Perfect . . .

. . . drying day. A lovely Spring day with sunshine and a slight breeze - all the washing dried. And, whilst hanging it out,  I was accompanied by a Song Thrush, high up singing and singing. Wonderful. 

I had a few hours this afternoon with good light - to read and stitch. The blip is this week's tag, which I completed. I suppose this would be okay for Tiny Tuesday as they really are tiny, the size of a luggage label. 

They don't take a lot of creating, the longest time, and what I am enjoying, is the sorting through fabrics and threads to make choices. This piece started out as a scrap from a sample of printed velvet. When I was at Newton Rigg and had not long moved to Cumbria, I used to return to Bradford quite a bit to visit friends etc. and I sometimes went to a place where they made velvet - Denholme Velvet I think. If I spoke nicely to people they would give me a bag full of velvet offcuts. I would return to our group with these and we learnt how to print using discharge methods, e.g. printing with bleach. I now have a pile of these samples and this is a piece of one of the samples. I found the perfect thread and a bit of lace and then added the circles. The challenge we had been given was to make the circles by tightly stitching with buttonhole stitch all the way round. To find the original rings I sorted through a very dirty, dusty box full of oddments of screws, washers etc. collected over many years. I had to clean the rust off these ancient washers, but then they were transformed with a bit of thread.