Congratulations

I attended one of my City & Guilds beading days yesterday and discovered that not only have the Priory Beaders won the Beadworkers Guild Group Challenge but one of our members, Val Robertson, has won the Intermediate Category for individual beaders. Congratulations Val! Both entries can now be seen on the Beadworkers' Guild website.

Good News

I received an email from the organiser of Priory Beaders telling me that we have won the group entry of the Beadworker's Guild Challenge. Great news I am so thrilled. We are a very new group having only been formed in September 2008 so it is a great achievement. I don't have any pictures of the finished piece at the moment but will post some as soon as I can. This cheered me up immensely as the saga of my injured knee continues. I have had the results of my MRI scan and there is good and bad news. The good news is that I have not torn the cartilage and so don't need an operation. The bad news is that I have extensive bone bruising. This means that I have lots of little cracks on the head of my femur and tibia. It will take a long time to heal, possible up to Christmas and beyond. So far I have been trying to carry on as normally as I can but it is very painful and I will have to continue to walk with a stick for quite a while. At least I haven't done any permanent damage!

On a brighter note I have been working on my next beading project - a beaded bag. It is once again inspired by the shapes and colours of passion flowers. The whole thing will have an Art Deco feel and will be pyramid shaped. I am aiming to make it up from beaded shapes and line it with silk in a contrasting colour. I am going to incorporate lots of Swarovski crystals and fresh water pearls.

Some beaded elements for my Art Deco Bag

And I am continuing my adventures in sock knitting. Spurred on by the success of my Salvation Socks I bought a copy of 'Cool Socks Warm Feet' by Lucy Neatby and I am now knitting some toe up socks with a Turkish Heel. Great fun!

My finished 'Salvation Socks'

Fun days out and not so fun days in!

I had the week leading up to Easter off. It was much anticipated as work has been very hectic recently. It gave me an opportunity to unwind, do some beading and generally take it easy. My OH and I went up to London on one day. We both love gardens and are interested in their history so we planned two visits - one to the Garden Museum and a second to the Chelsea Physic Garden. I would thoroughly recommend both.

The Garden Museum (formerly know as The Garden History Museum) has recently been given a face lift so I was looking forward to visiting it. The museum is based in a converted church in Lambeth, right next to Lambeth Palace, where the plant hunters John Tradescant Senior and his son, also called John, are buried. The garden itself is quite small but beautifully planted with box topiary and many fascinating plants. When we visited there was a exhibition about the gardener Beth Chatto which proved very interesting.

After a delicious vegetarian lunch at the Garden Museum we then went to the Chelsea Physic Garden. This is a beautiful walled garden situated right next to the Royal Chelsea Hospital. All of the plants are well labelled and regular guided tours enable you to get the most out of one of the oldest medicinal plant gardens in England. Then after tea and homemade cake it was time to head home.

This photo does not really do this beautiful garden justice.

The rest of my leave was very enjoyable and on Easter Saturday I went to a meeting of the Priory Beaders which meets in Christchurch once a month. We were working on a group entry for the 2009 Beadworkers' Guild Challenge. The theme is 'Celebration' as 2009 marks its 10th Anniversary. I can't give too much away about our entry but we were all given the task of making a beaded representation of ourselves to be incorporated into the piece. The instructions for doing this were devised by one of the organisers of the group, Jane Griffin. We will have to wait several months to find out if we have won. Even if we are not placed we have still enjoyed immensely working on this project together and have some great memories.

Me - represented in beads - blue and green are my favourite colours.


I was enjoying the remainder of my Easter break when, on Easter Sunday, disaster struck. I slipped getting out of the shower and twisted my knee. It soon became apparent that it was fairly serious so I took myself off to Accident & Emergency. Luckily my X-ray showed that I had not broken anything. However I have damaged the ligament on the inside of my knee. The result was one week at home followed by the past 10 days back at work hobbling around on crutches in a fair bit of pain. My physiotherapist is convinced that it will heal fairly quickly, I hope that he is right. I have always been ridiculously healthy and never hurt myself like this before. I can safely say that I never want to use crutches ever again after this and will be extra careful in future.

'Salvation Socks', so named as they saved my sanity during a period of enforced rest.


During the week that I was stuck at home, after being instructed to keep off my leg completely, I turned in desperation to knitting to keep me occupied. I read until my head ached and saw enough daytime TV to last me for a very long time. Sock knitting proved my salvation. I have been knitting a fairly complicated pattern called 'Mermaid Socks' by Lucy Neatby (later rechristened 'Salvation Socks'). I absolutely love them, and I think that they will be fun to wear. At least something positive will have come out of this experience!

I saw this on A Girl in Winter's blog and could not resist having a go myself. Why not see how many you have read? -

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen - YES

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien – YES

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - YES

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling – YES

5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - YES

6 The Bible – bits of it

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - YES

8 1984 - George Orwell - YES

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - YES

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - YES

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - YES

12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy – YES

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller – NO

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare – some but not all

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier - YES

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - YES

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks - NO

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - NO

19 The Time Traveller's Wife - NO

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot- YES

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell - NO

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - YES

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens - YES

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy - YES

25 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - YES

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh - NO

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - YES

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - YES

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - YES

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - NO

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens - YES

33 The Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - YES

34 Emma - Jane Austen - YES

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen - YES

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - YES

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - NO

38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres - NO

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden - NO

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne – YES

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell -YES

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - YES (This definitely has no place on this list!)

