Teignmouth Revisited

Yesterday my hubby took me back to Teignmouth, this time for a shopping trip. It was a bit frustrating on Tuesday, having to rush around because of the car, and I’d seen several shops I was keen to visit.

I rarely get the opportunity to go shopping, and I always really enjoy it when I get the chance! It was time my clothes budget got an airing because it’s a while since I had anything new, and I’ve had to get rid of quite a bit of stuff because since losing weight, it no longer fits me.

We had a lovely day out, in beautiful hot sunny weather, and I spotted quite a few shops and little nooks and crannies in the town that had escaped my notice a couple of days previously.

A shop full of vintage sewing machines.

A wonderfully ornate old machine, and just look at that glorious case…

A miniature iron, in what looks like its original box.

A couple of tiny miniature sewing machines, both by Singer.

The shopping streets are narrow and picturesque.

The shop fronts are very pretty, and it’s interesting looking up above to see the architecture of the buildings.

Gorgeous hand-made leather shoes. Very much my style, but too pricey for my budget.

We came across a busker playing gorgeous American Blues music on a variety of instruments – a guitar, a 3-string cigar box guitar and a 3-string biscuit tin guitar! He played pick and slide style. We had a very interesting conversation with him, and I saw him again later on, on his way home. (Left-handed guitarist like Paul McCartney.)

His cigar-box guitar. I love the fact that the volume control knobs are made of bottle tops!!

He was very happy for me to video him.

He explained that much of this music originated from the slave and ex-slave communities and being very poor, they had to make their musical instruments from whatever they had handy. I love this mentality which shows great inventiveness, and which today has ben developed into the recycling and upcycling culture we are all familiar with. (Think of my hubby’s excellent pedestal for our new sundial! We’d never have ended up with this unique pedestal if we’d had the money to go and buy a proper one.) There’s so much satisfaction in making something useful and/or beautiful from what most people would consider rubbish, which driven by need, produces something often unique and quite unexpected.  It means so much more. I loved the vintage look of the cigar box and biscuit tin guitars, with the scuffs and dents, and the general patina of age. Paul said that these all added to the tone of the instrument. I am reminded of the itinerant Klezmer musicians of the old Ashkenazi Jewish world, travelling from village to village and playing for weddings etc., carrying their instruments on their backs and living as best they could.

Now for my purchases. We went back to the jewellery shop – I was keen to revisit Teignmouth this week, because their sale was due to end at the end of this week. I bought two more of the gorgeous necklaces and also a very pretty ring. You wouldn’t believe how cheap everything was – they weren’t over-priced to start with, but at half marked price, you couldn’t go wrong.

Here are the two I bought on Tuesday, for comparison.

I bought a few items in the Pound Shop, mostly stuff to use in the studio.

I visited a shop which sold some lovely unusual ethnic style clothes, scarves, gifts etc. and bought a skirt and almost matching scarf in there.

We also found the ethnic shop I found it so hard to tear myself away from the other day! Their stuff was also incredibly cheap – ethnic and boho-style clothes usually are, and they are generally quite unusual and you don’t see hordes of other people wearing exactly the same stuff. I really stocked up in there.

When we got home we were both pretty hot and tired, so I made us a nice cold drink – lemonade with basil, a recipe I found quickly online, made from fresh lemons mashed up with basil leaves – gorgeous flavour and so refreshing on a hot day!

I then had fun trying it all on and mixing and matching the items with each other and with stuff I already had. Here’s a mini-fashion show starring Shoshi complete with mirror and phone!! (I wasn’t sure how else to take the photos.)

Here’s the skirt and scarf I bought in the first shop, teamed with my navy embroidered waistcoat and red t-shirt to complement the red border around the hem.

Now the stuff from the ethnic shop.

A fun pair of patchwork dungarees. Dungarees always make me look fat but somehow I couldn’t resist this pair!

(Sorry about the bad quality – the sun was streaming in through the window and it was hard to get the photos right.)

I thought the dungarees looked more flattering with one of the scarves I bought at the same time.

I bought a pair of patchwork trousers which are made of heavy-ish cotton. They are much too long so will have to be taken up.

They had a rack of fabulous silk dresses and skirts with elasticated tops and uneven hems with points, which could be worn in a variety of ways. I bought one of the dresses and a skirt. This is the purple dress. It has ties to make shoulder straps but you don’t have to use them if you don’t want to.

You can wear it as a skirt.

Without the straps, and pulled down a bit to make a low waisted dress.

The skirt is greenish-blue.

I thought I could have some fun with this and wear it in all sorts of different ways! Here it is as a head scarf. I hope the length of it down the back doesn’t look too nun-ish! It reminded me somewhat of the Vermeer picture, “Girl with a Pearl Earring.”

As a poncho. I like the way the elasticated waist becomes cowl-like.

