Angus Open Studios 2012 - part 1

This year Kirsty and I had grand plans for doing a big AOS tour again, but unfortunately she was quite poorly on the only day we were able to go out together.  It was scorching hot too, and the thought of travelling around in a stuffy car really didn't appeal to her.

However, she's a big fan of Love and Peas, aka Jenny Blair, who makes the most amazing books, so we did eventually set off for Tannadice.  Jenny has already encouraged Kirsty to make her own books and was kind enough to give her a book full of ideas some time ago.  

On Sunday she showed Kirsty several binding techniques and gave her lots of ideas for the kinds of materials she may like to use in future creations.

Jenny was exhibiting, along with a number of other artists and makers, in the lovely setting of Tannadice Church, beside a sparkling river - just lovely.

We only managed one other venue on Sunday, which was the nearby Oathlaw Pottery.  We were greeted by Maggie holding a large pitcher of lemon barley water to quench our thirst!

There really was no air movement whatsoever and the temperature was stiffling so it was very much appreciated.

She showed us her kiln and explained the processes involved in creating a wide variety of beautiful ceramics.

The bright and welcoming gallery space had all kinds of lovely pottery and I couldn't resist treating myself!

The pottery is open all year - check the website for opening times.

Drawers

There's a mad place near here called Steptoe's Yard.  It must be pretty famous as I've had several far travelled customers ask me for directions (it's beside the St Cyrus Nature Reserve).

Steptoe sells a mixture of lovely antiques, awful tat and broken things, unusual reclamation pieces, crockery, furniture in good condition and furniture in a terrible state.  

There's no point 'nipping' to Steptoe's - you have to spend a good amount of time there to find the wee nuggets hidden away in a sea of 'stuff'.

I've bought quite a lot of things from here and given them all a new lease of life - piano stool, travelling trunk, footstool, bench etc.  This was my latest acquisition - a set of scruffy old drawers with two handles missing, water damage at the bottom and bird poo on the top. Lovely!

It's solidly built though and only cost £10.

After giving it a good clean and a light sanding I gave it two coats of red Annie Sloan paint. 

I bought some stencils with celtic designs from an excellent selection at Stencil Kingdom  to give it a bit of decoration.    

I attached the first stencil with repositionable spray adhesive and at this point learned a valuable lesson - always read the instruction on the tin properly!  I neglected to wait for the freshly sprayed glue to become tacky and as a result, when I removed the stencil it left a sticky mess on the drawer.  Grrrr!  

So I had to leave it a while, rub it down again and repaint it - lesson most definitely learned! A selection of red, pink and yellow acrylic paints were applied...

...and, once they were dry, the entire thing had to be waxed.  

I brushed wax onto the surfaces, left it to soak in for an hour or so, and then started rubbing it to a lovely sheen.  Kirsty helped with this bit as it's quite hard work.

The photo below shows what a difference a bit of vigorous rubbing makes!

All that remained was to screw on some new handles (ridiculously, the most expensive part of this whole process!)  and there you have it - a totally unique set of drawers!

Finished flower

Just a wee postscript to the Fife Open Studios post - 

Kirsty's fused glass flower has arrived and she's delighted with it!  

Thanks again to the ladies at Chillilicious for making our visit so enjoyable.

Fife Open Studios 2012

This year Kirsty & I treated ourselves to an overnight stay in order to make the most of the Fife event.  

We visited a total of 16 venues and saw metalwork, painting, textiles, glass, ceramics and an assortment of mixed venues.  A really fun day and a half out.

One of the wonderful things about touring around open studios is that you get to visit places that you'd never normally see.  The venues we visited ranged from the stately home at Mountquhanie...

 ...to a quaint thatched cottage in Collessie...

...to a workshop in the woods near Falkland.

This workshop is where Dave McKeen makes his amazing wooden boxes that we have for sale in Starfish Studio.  He builds secret drawers and towers of drawers into his work, and they are a constant source of amazement to my customers!

Here are some works in progress.  These include a secret drop down tower and comprise 54 individual pieces, all carefully numbered to be sure that they go back in the right places!

The signage to the various studios was very good, my favourite being the row of chillies leading the way to Chillilicious in Ceres.

At this venue, just like last year, Kirsty had a go at making her own fused glass creation.  

Now we just have to wait for the postie to deliver the finished, fused piece!

Adventures abroad

I usually do a bloggy post about our holidays so regular readers will probably know that we always take our family holidays in Britain.

Last summer my teenage daughter grumbled about us going to Mull.  She reads these teen magazines with holiday checklists comprising sunglasses, bikinis, sun cream etc, and we were packing jumpers, waterproofs and midge repellent!  As it turned out, we had amazing weather and it was one of my favourite holidays ever, however I have to accept that she no longer has the enthusiasm for visiting castles and going on long walks that she had when she was younger.

The last time we went abroad was almost five years ago.  We took the ferry from Rosyth to Zeebrugge and had a day and night in Bruges before taking the train to Paris for one night and then a few days doing the Disney thing.  It was an absolutely fantastic trip, spoiled only by the French declaring a national strike which meant that no trains or buses were running on the day we were due to leave Disneyland.

To cut a long story short, we had to take a taxi from Disneyland Paris to Brussels - over 200 miles in a taxi!  There was no other way to get our ferry home, it was an overnight sailing which doesn't run every day and we absolutely had to be on that boat.  The taxi cost 600 euros, so thank goodness for holiday insurance!  The problems then continued with some thieving scumbag stealing my purse on the train platform in Brussels, but that's another story...

So, we were a bit put off doing the 'foreign thing' and both my daughters had worries about flying, so it was with some trepidation that we agreed to try a week in Mallorca during the Easter holidays.  None of us are sun worshippers and we're not keen on crowds, so we probably couldn't cope with the Mediterranean in the summer - not to mention the fact that the rental on the villa is trebled if you go in August!

We had a 5am check in at Edinburgh airport, were loaded onto the plane ready for take off at 7am, and then the captain announced that the French air traffic controllers were on strike (see a pattern emerging here?) and we had to wait for a time slot before we could fly over France.  We sat on the tarmac at Edinburgh for two and a half hours.  Yawn (although we did take the captain up on his offer of visiting the cockpit).

Other than that we had an absolutely fab week and I'm so glad we went.  The weather wasn't scorchingly hot (thank goodness) and it wasn't horribly busy.  Definitely a good time of year to go.

I really enjoyed speaking a bit of Spanish and my confidence with the language grew as the week went on.  (I did 'O' level Spanish a long long time ago and have recently been brushing up a little.)

Not wishing to bore people with my holiday snaps, here's a small selection of photos.  Mallorca is a really beautiful place, especially in the small coves and up in the mountains but I'm sure lots of holidaymakers never leave the resorts.  Why anyone would go all that way and spend a week cooking on a beach alongside thousands of other people I'll never understand.

Cala Sant Vicenç

Soller

365 steps in Pollença leading up to a wee chapel

My girlies

Our villa - very private, just perfect, near Pollença

Amazing road down to the stunning bay at Sa Calobra

Paddling at Port de Soller

Visiting the castle at Capdepera

Take some hexagons...

Before Christmas I spotted these card hexagons in a craft shop.  They immediately reminded me of the very little sewing I was taught at secondary school when we made a small patchwork purse.  I bought them on impulse and then had a think about how to use them.  I have a bit of a thing about bumble bees and I've wanted to make some bee themed textile art for ages.  So, naturally, hexagons = honeycomb!

I chose cotton in lovely bright oranges & yellows and really enjoyed using the techniques I learned in about 1982 - and hadn't used since!

I made two flowers by needlefelting all kinds of interesting fibres to a piece of felt, stitching it into a flower shape and adding seed beads to the centre. 

The bees themselves were fiddly to do.  Firstly the brushed cotton black stripes were stitched on to the yellow fabric.  Then I stitched the bees to the background, trapping some shimmering wings in place and using a little stuffing to pad each bee out.  I like the visible stitches around the bees - I think they add to their bumbly fuzziness!

This piece involved a lot of hand stitching, although I used my machine to sew the patchwork and greenery on to the black background.  Et voila...

Hearts

Wet felting is great fun and you can create the most beautiful things, but I find all the rubbing really hard on my hands (what a wimp!) so I don't play around with it very often.  I have, however, come to the conclusion that felt is the most wonderful fabric on the planet - it is versatile, so easy to sew with and, best of all, it doesn't fray!  Simple sheets of machine made felt have made a great backing fabric for these hearts.

In a perfect world I'd be backing these with beautiful Harris Tweed, but I looked at the cost and it would mean a fair an investment on my part and a higher retail price to pass on to my customers.

I've made a few hanging hearts with three dimensional, fluffy animals.

Here's another use for those old maps I keep talking about!  

The trees are nice and fluffy, made from gorgeously soft silk laps.

And here are a couple of boats for all you sea lovers!