GUESS WHERE I AM?

I am home in England!!
We decided that as the company my husband now works for provides us with flights home I would take advantage! So here I am and this is the sight that greeted me as I drove around the corner yesterday.........my VERY full front garden..........I have missed my garden very much and so I am looking forward to spending some time amongst the flowers.
I have to say that my back garden is not looking so good, it has suffered from 8 weeks of neglect and the recent dry weather!

OF A FEATHER.......

                                                    AND MORE FRENCH KNOTS!

I had such fun stitching the French knots for my last piece that I wanted to do more. I have also been wanting to use my sewing machine more and so decided to combine the two things.

This piece is worked on an A4 piece of canvas that I coloured first and let dry.

The bird bodies are torn from an old book page and then glued in place. The legs, beaks, tails and outlining of the bodies is all stitched with the machine. French knots were added afterwards.

                                                            I really liked this bird!!

                                                   And this ones beak came out really well!

  I chose the colours for the birds to fit into the PLAY DATE CAFE challenge this week, I haven't entered any challenge for so long I thought it would be fun to get back into doing that occasionally.

FRENCH KNOTS

Yesterday while blog hopping around I saw a piece of work that had some simple stitching and just a few French knots that was so effective I thought I would have a play. Check out the piece I saw here  ALICE AND CAMILLA
So off to a journal I went............I was wondering (I do that a lot now I have so much more time on my hands!!) what I did before I discovered working in  journals? I think they make the perfect places to play around and experiment in especially like yesterday when you see something you want to try out. Instead of working on bits of card etc that you wonder what to do with afterwards you have your journals to look back through.........so much fun!
Anyway back to the stitching.............I stamped the bird and then added the long straight stitches to look like grass and the French knots in amongst.

Next I decided I needed to add a few words and decided to stitch those too.

Finally I decided to stitch this page to the one after it to hide all the mess at the back and did that with just straight stitch around the edges.

DRINK ME, EAT ME

These images would usually be too cute for me but I do make exceptions for subjects I really like and seeing as these are ALICE I was happy to make the exception!
Over the years lots of people have illustrated the Alice in Wonderland story, these images are by Mabel Lucie Atwell and are produced as rubber stamps under licence by THE ARTISTIC STAMPER here in the UK.

 I started out just to do one side of this double page spread but the ink and the stamping "migrated" over to the other page so decided to carry on over onto that page. I printed out the first chapter of the story and then cut selected lines into strips and pasted them onto the page.

Heart and home and flowers

These are a few pages from a small journal that I have been messing around with over the last few days. All the colour is Distress Inks. Can you tell from the last one that I was not feeling very settled that day!!??

And finally, a bit of nonsense.............like my new flower vase?? It seems baked beans are universal!!

Back stage at the opera house

It seems I can still access blogger today so thought I would share some more pics with you, this time of a back stage tour of the opera house. It was all very interesting but the costume storage rooms were fabulous, a little girls dressing- up paradise!

                                                                     Tu-tu anyone??

                                                              Cossack hats?

                                 Ballet shoes waiting to have the wooden bits put in the toes.

                    Wooden shoe lasts...........I would have loved a couple of those to alter!

                                                                     Large set storage.

Could not resist taking this pic..............you know how most of us work with sheets of paper or a pad underneath our work and it collects all the extra ink/paint etc that strays over the sides of the card? Well it seems they do the same in the theatre! This room is where the sets are painted and the whole floor was covered in huge sheets of paper with lots of evidence of recent work!

Quilt exhibition

OK by some strange quirk I am today able to access Blogger and post myself so I am making the most of it to show you some pics from a quilt exhibition I went to last week with the handicrafts group here in Almaty.
The gallery was not the most salubrious looking from the outside but inside was a different story.

The artist whose exhibition it was is called VERA SHERBAKOVA, she was born here in Kazakhstan but now lives and works in Moscow. This was her first exhibition in her native country.
The above pics are of her George and the Dragon quilt. It seems George and the Dragon is a universal theme, not just used as the patron saint of England!!

Interesting detail on another quilt, threads wrapped around sticks..............mmmm can see that idea being used!!

ALMATY JOURNAL PAGE

So here is my first piece of work produced here in Almaty! The three large letters ALA were cut out from one of the labels attached to our packing cases, they are the code letters for Almaty airport!

The corrugated card in the corner of the page came from a box of chocolates I was given last week.

And the white circles were made by dipping a Kazakhstan loo roll middle into gesso!!

COMING BACK TO BLOGGER!

As many of you know I recently moved to live in Kazakhstan. I was really disappointed when I got here to find out that access to Blogger blogs from here is not easy;and it really surprised me to realise how much I love my Blogger blog and the contact it gave me with like-minded people. I have felt quite adrift without it, the old saying you don't know what you have till it's gone is certainly true!

After a while I decided I was going to move to Wordpress as access to that is easier but I REALLY don't like my Wordpress blog, it is not easy to make it fun and funky like this one......I miss my skeleton guys......it feels too business-like.
So,I did some investigating and some chatting my good, good friend Wendy who has volunteered to help me with posting pics which I still can't do from here though I can post text, and I have decided I am going to continue with this blog and abandon the Wordpress one.

Posting might get a bit erratic at times as I have to rely on Wendy and its not like she doesn't have anything else to do but hopefully between us we can manage at least once a week!
That brings me onto another bit of news, there ARE going to be times when I CAN post more often as I am going to be back in the UK more than I thought initially! Watch this space for more news on that in the next few weeks!!