The other scarf I bought in that shop. I love big square scarves because they are lovely for tying your hair up in.

After taking these photos, I realised that in most of them I’ve got a really grim expression! I was concentrating on getting the best view possible with the phone camera, and also I was feeling pretty tired after our busy day shopping, and finding it a bit uncomfortable, all the standing to do the photos.

Finally, a pair of green suede sandals with ankle ties.

Recently I had to throw away two fabulous pairs of sandals that had long been favourites – absolutely nothing wrong with the tops, but the soles, made of synthetic rubber of some kind, had completely deteriorated and were crumbling away, and there was no way they could be repaired. This sort of thing makes me sick. I really liked those shoes but they were clearly not made to last. I expect my favourite shoes to last for many years, and at least to be repairable if they wear out!

Anyway, I think you’ll agree I had quite a spree! These clothes may not be to everyone’s taste but I’ve always loved the alternative look and tended to make my own fashion – part of my creative spirit, I suppose!

Outing to Seale-Hayne

Yesterday afternoon my hubby and I went to Seale-Hayne outside Newton Abbot. This beautiful place used to be an agricultural college but is now the home of Dame Hannah Rogers’ school for disabled children, now known simply as Hannah’s. We have visited several times in the past. They host a lot of art in various forms, with small workshops and studios available for local artists, and a gallery. Unfortunately they were in the process of installing a new exhibition so all the gallery had to offer was a collection of workmen and a lot of pieces of MDF and dust!

From the front entrance archway, you enter a large open courtyard. It was extremely hot in there as there wasn’t a breath of wind!

In one corner of the courtyard was an amazing sculpture of a kind of robot, made from all sorts of agricultural and industrial scrap. The man in the shop said it had been made by a blacksmith who has a studio on the estate, with the help of some of the students.

It looks like something out of War of the Worlds! Amazing what you can make with stuff that most people would think of as rubbish.

They have a very nice gift shop.

I loved these little hanging ornaments. The heart-shaped ones reminded me of the heart embellishment I made for my hubby’s anniversary card recently.

I think I must make some more of these. I love the little birds.

I remember this long corridor from previous visits. The lampshades are just gorgeous – almost Zentangle.

I love this beautiful Celtic calendar.

Back in the courtyard again. Along one wall are several large painted posters on wood.

Round the back I found a place called The Green Room which has been converted into a sort of common room, club and music studio for the older children and young adults.

A gorgeous old door. Love the handle!

In the corner of the courtyard. This tree sculpture could have lots more things hanging from it. It just has some rather uninspiring leaves!

View of the main building again.

In another wing we found a long paper pasted to the wall, with lots of little frames drawn on it. Apparently this is for the children to draw their portraits in.

Also in that corridor, some beautiful glass hanging plaques in the window,

and a framed piece of weaving.

A lovely afternoon out. It was disappointing that there was less to see on this occasion, but no doubt we’ll go back sometime soon, and in the meantime we’ll keep an eye on the website to see what exhibitions are coming up.

2014 Annual Review of my Art

The third of three posts for today, and the second of two review posts, as there was too much for a single post! WARNING: Long post, picture rich!

WOYWW visitors, please scroll down to the first post for today.

Working in my New ARTHaven

My new ARTHaven is proving to be a total delight and joy to work in. I love this room. I am surrounded by all my materials and equipment, organised how I want it, and the layout is so conducive to mixed media work, with each work zone flowing freely into the others. It is wonderful to be able to have my sewing machine out permanently, and have easy access to everything. I tend to use the main work zone most of the time, which doubles as a paper art and mixed media station, and I can easily bring materials out as required.

Recycled Mini-Album

The main project of the year was the creation of my recycled mini-album, a gift for our niece, all about her grandfather (my father) who died almost exactly a year ago. It took me eight months to complete. The book itself was made from scratch, entirely from recycled materials – the cover from a dried milk carton and the pages from recycled Christmas cards. For the non-recycled materials and embellishments (e.g. metal hardware for the cover, thread for stitching the signatures, etc. etc.) I used only materials that were already in my stash, and with the exception of paints and gel mediums etc., it hasn’t cost me a penny to make! The discipline of using only recycled materials was great fun and gave a tremendous sense of achievement.

The pages were decorated with mixed media techniques with many different materials being used, from crumpled tissue paper to fruit net and Polyfilla (joint compound). I used acrylic paints and gel mediums, Perfect Pearls (mica powders), rubber stamping, Zentangle, collage, stencilling… Not only was this tremendous fun, but it also increased my knowledge base in the use of many materials, and was an adventure in mixed media.

I enjoyed the feature I made of the borders, which were consistently black and white throughout, emphasising the carefully graded page sizes within each signature so that the borders became layered and compound as you turned each page. (For full details of the construction of the book, and embellishment of the pages, please see my blog archive in the left-hand side bar under “Recycled Mini-Album.”)

