Thursday, March 31, 2011

Friday Night Fix

Here is the first page of my altered book. I have been watching DMTV with Linda and Laura Kemshall. The Friday Night Fix is a series of six work along video tutorials on altered books. I started with one of my kids old school books. It had shinny pages and as you can see my attempts at achieving a nice starting base has not been very successful. Although I like the feel of this page after applying gesso and colour pastels I'm finding it hard to get a suitable theme. I had started out thinking about flowers.

 This page does nothing for me and could it get any worse, the answer is yes have a look at the next page.

 I tried to apply some texture, but I hate it. The following are some of the other pages in the book. As you can see they have some nice pictures of bees. But not enough through out the book, it changes subjects as you would expect a school book to do.



This is a book I started before the Friday night fix where I glued three pages together. I do like the effect of this page but its as stiff as board and very wrinkled. The moral of the story is to follow the instructions and get the right book to start in the first place. So I have not given up on this process yet, and have purchased a very nice little book on flower arranging written in French. It cost €1 and I bought it from a stall along the river Seine.

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Charity Quilt

The Castle Quilters meet every Wednesday at the Quad in Roscommon. Each year we make a quilt for charity, and I have to say I love the colours in this one for the St Vincent de Paul Society. We had the quilt professionally quilted and it looks amazing. Tickets are €2 each or a book of 6 for €10.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Trip around the world.

This is my piece from the workshop I took at the IPS this month. Cecile Flegg came down from Donegall to teach this workshop. I used fat quarters, batiks and marbles. I loved the way they came together almost like happy accidents. This was a very quick method and I'm looking forward to the final result. However this is on the back burner as I am working on my piece for our IPS exhibition next month. Cecile was a very nice lady and we all enjoyed working with her, and look forward to doing more workshops with her in the future.

Thursday, March 17, 2011

Get your blogs on!!!!!!!

My Non Blogging friends are complaining that I'm not blogging enough, so girls here are some pics from my Paris trip. And a little encouragement to get your blogs going. Below are the beautiful arches at  "La Conciergerie". It was a former royal palace and prison. Marie Antoinette was condemned here.

This is the roof in a department store called Galeries Lafayette.
This one was taken from the boat under one of the many beautiful bridges on the river Seine.