Matching Colours!

Last week my Kona Colour Card arrived. I’d had a bit of a faff with trying to get one. Initially I had ordered one from one fabric shop only to be told the next day that it was out of stock and I got a refund. I then spent that morning hunting down another (they are like gold dust in the UK) and found one shop who agreed to sell me one for £15 including recorded delivery – so I went for that hoping to get it the next day but paid just after the lady had done her post run – but later that day got an email to say that actually they didn’t have one to sell me after all! But as I really needed one soon she offered to give me her slightly older one that was still in good condition for half the price – so I went for that. So it’s not as nice and swishy as the one I was hoping for and it isn’t the latest one with all 271 colours – but it’s better than nothing and for £7.50 I can’t really complain!

So rather than this:

I got this:

I think I’ll survive!

It enabled me to find two greens to match up with the green in the pattern from two cushion covers I sold the other week where the customer wanted two small cushion covers and one large one to coordinate.

It also helped me to pick the right shade of orange to pick up on the orange in this awesome robot print Kokka fabric. This cushion is in the shop here.

I was also finally able to find the right sort of browny grey shade to match up to the colour of the branch in this bird print fabric to make the cushion I’ve been waiting to make for a while – ordering browns that were too brown and getting frustrated! In the shop here.

I also fell in love with this Kokka Echino bee fabric and found a nice lush clover green to go with it. I made two of these – in the shop here.

And also this faux patchwork Kokka fabric – I teamed it up with a nice rich plum colour. In the shop here.

The brown I had bought before thinking it might match the bird print I ended up putting it together with this great brown and yellow forest print fabric – in the shop here.

And I used a green I had bought before thinking it would match the green in the bee fabric but it was too light – but found it worked really well with an owl print Kokka fabric I had. So I used it to make two matching rectangular cushions with a lace ribbon embellishment. Quite nice and summery – in the shop here.

And I’ve also done a couple without having to colour match – a really nice bright coloured spot fabric as a wraparound style – in the shop here.

And I had an order from a good friend (and repeat customer) for some cushions for her son’s bedroom – due to head off tomorrow.

It’s also been a bit of a weird week. Over the Bank Holiday Weekend I wasn’t feeling particularly well and generally a bit run down. (My husband bought me two lovely bunches of roses to try and cheer me up.) My sewing machine (The Beast) has also been misbehaving somewhat. After getting two new replacement bulbs last week another one has blown! Plus the thread tension decided that rather than being quite happy at the usual 4/5 it wanted to be turned right up to 8 before it would play nicely. Plus some thread it just really doesn’t like and snaps it very frequently. So along with all of that I have also burnt my hand on the iron and my thumb on the very hot sewing machine bulb – it is a bit longer than my old one so if I am rethreading the needle I sometimes catch myself on it!

However I did get out and about as on Wednesday night my husband and I went out to Bath to see the comedian Miles Jupp. We had a nice meal out before the show just up the road from the comedy club (and had a 25% off voucher so even more of a bonus!) So it was nice to have a laugh and a bit of a different evening to usual!

So now heading into another weekend and looking forward to spending time with my husband!

More Slightly Odd Gifts

Following on from yesterday’s Mini People post – last year when my good friend from work had to go into hospital I knew she was feeling quite anxious about it.

I decided to make her a little set of things to help cheer her up while she recovered from surgery, she would have to be off work for two weeks so although it wouldn’t be something that would keep her occupied that entire time, I thought that a few silly things might just take the edge off a bit.

Firstly I made her a silly card – I found a great photo from I think a sewing pattern for making everyone in the family a Spiderman costume. On the front of the card I wrote “My Spidey Sense Tells Me…” and on the inside “…You Are Not Going To Die!” (I must point out that it was a straightforward op with no chance of death!)

I decided to make her two little books – one filled with silly little cartoons (some copied from my favourite web comics and others out of my own head) and another which was a poem I had written which I illustrated again using my cartooning talent (of which I have none – be warned!)

These were a mixture of things that made me laugh from sites like Natalie Dee, Poorly Drawn Lines, Married to the Sea and just me.

With both these little books I sewed the binding rather than using staples.

I then painted and drew her a little pebble to keep her company.

 This is Trevor, he likes long walks on the beach and enjoys listening to Acid Jazz.

I also made her a little donkey finger puppet (after having asked her a while before if she could have any animal other than the ones she already has – what would it be – and she said donkey.) And I made her a moustache on a stick. Hours of fun.

Altogether it looked pretty cool. I did forget one thing though – a jumbo sized Twix but never mind!

 

 

Mini People!

One of my many alter-egos is being a consulting contractor in projects. Basically I assist project managers, ensuring they abide by certain methodologies, complete appropriate documentation, report to stakeholders etc.

Last year whilst working for a local firm I made some really great friends who were really encouraging of my creative side, they liked to see what things I had been working on and enjoyed me sending them odd cartoons based on situations at work or weird things people had said.

One of those friends was Abi, she had started in the February and we became firm friends. Similar sense of humour and we had a great laugh. I discovered one day in April that her birthday was the following day and I thought that I should make her something that would make her smile. In UK projects we tend to follow a methodology called PRINCE2 (PRojects IN Controlled ENvironments), something which Abi knows a lot about. Her PRINCE2 manual went everywhere with her. She also often talked about how she loved savoury buffet type food, pork pies, scotch eggs etc. So I thought I would make her something that incorporated some of the things I knew she liked – and so I made a Mini Abi…

I made her using felt for the clothes and accessories, wool for hair (with a ribbon in it) and backed with a funky owl fabric and lightly stuffed. She has her PRINCE2 Manual and a pork pie. They are held on with Velcro so can be removed as required. She absolutely loved it! It remains on her desk and is something she often shows people.

After making Mini Abi, my work colleagues insisted that I make more, so I made this one of one of our project managers – Brian.

As our projects often involved work with the emergency services it seemed fitting to use a fabric with a police car on the back.

I then made one for our head of Testing – Paul. He needed some cheering up. He had been brought in to help give proper structure to the test team and to ensure we had proper test documentation and generally sort things out!

So by day, he was mild mannered Paul, drinking tea and writing test strategies…

But when he hears the distressed call of a project manager he drops his cup of tea (or carefully places it down) – rips off his tie and transforms into Super Test Man!!!

He was backed with some super awesome pac-man fabric for that bit of geek chic.

I then made one for the lovely lady I sat next to – Mel. A rather stylish woman who was a keen swimmer.

Her work attire (complete with fashionable scarf) was attached by a couple of wrap around velcro ties which could then be removed…

 It’s like something out of Baywatch!

Then finally I thought it was time to make one of me. So this is what I did – with some fab tattoo fabric (as I do rather like tattoos and have one on my back) and with a cunning accessory!

Yes – it’s a Mini Me with an even Minier Me!

She now sits on my kitchen windowsill – overseeing my sewing – along with polka dot pots of felt tip pens, painted pebbles and a yellow glittery sunflower made out of a Costa frappe lid – oh and this little lady I made ages ago!

Other ways of being creative

So as well as sewing, the odd bit of sketching here and there and cooking the odd bit of interesting food, I also enjoy taking photographs.

Back in 2010 my town was getting involved in the Britain in Bloom scheme – getting local areas to make their gardens look beautiful and in turn the council made the effort with hanging baskets, floral beds and planters around the town. As part of this they decided to hold a photography competition of shots of flowers. My husband and I decided to enter a couple of pictures and after a while I had a letter inviting me to the awards ceremony – not just for the photography competition but also for the local garden prizes. When we got there and looked around at the photographs up on display I was amazed to see that my photograph had been awarded first prize! I won some vouchers for a local garden centre and was really pleased! Sadly this seemed to just be a one off as they have never run the competition again.

My winning sunflower photograph (by Alex Cleverley.)

My town also hosts an annual Arts Festival and I’d never really known much about it until I met my husband. The first year we were together we had gone into town to have a look around the local Heritage centre that hosts a gallery of the photography clubs best photographs of that year. You could go around and note down the numbers of your three favourite photographs and I guess the most popular one would win a prize. It was in going round that gallery that we found out there was a photography competition as part of the arts festival and the final day for entries was that day. We took down the details and headed home to look through our recent photographs and picked up to three to enter each. I was pretty surprised to get an email the next day to tell me my photograph had been chosen as the winning shot! Twice in the same year!

My winning entry – Virgin Sunset (by Alex Cleverley.)

I was presented with a glass trophy on the final night of the festival. I think the organiser was expecting me to be a man – with the name Alex – I get that a lot!

Since then I’ve not been as lucky and haven’t won any other photography competitions, but my husband did come third in 2012!

These have been some of my previous entries:

Close up of a peacock feather and wintery Cow Parsley by me Alex Cleverley.

