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waiting for the great leap forwards
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3rd-Jun-2008 12:53 pm - Snail Incident and Sketchbook Bits
I have slowed down to an even more sluggish pace than usual this week following an incident with some snails last Wednesday. Lots of snails. Being averse to the use of chemicals in the garden, and more generally averse to killing creatures, I collected up several hundred of the snails who have been eating my beans/ tomatoes/ lupins/ delphiniums and took them for a walk to a nearby bit of rough land where they would have to take their chances with the local thrushes and blackbirds.  It was a wet day.  Having deposited the snails I was walking home and, in stepping sideways to avoid a muddy puddle, put my foot on a mossy railway sleeper.  My front foot slid forward, the other slid backward, and (seemingly in slow motion) I unwillingly did the splits in a way which makes me feel slightly sick even now.  To cap it off, I keeled sideways, and landed in the muddy puddle I had been trying to avoid in the first place.  It hurt such a lot and I was shouting out in pain but nobody in the vicinity (certainly not the young couple eating their packed lunch out of an asda bag about 20 yards away) came to my assistance so I fumbled for my mobile and called home for help.  So I had to wait 10 minutes for my 72-year-old dad had to come and help me up off the floor.  

That was all preamble.  I've done my hamstring - I think that's all it was, I phoned NHS direct - and my knee feels a bit dodgy too but it has improved day by day and I presume it will all sort itself out in a week or two... but it has left a cloud over the whole week and it almost feels as if the pain has spread around my whole body so everything is slightly uncomfortable and out of kilter. 

For that reason I haven't done a huge amount of new art stuff but I did do a few pages of colour collage to take my mind off the pain in the first couple of days with my foot up.  And here they are (in reality they're about A3 size): 

  
 
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26th-May-2008 12:09 pm - Woven Felt (completed)

Well, it took me a week, but I did finally force myself to cut up the precious prefelts, weave them together, and felt them down into a sturdy and solid finished piece.  I'm not thrilled with it as a thing of beauty (both of the original pieces were more beautiful to my eye and perhaps I should've made something less precious to butcher for this experiment) but I've done what was asked of me, and have learned a lot from the doing of it, I suppose.

 

That's the front and the back face - in a way I think the reverse is rather prettier - and the teacher did suggest that I go for something with a bit more contrast than the stone/earth combo so I guess she was right about that.  I won't be doing anything like this again very soon as it took absolutely ages but it does suggest various other projects that I've filed away somewhere in the back of my mind for another day.

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19th-May-2008 12:16 am - Felting Homework (in progress)

…I am attempting to sidle onto LJ almost unnoticed (at least until I get my bearings). 

I’ve been doing my felting homework (for my City and Guilds 7822) this weekend.  It doesn’t suit me to commit to a long-term course and turn up at the same time every week – I have too many other commitments already, mainly in Unitarian circles, and it’s nice to have a quiet night in on a regular basis – so I’m doing the course in a slightly different way.  There are seven residential weekends spread out over two years which suits me very nicely... except it does mean we have rather a lot of homework to do… and I invariably leave it all until the last moment so it ends up with me getting into a bit of a palaver.  There always seems to be plenty of other stuff that’s more urgent to be getting on with at any given moment.

  

Here are the two A3-sized pieces of pre-felt I made on Saturday.  As if I haven’t got enough homework to do, this is an attempt to make a better job of something I didn’t do properly in time for the last weekend, purely an attempt to satisfy my perfectionism.  These pieces are based on some photographs of stone and earth I took last year in Iceland.  The idea is that I have to cut them into strips (if I can bear to… I rather like them as they are) and then weave them together and felt them into something a bit more exotic.

Will post evidence of the finished article whenever it comes into being.

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