How is it?

How is it that very small people who are off school ill can quickly chip out a lino design, edition it and wander casually back to the sofa despite being too weak to possibly walk down the road and learn something?

...meanwhile in the same period of time I haven't cut out and editioned a monster (and her friend), but she's getting there and seems quite content to wait until next week to fully emerge.

fabulous fibre

My family have had a thing about fibre for a while now, first my grandad and then my mother and I think it may have worked its way through to me too.  Many a happy weekend in my childhood was spent looking around carpet factories and spinning mills (not so many of those around these days) and the sound of the knitting machine lulled me to sleep through my childhood.

So this tea towel, while slightly obscure to some, seems almost inevitable to me and surely we all need to celebrate the strange places we can get fibre from?

If you sit still with a spinning wheel in a public place then it will not be long before someone comes over to ask whether you can spin the dog hair they have been carefully saving every time Shep/Fluffles/Fang has a big moult (the polite answer being that you have an awful lot on for the next ten years...) but there are some equally strange animals that do supply fibre in real life, and probably some as equally smelly.

Crumpled enough?

picture swaps...

One of the great things about doing art fairs and craft fairs and open house trails and all the other lovely events where artists and makers get together is that sometimes you manage to pull off a fantastic swap.

Over the years I have swopped all kinds of things and I find that the items somehow take on a greater worth than if I had just bought them - two people who both enjoy/value/admire each others work manage to get together and have a sideways conversation (or sometimes a direct ask, but then how awkward is it to say 'No'?  That looks like I don't like your work or think mine is worth lots more or some other difficult scenario) and that leads to decisions about which pieces of work could be equivalent in terms of a swap and just sometimes it all works out really well.

This is my latest swap, with Caroline Watson, who is a painter.  How many tea towels could I give her for a painting?

Luckily for me she has also done a small series of lino prints, so when chatting away at a local arts trail we somehow ended up in full swop mode.

...and how happy we both are with the result.  I hardly ever buy other lino printers work, although there are so many I really, really admire and I would love an example of their work of my own and it is a medium I am so drawn to at every art show...and now I have these fabulous creatures living with me here!

Caroline chose an unframed print of my "Crowds get bigger towards the back" and  seemed equally pleased.

Hurray for picture swaps.  Do have a look at Caroline's paintings too...