Market Day

This Sunday is the Eastbourne Market, and I’ll have a stall. It’s my first market and I’m very excited to do a local one. It’s on from 11-2 at Muritai School. Here’s a peek at some of the bits I’ll be bringing. Hope to see you there!

One Year of Blogging

This week is the one year birthday of my blog. As such it seemed appropriate to appropriate a birthday present. This quilled art is a picture I recently made for my sister’s birthday.  I’ve used poppies again, this time paired with forget-me-nots and yellow roses. Making the strings of forget-me-not buds was the most satisfying part – I’m pleased they have a level of botanically accuracy as well as visual appeal.

Wheatfield with Poppies

Poppies have a certain mystique. They have a complex history, bringing associations with war, with remembrance and graves and ‘foreign fields’, as Remembrance Day last week highlighted. They are also part of a summer day in the sun, time spent playing in a field. In the language of flowers they are associated with eternal sleep or oblivion. Their association with sleep is no doubt due to their pharmacological effects. Poppies can also mean consolation or pleasure, and the usual red flower associations of passion and love. Oddly, yellow poppies mean wealth. 

Travelling through Spain a few years ago, what really struck me, and remains vivid in my memory, was the red earth in the fields, with crops growing up and scattered with splashes of poppies, so dark they looked like the earth stained them too. I could understand why war poetry dwells so on poppies – and not just because they sprout in disturbed, war torn, fields. They’re the colour of blood – old blood in the earth, fresh blood in the bud.

Wheat fields with poppies are a classic and enduring image, beautiful but also full of layered meanings. I had great fun recreating such images. This is actually my second picture – the first didn’t quite work out, so remain half in pieces gathering dust on my table. The background is acrylic paint on card. The poppies and wheat were both great to quill (I’m particularly proud of the poppy centre), and I’ve already repeated the poppy design in a bunch of flowers I’ll post about soon.

Days Bay Play Paper Course

Wednesday-week an exciting thing will happen – another Dora Papers Days Bay Play class starts! I’m really looking forward to it, with lots of fun things planned. 

This term we will be doing more marbling, including intermediate patterns.

We’ll also be making papier-mâché containers, and marbling them. Here are some I made recently – the two on the right are made by my nieces.

Making marbled notebooks.

And, of course, some origami.

If this looks like a great time to you, and you (well, your child) are aged 8-12 and in the Eastbourne area after school, pop on over to the Days Bay Play blog and check out the details – there are still a couple of places left.

Marbling Craftiness

Palm

As anyone who has done marbling is no doubt well aware, marbling is a ‘small’ craft. There aren’t many around who do it and consequently even appropriate paint can be hard to get hold of – I order mine online from the States. Marbling rakes and combs for sale are somewhat trickier. After an extensive search I can tell you with some confidence that they just aren’t available, or at least not sold by anyone who ships to New Zealand and charges something I'm prepared to pay.

Nonpareil

There is of course a good reason for this, beyond even the small potential customer pool. Everyone develops their own methods in marbling, including their own basins. My main ones are actually the plastic draws of an office organiser, perfect for me as they neatly hold my preferred paper size (A4) with a little space around them - and they can go back to being office furnature when I'm not marbling. The size of the rakes and combs need to be appropriate to the basin size which really means they must be made to fit.

French Curl

I’ve been making do with some fairly awful pin and cardboard combs I put together in a couple of hours last year. The pins shift, the cardboard bends and disintegrates when wet. I only had 1 and 0.5 cm combs and no rakes. Finally I got my act together and hauled out the tools. I’m proud of the result. I now have short and long 1 cm combs, and 1″ and 2″ rakes and a bouquet rake. 

Pretty yet vicious marbling tools

Double-Cabled Nonpareil

Of course they didn’t stay looking this pretty for long. I’ve barely done a month’s worth of marbling with them and they all already have paint splatters – and a couple have some wonderfully marbled sections where I’ve dropped them in the size. Still, they are working very well and haven't broken yet! The marbing pictures on this post are some of my recent experiments with patterns I haven’t been able to make before.

Further Cake Adventures

I’ve been playing with icing again. This time the cake was for my nephew’s birthday. As it was a family party I decided to steer clear of chocolate, as it doesn’t suit everyone (oh the horror). I also wanted a cake I could eat. The result was a gluten free egg-free lemon cake. I’m really pleased with it and the great thing about lemon is that the cake tastes better after a few days, rather than stale.

The nieces suggested a train cake, which sounded like fun to me. This is just one normal sized cake, baked in a square tin then cut to form an engine and carriages. There is a lot of icing – seriously so much icing. There will be icing dreams.

Over all I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, although the many ways it deviates from a proper train bother me a little. For example just how the wheels work when they’re outside the track is a mystery and the funnel placement plain wrong (but necessary for cake structural integrity, unfortunately). The kink in the track is also odd – when I saw how it’d turned out I wanted to create a train derailment, because there is no way a train could get around a corner that tight. Sadly disaster themed cakes are probably not suitable for toddlers.