My son asked me knit something for him. They only pattern I could find for his size was the Critter Socks in Wendy Knits Toe Up Socks for the Whole Family book. I didn´t do the pattern though as the wool was already variegated. He is not really into knitted things, but I think it was the thought that counts. Son Number Two might like them when he gets to that size...
I´ve been considering teaching a demonstration class in linocutting and hand-carved stamps at the local library. [This didn´t come to pass as I´ve been too busy.] I´ve used or given away alot of the things I´ve printed already, so I bought some sepia block printing ink and printed a few sample pages, cards, and envelopes. They turned out really well. Block printing ink is a lot thicker than the fabric ink I´ve been used to. As you´d expect, it prints a lot better on paper and it´s easier to apply the tiny amounts required for paper.
I finished the printing for the checkers game ages ago, and finished the sides. So that´s done. The board is all straight, I´ve just taken the photo on an angle to avoid the flash. It took me two hours to handprint it, with a handcarved linocut stamp which I made of a wave design. Each square is about 8cm x 8cm (approx 2.5 inches square). I didn´t use the previous ocean design stamp I carved because I was running out of fabric and it would have been too big, and possibly too complicated. Over such a large board, the background squares need to be quite simple or the eye finds it too hard to spot the checkers pieces on it.
All the beanbag checker pieces are printed now too, with handcarved linocut stamps I made, and I just have to cut them out, sew and fill them...
After one unremovable spill too many on my tshirt, I decided to try covering the stains with a stamp. I used the daisy stamp I made last year. The stamp didn´t quite cover up the stain; it is still sort of visible through the paint. Darn. So this is still an ¨around the house¨ tshirt. Still, I think it turned out OK in general.
Scorching Bay, near our old flat, Wellington, North Island, New Zealand
A friend lent me the book Simple Crochet by Erika Knight. It has lots of modern patterns for crocheting things for around the house. Some of them are from different materials like string or leather and look quite edgy. The textures look really interesting. There are boxes, bags, rugs, cushions, etc.
I had a go at a large, round bowl using reasonably thick string and a 4.5 mm crochet hook. But it is quite hard to pull string through, as it doesn´t slide like wool. It started to aggravate my sore wrists, so I finished the whole thing off as a small bowl instead...
I´ve had a go at printing one of my larger hand-carved stamps on larger stones. It seems to get progressively harder to find smooth stones in a larger size. I suppose that makes sense. This was the only print that remotely turned out OK, and even then I had to retouch it with a black marker to fill in bits that didn´t print completely. For larger, less even stones, simpler prints might work better.
This is my square for the Quilt for Christchurch. The Breeze radio station is asking for squares, with a message for Christchurch on it, and then a quilting group is going to join them all together into one enormous quilt and it will be hung in Christchurch Council (I think). Red and black are the colours of the local rugby team. Everyone from our Monday night sewing group is doing one, and we´ll send them in together. The instructions of what squares they wanted were a bit vague, so I hope that what I´ve done is somewhere in the parameters. The message is a Māori proverb, which means:
