and diy tat) and the space on my kitchen floor is almost doubled! Less risk of visitors thinking it’s a bin, too…..
I had a day in bed after all the upheaval, mainly cos I had a chill and thought that yucky cold everyone’s having was getting me, but feel better for making the improvements. Most of the follow on cleaning is done – a sort through the debris on the foldout table is called for, but my new workstation is independent of it, phew!


I had a play with pelmet vilene tonight, so you have some eye candy. I wish I’d photographed the stages, at one point they were sooooooooo ugly! I printed the spirals with a homemade stamp (the foam insulation for laminate flooring on a sweetie tin lid) and stencilled the mottles using a net curtain lace band and strips and chunks of latchhook rugging canvas. I mixed different strengths of acrylic paints – thick as cream to print, thinned to milk with cheap lustre acrylic and water for stencilling with a cheap bristle brush and really watered down to wash over the dried prints. The strong red, gold and green looked very stark and ugly – mottling with a maroony beige (sounds awful, I know!) and then a milky hot chocolate colour with added bronze Brusho lustre really helped, making a sort of autumnal effect. Then I made a prussian blue thinned with gold lustre to a petrol blue to print with, stencilled with a coffee maroon and washed with a thin bluey purple for the second batch. Sometimes it is necessary to go through that ugly stage to understand what you want to make. These all turned into something useable, and because I do keep going, they probably always would, but it’s very important to let yourself make those ugly/mistakes/wrong turns to get to the real path, which is of course, your own, not the broad track or superhighway the craft industry wants you to follow. Remembering Cherry Simone’s stories about the scrapbooking paraphernalia of exactly measured extremely expensive items at the class following the joyful freedom of art journalling reminded me to keep going, to see where the ugly took me, what it could teach me. And that turned out to be a lot! I’ve been working in a vivid palette for a year or so, and the brashness of the bold colours I’d mixed suddenly made me want something softer and muted. October is drifting into November and some really interesting colour mixes are around, ashy pinks and browns, misty buffs and greys, wet blacks and umbers, mmmmmmmmmmmm….

These are all for free machining, so follow up photos should appear soon. I’m really on a roll with the journal covers, so xmas presents here we come 😉