deep purple November

This beautiful photo of the Thames, taken by my daughter from Waterloo Bridge speaks to me of November. We all have to be a bit heroic in November.

Out of the city, it has been a wonderful blogging / wool lover’s November with some very informative blogs to tell us more about the beautiful fibres we work with. My favourite blogging heroes (heroines) for November include:

Pam Hall on Working with Wool The colours in the weaving inspire me.

Nuno Felting with Fabric Paper Lamination Ruth Lane you are going beyond my skill level lately but I have followed your recent experimental work with fascination!

Tapping into Reserves I wholeheartedly relate to this thesis on introversion!

Veraiconica Thought for today on November 17th Exactly!

Apart from trying to overcome the frustrations of the ios7 operating system on iPad, I myself, by sheer slog and repetition, am improving the quality and consistency of the material I can produce.

This has paid off in terms of muscle strength. I’m a wheelchair user, but the other day when I went to see my physiotherapist I actually asked her to put up the resistance level on the rowing machine. She was somewhat surprised but we won’t tell her that that is a result of an almost daily rolling of felt rather than doing all the torturous exercises she recommends. A small victory in my personal Waterloo !

Having decided my felting antics were going nowhere without the capacity to sew things I recently bought a new sewing machine. Stitchery does make things more interesting. Yesterday I was evermore waiting for the gas engineer to come and rescue our boiler. I took two small cut offs from pieces of felt made recently and had fun with a lot of festive stitching in silver metallic thread. One bit of felt was in a lovely deep purple. The other was a small piece made of grey Jacob’s wool tops imbibed with silk.

Zigzagging on the felt flap in metallic thread helped make a successful hinge, weighted the flap and looked pretty.

By five o clock I was still surviving on one fan heater. But I had this little purse to show for my wasted day!

Speaking of Great battles against the French, I do think this statue in Trafalgar Square is a stroke of genius though we are told no irreverent humour was intended!