Long Time!

I haven't posted anything here in quite a while - my bad! Life seems to get in the way of regular blogging and I'm not sure the limited traffic on blogs these days justifies the time spent writing them etc. Despite that, I'll try and be better and more regular, because I DO like writing a blog - if for nothing more than that it is a kind of potted diary of what I'm doing. 

Here's some new work:

Rueben and Daphne.

These are two cloth dolls completed earlier this year.

Two knitted frogs - DotPebbles pattern

These were great fun to make.

And finally, just to show evidence of the cold snap we had this past winter, here are some pictures of frost tracery on my back porch windows after a week of hard frosts.

"Fade"

I've had this piece in the back of my mind for quite some time.....years, in fact, but I never quite found the time to realize it.

This is the initial watercolour sketch.....three frogs on a log with the colour successively fading from them.

I decided a couple of months ago that I wanted to make this piece (finally!) for my exhibition in August, so I knuckled down and got it done in the past week. First I had to make three fabric frogs:

Since these are quite small, this is tricky and intricate fabric piecing, and they all needed to be in slightly different poses.

The frogs were then arranged side-by-side on a piece of wood that I have had set aside for this project for ages..........I painted the fade into the wood as well.

Of course, it is fairly obvious that this piece has a strong environmental message: frogs and amphibians generally, are "canary-in-the-mine" species.....their sudden decline and disappearance from many habitats indicate that all is not well with the ecology of these habitats. Presence of frogs is a strong indication of environmental health.