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - NO

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving - NO

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins - YES

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery - YES

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy - YES

48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood - YES

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding - YES

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan - NO

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel - YES

52 Dune - Frank Herbert- NO

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons - YES

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen - YES

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth - NO

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon - NO

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - YES

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - YES

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon - YES

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - NO

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck – YES

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov - NO

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt - NO

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold – NO

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - YES

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac - NO

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy - YES

68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding - YES

69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie - NO

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville - NO

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - YES

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker - YES

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - YES

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson - YES

75 Ulysses - James Joyce - NO

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath - NO

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome - YES

78 Germinal - Emile Zola - YES (in French! Do I get an extra point for that?)

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray - YES

80 Possession - AS Byatt - YES

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens - YES

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell - NO

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker -NO

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro - NO

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert - YES

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry - NO

87 Charlotte's Web - EB White - YES

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom - NO

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - YES

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton – YES

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad - NO

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery – YES

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks - NO

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams - YES

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole - NO

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute - YES

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas - YES

98 Hamlet – Shakespeare – YES

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - YES

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo - NO

A total of 64, not as many as 'A Girl in Winter' but not bad.

I'm Back!

Well I have decided to start writing again. I have been feeling very low for the last few months. My Birthday just made me feel even worse. And to add insult to injury just a week before I had my eyes tested and discovered that I needed reading glasses. So now I look like the stereotypical librarian with glasses perched on the end of her nose! Thank you to all who have left nice comments on this blog while I have been away. They are much appreciated.

One thing to celebrate - after over 110 hours of work my Passion Flower vase is finally finished. I have gone through many emotions whilst creating it - frustration being the main one. However now that it is finished I am quite happy with it. Tomorrow I hand it over to my City & Guilds tutor for assessment. Now I have to start the next project, a beaded bag.

We are having the coldest winter here in Britain for 25 years. Normally we would never see snow here on the south coast but here are some pictures taken on my walk to work just over a week ago.

The daylight hours are starting to lengthen so hopefully that means Spring is on the way.

Take a break

I am in a melancholy mood at the moment. Life seems to consist mainly of sleep and work and so I am reluctantly taking a break from updating this blog at the moment. There is just too much going on in my life, some not particularly fun things. I am hoping to start again at the beginning of December in a much happier frame of mind.

Grand days out

The past few weeks have gone past in a blur. I have been so busy that I haven't had time to update this blog. Work is hectic as always, with lots of teaching to plan and deliver. However I have been busy with fun things too. On 4th October I attended a 'Vibrant Velvet' workshop run at Walford Mill by Jane Venables, a very talented textile artist. I have experimented with dyeing cloth in the past but sadly don't have the space at the moment to do it. As soon as I saw the course advertised I knew that I wanted to attend. I have read several of Jane's books so jumped at the chance to be taught by her.

Getting to the venue in Wimborne meant that I had to get up quite early. I woke up at 6:00 am with butterflies in my stomach - excitement and nerves combined. When I arrived I was welcomed by Jane who then proceeded to show us some of her stunning work. Her technique involves painting dye directly onto the back of the velvet using a large brush - very similar to painting in watercolours. Because the velvet is dry, and the dyes are very runny it starts to spread and the trick is to paint quickly so that you have some control over it. I couldn't wait to get started.

I was the only complete beginner there. Everyone else immediately set to work and produced stunning works of art. To my embarrassment mine resembled the daubings of a three year old. Jane was very supportive and gave me lots of encouraging advice. So, undaunted I embarked on my first scarf length. Part of the joy of this technique is that you really are not sure how it will look until you are finished and can turn it over. To my immense relief the design of red tulips on a dark background looked quite nice. My next attempt was going really well until I accidentally dropped dye where I shouldn't have. I then had a go at creating my own devore using fibre-etch fluid. This was a bit of a disaster and will probably be relegated to the back of a drawer. I have one length of velvet which can be made into a scarf and one piece which will be used for my beadwork. I also ended up walking around with blue hands for a couple of days after picking up a piece of velvet which wasn't completely dry. The next day I got some very strange looks from the woman on the supermarket checkout. I wonder what she thought I had been up to! Despite my lack of artistic talent I thoroughly enjoyed my day and have signed up for the next one day workshop in June.

My feeble attempts at painting silk velvet

Last Saturday I went to the Knitting and Stitching Show at Alexandra Palace with my long suffering OH and three friends - M, P & K. I have been to the show before but none of the girls had so I was interested to see their reaction. It involved a very early start. I am used to getting up at 6:00 am but even I struggled to get out of bed before 5:00!! Once on the coach my OH discovered that, apart from the driver he was the only man amongst 35 women. Brave soul! I think that everyone had a good time. M gives a very funny account of the day on her blog 'Knitting Keeps Me Sane'. The highlights of my day were meeting Nicky Epstein, seeing the work of Takako Sako and the looks of complete wonder on my friends' faces when they entered the Great Hall for the first time. I bought a copy of Nicky's new book 'Knitting On Top of the World'. She was there at the show that afternoon and signed my copy. It was a real privilege to meet such a talented person. I rounded off the day by buying some gorgeous hand dyed sock yarn and a scarf pin. Then it was home again on the coach, happy but very exhausted.

Alexandra Palace (affectionately known as 'Ally Pally') in North London

Full sized kimono by Takako Sako - it contains over 180 colours and more than 2,000,000 beads

Scarf pin from Purlescence

Cherry Tree Hill 'Supersock' and Hand Maiden 'Casbah'.