Grass seed and Sycamore seeds by me Alex Cleverley.

Pony on the Ridgeway by me Alex Cleverley

The festival also has a poetry competition and the first time I entered it I ended up with third prize – a gift card for Waterstones Book Shop – that I used to buy some poetry books with. I’ve been writing poetry on and off since my early teens. Of course back then it was pretty much angst ridden rubbish. One year my school bag was stolen and I lost a book full of poetry I had written – with no copies anywhere else. I was pretty upset. With it went my Walkman and most of my school books and my purse. I had to call my Mum to collect me from school as I couldn’t get the bus home without my purse. It was never found and I always wonder to this day whatever happened to it.

I don’t really write so much poetry these days, but I usually try to do some to enter into the poetry competition, although last year the organisers decided not to run the poetry competition, which was a real shame. I hope they reinstate it this year.

My third prize entry was as follows:

Art for Art’s Sake

He sits with charcoaled fingers
The room dimly lit
Face smudged from self-dejection
Hollowed eyes – empty canvas
Sketches patina the stippled floor
A thousand masterpieces in miniature
Discarded, inadequate – so he thinks
His muse lies in another room, inked black
Drawn to death
Her pastel hues foreshortened
Nude lines upon the paper
By such artful time etched hands
Capturing her ample shadows
Her slender tones
Practised, tangled limbs
Seated – reclining – erect – genuflect
Eraser worn to a stub
Rubber fragments strewn
Tell the tale of the conquered artist
The toughest critic – his own
Palette not intense enough
To arrest her beauty
To inhale, exhale, reproduce her bloom
Each crumpled piece a miscarriaged image
Their amalgamation in art – desolate.

by Alex Cleverley

 

Drawings

A while ago I did a post about my inability to draw hands and how I had sat and practised a bit using an old book from the 1940s.

I am not too bad at copying other things when it comes to drawing, not so great at doing something from scratch but I did say that I would put up some of the old drawings I have done – they are copies of other pictures but done from just looking at them, so no tracing or anything. (Caution: Some nudity!!!)

The first two are copies of an Edvard Munch picture and the famous The Kiss by Klimt (one of my favourite artists – don’t look at the hands…)

Then copies of some Salvador Dali sketches and an Alphonse Mucha painting (another of my favourite artists – again try to ignore the manglewurzel hands!)

Then copies of some Salvador Dali sketches and an Alphonse Mucha painting (another of my favourite artists – again try to ignore the manglewurzel hands!)

Then some baby feet copied from a book about drawing and a sailor pin up girl by Gil Elvgren (another favourite of mine.)

And finally a nude from a book on drawing I think!

I shall make an effort to draw more and to try and work out what my own style is. The problem with preferring to copy is that I don’t really know what my style is (other than drawing rather bizarre cartoons but that’s different!)

Squares aren’t the only shape…

I’m all about rectangles at the moment.

Last week I decided to try my hand at rectangular cushion covers. I wanted to make them a little differently to how I had been doing the square ones, by having two different fabrics on the front and perhaps with a little embellishment to make it a bit more interesting.

My first attempt I made with the measurements of the cushion pad in my head. This was a bit of a mistake as I should have really made sure I knew what the proper measurements were BEFORE I started. But you live and learn!

I used some leftover Alexander Henry tattoo design fabric and some teal green Kona Solids fabric for the side and back. I then used a nice crimson red velvet ribbon with some black crochet style lace ribbon either side of it for a vintage style embellishment. After I had pressed it I realised just how small it was and how it wouldn’t fit my very plump 12″ x 18″ pad I had (which was more like 13″ x 19″) I ended up getting a 12″ x 16″ pad and just about crammed it in!

My second – and much more well thought through attempt I used a great piece of Kokka fabric I had from a purple fabric stack from FabricHQ I’d had for a while trying to think how best I could use it. I teamed it up with the lovely Mustard Bella Solids fabric I had used before with my grey and yellow triangle print cushions as I thought it really picked up on the hint of yellow in the design. I used a delicate cream ribbon to go down the seam – all neatly hand sewn. I REALLY love this one!

I then did a red Nordic/Scandinavian style one using a leftover piece I had of this lovely bird/chick and tree pattern. I have previously made some mini Christmas stockings out of this fabric, but teamed it up with a nice dark cherry red plain cotton which I had picked up as an end of bolt for a good price and then put a nice retro bit of red rick rack on it for detail.

Then I went back to squareland with a really amazing Alexander Henry industry city print – Smokestack. I did this just with a plain black cotton fabric back. It is kind of art deco feel to the design. My husband really likes this one.

A couple of days before I had also made this one using some Lotta Jansdotter design fabric. It reminds me of pebbles. It is backed with a teal blue/green fabric to match the colour on the front.

And then at the end of last week I had an order for two owl & snail print cushion covers. These are made using Robert Kaufman Bermuda fabric. I now have only got enough to make three more. They are backed with a nice fine green stripe fabric – Road 15 – Road Rain. So they went off and were received today and had a lovely message from the happy customer to let me know they had arrived and asking if I would be interested in making two smaller plain green cushion covers to match – and of course I said yes!

I had also decided at the weekend to get a colour card for the Kona Solid’s fabrics. There are 271 shades to chose from and as I often order them to go with certain designs to do the plain backs for cushions but it can be a pain when you are trying to match a colour based on what you can see on a computer screen. I don’t have any remotely decent fabric shops near me so I rely on online shops to get the best and most interesting fabrics. I’ve been disappointed at times when a fabric arrives and it’s not quite right, so I decided to order one – they are a bit hard to find in the UK and only a few shops sell them.

I had found one at Plush Addict for a great price of £9.25 and had ordered it along with some other fabrics but had a call this morning from them to say they were sadly out of stock and they had been waiting weeks for them to come in, so I got a refund. I then hunted down other UK sellers and found one who only had one left and asked them what they could offer it to me for. I got a good deal for £15 including recorded delivery from GKS Fabrics. I’m really looking forward to it arriving, I think it is really going to help! It will also help me to pick out a good green to match either the lime green or the darker green in the owl fabric for my customer if the two green fabrics I have already aren’t a good match. Each page is A4 sized and uses swatches of the fabric rather than a printed version of the colour. It seems a bit pricey but when you weigh up the cost of ordering fabric that turns out not to be the right shade you need and the disappointment and time wasted in then having to find the right one – I think it will be worth it!

Eeeeee excited! (Image from http://www.fatquartershop.com)

Although I have been getting rather irked with the sewing machine – aka The Beast this past week, lots of thread snapping and then had to change the bulb only for the new one to go a few days later – so two more bulbs are on their way to me, so at the moment my sewing is only being done when it is a sunny day! Either that or get my husband to stand over me holding a torch… But other than sewing in the dark, it’s all back to normal now after a bit of tinkering!

Smokin’….

Last Friday, after a day of domesticity – dusting, hoovering, bathroom cleaning, making more cushion covers… I decided to make a nice salad for dinner. I love a nice salad, it is one of my favourite meals to have. A nice big bowl of mixed leaves, usually with a few other bits and bobs to fill it out a bit to make a main meal.

Sometimes I like to have griddled chicken, or salmon and often like having griddled halloumi cheese for a salty tang but in this one I used torn mozzarella and decided to do some tea smoked duck strips.

I’ve posted about tea smoking before when I did a buffet style dinner party before Christmas, I did some thinly sliced chicken breast back then, but thought about doing the duck while I was doing the online shop earlier in the week. I figured that the thin strips wouldn’t take long to cook using this method and would be a little different.

I got a lovely bag of mixed leaves and fennel tops – Steve’s Leaves salad bags have been on offer via Ocado for a while now so been making the most of them. I tastefully arranged it in a large dish, along with slices of cucumber, radish, tomato and some nice ripe melon and strawberries (I LOVE having strawberries in a salad!)

Then I sorted out my little smokery – got my grill pan and lined it with two layers of foil and put a mixture of dried rice, soft brown sugar and emptied about four Earl Grey teabags into it. I then put the grill tray in with more foil on with a few holes pierced through. I put the grill pan over a ring on my gas hob on a low heat and waited until it started smoking. I coated the duck strips with a little olive oil and when ready put them on the grill tray and covered the whole lot in yet more foil. I had the overhead extractor fan on, every window open but the house still smelled of smoke for about a day!

I left them under for about 7 minutes and they were perfect. A delicate smoky flavour and went really well with the fennel tops in the salad. Lovely on a warm spring evening with a glass of sparkling water with raspberry and lemon cordial and a wedge of lime! Left to coat liberally with the dressing of your choice!

Tea smoked duck salad

The only downside (other than the smell of smoke in the house for a while) was that when clearing up and getting rid of the foil that the smoke residue on the foil stained my fingers yellow. But almost gone now!

 

Aromatic soup!

The other day I decided to use up some carrots and butternut squash we had in the fridge and made a soup. I had some stock in the freezer left over from doing a roast gammon a while back. The stock was very aromatic – it was the water I had boiled my piece of smoked gammon in, along with some star anise, cinnamon stick, chilli flakes and peppercorns. It had a salty, gammony, spicy goodness about it.

I peeled and cubed the vegetables and fried it off in a pan with some butter and some sticks of fresh ginger. I also added some ground ginger, ground cinnamon and white pepper – although to be honest it probably didn’t need the white pepper or the ground ginger as it had a lot of gingery peppery flavour – a little too much for me (but I am a bit of a wimp when it comes to hot flavours.)

I then covered the vegetables with the stock and let come to the boil and simmer for a while until the vegetables were cooked through. Then I blended it all down with a hand blender and added some mascarpone cheese. After a taste test it just needed something a bit sweet to counter the saltiness so I put some maple syrup in – perfect!

To serve it I put a small blob more mascarpone in. I think if I made it again I might perhaps just stick with the fresh ginger and leave out the pepper and ground ginger and maybe more veg or less stock as it was a bit thin, but still tasty!

With the soup that is left I am thinking of combining it with some ground toasted cashew nuts and maybe some toasted spices like cumin and some tomatoes and some fried chunks of paneer for an aromatic curry.

Warning – Another Cushion Related Post!

It has been 21 days since my last post about cushions so I figure it is OK to do another one.

I made some more great cushion covers over the past few weeks. A while back I made some yellow and grey triangle ones using the great fabric – Stamped by Ellen Luckett Baker. Initially I had thought I would keep them to go on our sofa at home but then I found the blue/green version of the fabric and totally fell for that one as it goes really well with the colour of the feature wall in our living room, so I made a couple of cushion covers out of that (and a couple more to go in the shop.) The yellow and grey version ones are now listed on Etsy.

 

Now taking pride of place on the sofa – you can just about make out the wall in the background!

I also found this really great geometric print fabric. It feels a bit like silk but it is cotton. Backed with a cotton / linen mix navy fabric.

And then tried out this newsprint collage print by Windham fabrics. In my mind the purple background colour was more solid but when it arrived I saw it was more streaky – so it gives it more of a punky type feel. This one is a one fabric wraparound envelope style.

The next one was another same fabric wraparound style in a Michael Miller fabric.

Then I saw this great deer print fabric and found a plain teal kona solids fabric to match.

The final cushion I made using some fabric I had originally bought to use to make a cover for a pillow to make a bed for Sam our rescue cat we got in February. However, he came with his own blanket from his old home, and these days he prefers to sleep either on our bed, on the sofa or on a jute shopping bag, so I thought I would use it for cushion covers instead. I teamed it up with an Essex Linens solid colour fabric in Ruby – again something I had bought to go with something else – a fabric that had a sort of pinky red colour in part of the design but I found the Ruby was actually more orangey than pinky and it went perfectly with the Catnap fabric I had. So it was back to the drawing board to find another fabric for my other project! I think it is tricky when you are buying fabric online when you can’t be 100% sure on whether the colour will match something else, but as I don’t have any decent fabric shops near me I have to rely on buying online. I am tempted to get a Kona Solids colour card to use for when I want to find the right colour for some of the plain backings.

This week I am planning something a little different – some rectangular cushion covers – but using two or three different fabrics on the front and perhaps some ribbon detail. I will be taking a look at what fabric remnants I have and what ribbons that might work well together. I might even try some appliqué! (Steady now Alex!)

 

 

Manglewurzels

What, pray tell, is a Manglewurzel? Well it’s a type of beetroot, also called Mangold Wurzel, usually used for animal fodder.

It is also the term myself and a few close friends use to describe when I draw hands. It’s a bit of a shambles.

Some years ago my husband got me an old book ‘How to Draw Hands’ by Oliver Senior – a book printed in 1944. It has that old book smell about it.

You can tell it’s old as the first picture is someone holding a cigarette…

So last night, after my bath, I dug out my little sketch book and got some pencils, a sharpener and an eraser and flicked through the book. I picked two pictures to copy the technique and although they aren’t perfect and perhaps I picked the wrong hardness of pencil but here are my two goes and hopefully they are not manglewurzels!

Hand sketches by Alex Cleverley