Wonderful weekend

Just had a glorious weekend away in the Hunter Valley with 14 girlfriends, it was a surprise party for one of the ladies who turned 70 (a very young 70) she was a leap year baby so she says she is technically only 17.

We stayed at Pokolbin cabins, a couple of the girls had prepared projects for us, they had made little calico shapes and we had been told to take whatever beads, textiles and braids would fit in a margarine container to embellish them, it was so great sitting around the table with friends, sewing, talking and eating. My shape was a hand which finished up as a fishy looking character-




In the morning we had visitors outside the cabin - aren't the two little bobbsey twins on the left cute - they all sat up to watch that I wasn't getting too close.

Fallen off the edge of the blogging world...

...that's how I've been feeling, haven't been terribly creative, trying to declutter (not very successfully) still complaining about the heat this summer, and I've also managed to wipe my web site off the net by messing about trying to create my own 404 page (which I thought would be a really cute thing to do) but resulted in causing an internal server error with optus - we still haven't straightened it out.

I've also decided that I have been trying to keep far too many blogs, so have decided to do away with the 'crotchety old crocheter' - I do love knitting and crochet but it's only a small part my activities, not enough happening to warrant a full blog of it's own. Also will do away with the old blog at LJ, I rather like it here at blogger.
I'll keep my gardening blog going - even though the garden is like me - suffering badly at the moment from summer.

So....
last month I went out and joined a new textile group (have been hanging onto their brochure for a year) and I've given myself a kick start creatively.
Inspired by Dale Rollerson's wall hanging in one of the ClothPaperScissors mags I starting playing with some small rectangles of felt, adding fabric and tyvek, distressing it with a heat gun, machine and hand stitching, painting with Lumiere and puff fabric paints.







I had in mind making some sort of vessel shape from them, so am joining them to chop sticks, hopefully this will give them some support to stand up - at the moment the ones I've joined look good just hanging - might make some sort of loop so they can be joined in a square or hang flat -