Chrismas Decorations

I'm gearing up to teaching some Christmas workshops both locally and up in York. Today I was preparing samples and my youngest decided he wanted to make a tree decoration. He concentrated for about an hour and did everything by himself. The only thing I did was to cut around the heart shape inside. The inside was done on the embellisher machine and then trapped between red felt. I was really impressed with his determination to sew on the green beads all by himself as well. As for me, well I am struggling with a robin's legs at the moment!!

Fabric Fusion

This is the finished piece for my friend I have been working on. It's now with the proud owner and hanging on her wall. I'm not sure if I said before but one of the workshops I teach is a six day course covering different dyeing techniques, printing, stamping, paint sticks etc etc. At the end some students decided to trade work so the fabric has been "created" by lots of different ladies. The owner of this is just about to go and have a major back op so I have made it as a kind of gift. Her brief was to make it look like it had been thrown at the wall, nothing too formal. This photo doesn't show up all the detail but I used hand and machine stitching with different binding techniques.

These beads were from some curtain fringing.

Blanket stitch with beads attached.

Seals, fabric cuffs and fireworks

Yesterday we all managed to get up and out early so that we could go and see these amazing seals. We are lucky enough to live quite near a nature reserve, Donner Nook in North Lincolnshire which grey seals go to each year to breed. It is really well "policed" with volunteers from the Wildlife trust making sure that the public don't disrupt the seals, we are also contained behind a strong fence. In the past week there were 134 babies born (according to the statistics in the information shed).
Having never been before I was surprised at just how close to the fence some of the seals where. You can see the shadows of people behind the fence on this baby and mum -

I couldn't resist a close up of mums face, nor the baby below.

Once home I received these in the post -
I now belong to Fibre Arts Trading Group and this was the first trade I took part in. Thank you so much to Trees and Laura if you read this post, I can't wait to wear them. I am a bit worried though as I sent off my cuffs over a week ago and my trade partners haven't received them yet. These were the cuffs I made, I have fingers and toes crossed that they arrive safely.

The day finished with us going to a fireworks display, I discovered that my digital camera has a firework setting so I wanted to play with that
I'm going to use some of the images and print them onto fabric for my November journal quilt.