Happy New Year

A Happy and Prosperous New Year. Or in the local patois 'Lang may yer lum reek'. Translated as 'may you be able to buy coal so your chimney produces smoke'.

I am in Dundee where we had a quiet and very odd New Year. On New Year's Eve, it was extremely wet so we decided to spend the day textiling. One of my Christmas presents was a bottle of decolorant and I wanted to try it out. I used it above - on the left - on space-dyed cloth. Then used the same stencil to put on coloured versions, dark blue and orange. Not sure what will become of this - it would make a good book cover.

 And another piece using an Okinawan stencil with decolourant (the white bits) and Permaset textile inks. Again this might make a good book cover.

This piece, like the others, started out as a spaced dyed piece of cotton. The colours here were blue, purple and bright yellow (at the top and now cut off). It seemed a bit messy when I ironed it off but Dorothy persuaded me to pin it up on my design wall. The more I looked at it, the more it seemed like a landscape with a waterfall. So eventually I cut out the outline of the mountains at the top, begged a white and blue dyed piece of cotton from Dorothy and pinned it up again. Then I stencilled and painted trees on it and added threads to enhance the waterfall effect. When I get home, I will machine pine trees on it. So much for only doing weaving and bookbinding and not doing wall hangings! The work extended on to New Year's Day and we found ourselves cleaning up at 0930 last night.

Today I must get on with warp winding for Kennet Valley Guild class. I have wound about two thirds of one warp already.

Earlier in the week we went through to St Andrews Museum where Dorothy's Embroiderers' Guild has a big exhibition. A very talented bunch with a lot of stuff. They have 60 members and there were 220 entries. Here are a very few

This bowl is about12 inches across by Nancy Poole.

By Pat Cowieson

I liked the hydrangeas best. Most effect with minimum complexity