Card Making

Throughout the year I had to make the usual collection of cards. I am considering myself less and less a card maker and I don’t want to be type-cast as one, but they need to be done. Part of my problem is that I seem incapable of making “simple” cards and each one involved a huge investment of time as I want to make each one a completed art piece, and then I feel demoralised by the thought that if you take any piece of art and place it on a piece of folded card with a sentiment on it, it immediately becomes ephemeral, and I can’t escape the thought that its ultimate destination will be the waste paper bin when the birthday cards come down!

Here is a selection of some of my better efforts during the year (not in chronological order). For all the following items please click on the links for further information.

A house moving card. This was an original drawing in waterproof pen with colour added in the form of distress inks.

“Bejewelled” card. Background created with acrylic paint spattering and the application of sparkles, sequins and gems. Applied butterfly cut-outs.

Thank-you card for the teacher of our soap making course – rubber stamping, inking, glass bead gel medium, printed photos cut out and applied.

Also for the same teacher, this time for the felt-making course, a mixed media card with pop-up inside, involving many techniques and materials and taking several days to complete.

A bereavement card for a Christian family.

With the front overlay turned back:

Another mixed media card.

Birthday card for a bee-keeper.

A tag for a honey and lemon cold remedy:

I acquired some Stampin’ Up equipment and made a few cards using this – these first are using the Mosaic Madness set.

First card:

Second card:

Using the Six-sided Sampler set, I made this new home card:

Teabag Art and Zentangle

Throughout the year I have been collecting used teabags and drying them out for use in teabag art, which is something I am hoping to work on next year. For this year, I took watercolour paper and laid out the drying teabags on this, and they left beautiful and unique marks which I used as the foundation for art.

To begin with I have been concentrating on adding Zentangle art to these marks, using a fine sepia pen – this is very fine work for which I sometimes need to resort to a magnifier. I have done a number of abstract  designs, picking out the natural creases and “holes” in the imprint.

Taking this a bit further, I created a few cards, sometimes using the marks left by drying round tea bags. I made a small landscape for one of these, adding some colour in the form of distress inks.

Apart from this, I haven’t done a great deal of Zentangle this year, but I made this card for my hubby for Valentine’s day.

Other teabag art was mostly experimental, colouring with inks, stamping, etc.

I was hoping to add some machine embroidery and start joining the teabags together but it was then that I discovered that my old sewing machine was irreparably broken and that had to be put on hold for the time being.

Miscellaneous Projects

Other projects included an altered pizza box:

This mixed media project included the use of ripped corrugated cardboard and iridescent gel medium, together with applied images and text, acrylic paints and marker pens.

I did some experiments with different materials such as Tyvek and other meltable fabrics. This was a card I made, with a piece of melted nappy liner painted with acrylics. The texture was amazing, and it is a shame that the photo doesn’t do the colour justice, as the mixed browns were emphasised with the addition of gold gilding wax.

When we were away on holiday I came across some stuff called puff binder, and purchased a small quantity – it is very expensive so I experimented with different materials to see if I could make some myself, not very successfully, but the results could be used in similar ways.

Backgrounds, Scratch Papers and Masterboards

I spent one morning creating alcohol ink backgrounds on the back of solar panels fliers that we picked up at the county show (never throw anything out lol!).

During the course of the year I created a number of backgrounds and useful papers by cleaning off brushes and stamps and mopping up, and saving the results. I made quite a few from kitchen paper used for cleaning up, trying to keep the colour schemes coherent as I worked on other projects. The advantage of these is that their layers can be split apart and you get more backgrounds for your bucks that way.

No matter that sometimes holes appear – if the layers become stuck together with dried acrylic paint, it just adds to the distressed look!

Some background sheets maturing nicely!

I also made some interesting “scratch” papers – large sheets of paper or card used for cleaning off brushes and using up left-over bits of paint.

A blue one, where I emphasised circles and swirls.

This is what this one developed into:

Another one, mostly black and white, again emphasising my favourite circles motif.

A mixed colour one using a striped theme. This one also includes metallic acrylic paint.

These scratch papers are A3 in size.

I also made some masterboards (the same sort of thing, but created deliberately from scratch). With this first one I got a bit carried away and could have stopped earlier, when it was already looking pretty good. The end result is a very dark circles pattern, and with all the embossing resist it has a slightly waxy feel to it.

This one is a seaside-themed one with shell rubber stamping.

Again, the masterboards are A3 in size. They were created with a view to cutting them up and using the pieces as backgrounds in projects, but so far I haven’t cut any of these sheets up (masterboards or scratch papers) because I like them as they are, and they are also extremely useful as photographic backgrounds!

Knitting

I have been working on and off on a major knitting project which I am ashamed to admit that I started two years ago! My excuse for taking so long over it is that we did move house in the middle of it… It is now finished, in the nick of time before the end of the year. Nice to have at least one UFO (UnFinished Object) done and dusted!

Dyeing

I got my dyeing equipment out again after many years:

and produced these browns for the knitting project:

For the felt making course (see below), I dyed some Merino rovings, but this wasn’t terribly satisfactory as however careful I was, the dyeing process tended to start the felting process, so I ultimately abandoned this and managed to source some ready-dyed rovings at a good price on Ebay, which also saved a lot of work.

I also did some experiments with dyeing from avocado stones and skins, which produce a lovely pinky-beige tone.

As I develop my textile art skills further, this is an area I shall definitely be pursuing.

Felt Making

In the autumn I took part in two short evening courses. The first was on felt-making, and I was able to produce several interesting pieces, only one of which I have so far finished (I consider the others to be test pieces, learning the different techniques). The finished piece is a hair clip, using the poppies we made in the wet felted flowers class.

These are some of the unfinished pieces, the first being a wet-felted picture of poppies, which I am in the process of embellishing with some needle felting.

My second picture, which also requires some further work:

My nuno felted piece – one end of a scarf.

Soap Making

Before Christmas I attended the second course, this time on soap making, and have since been making soaps at home. Here are the natural soaps I made in one of the classes:

Honey soap that I made at home:

Other soaps made at home:

All packaged up and ready to go:

In the course we also made bath bombs and bath melts, which is probably not something I shall do again.

Since completing this course, I have joined the Soap Makers’ Forum online, and am on the mailing list for Soap Queen, and am learning a great deal from both of these sites. I shall definitely be pursuing soap making in the future, and it is neatly combined with other techniques too, because many of my skills can be employed in creating attractive packaging.

Notable Purchases for my ARTHaven During the Year

Kitty Squad stamp – from Stampotique. I have yet to unmount this stamp and remount it on E-Z Mount Foam – it will be a useful stamp, especially when I cut the kitties apart.

Darkroom Door Alphabet Medley stamp set – another very useful rubber stamp with a useful alphabet style for mixed media work.

Stampin’ Up stamp, stencil and punch sets, and some useful sentiment stamps. See posts above for details.

Various other miscellaneous stamps, stencils and embellishments.

Felt-making and soap-making supplies so I can continue this at home, having completed the courses.

Envelope punch board – the first envelope making board I’ve ever used that actually works (at least for me)! I have discovered lots of other things online that you can do with this, which will be fun to explore.

A trawl round the charity shops provided me with some great textiles for the altered clothing I want to tackle next year.

Plans for the Coming Year

Sheba, my Cougar cutting machine, has remained in the corner unused all year, I am afraid. As you can see, there has been a great deal else to do, and from my previous post you will see that we have been dealing with other issues in our life too, so it has taken a back seat for now. I would very much like to get going with it again, but it has been so long that I think I shall need to start again as a beginner, and one of the things putting me off starting again is the fear that I will need to invest a great deal of time in it, at the expense of other things. There are things I do need to use it for, though, so hopefully in the coming year this will become a priority.

Now that the mini-album is complete, I can return to the other album I started about Dad at the beginning of the year. This is an ongoing project, as is my Fine Art album which I started a couple of years back, and my small art journal. I should like to work further on all these books. I also want to get much more into book making in general, and explore different bindings, and make small books which take much less time than the major project of this year.

I am also drawn to working more with textiles. I have some charity shop stash to make up into upcycled clothing which is an area which interests me greatly. I also have a half-tester over the bed which requires drapes to be made, and the old four-poster drapes can be adapted and added to. This will involve using the sewing machine, and also quite a bit of hand embroidery, which is another area which has been neglected over the past many years and which I should like to return to soon.

I also have another knitting project waiting in the wings – another unravelling and remaking job!

The teabag art is also a major area of work. Over the past months I have accumulated a huge number of used teabags which can now be emptied and used as the basis of art work, and made up into projects.

I also want to get more video work done. This is very time consuming, but very enjoyable and creative.

In my ARTHaven I have a lot of equipment and materials which have not even been used yet, and during the coming year it would be nice to be able to put that right!

Who knows what the coming year will bring? I am hoping that health-wise and stress-wise, it will be better than the one just past, and that I shall have more opportunity, and more energy, to spend doing what I love best, being creative in my beautiful studio, with a clear conscience, and that I may continue to be stimulated by fresh ideas for design, and unusual ways of combining my beloved mixed media materials.

Thank you to all my faithful followers and visitors who have been with me throughout the year, and for all your lovely comments which were so encouraging and appreciative. A happy New Year to you all, and here’s hoping for a creative and productive year ahead.