Weekend Dispatches

Delivered - one plumpy-lumpy sack.

I have got to the point where I need serious amounts of wool and as many colours as I find in my normal paint palette. My toy designs are cramming my head, (I even go to sleep visualising them as I drift off) and it is so frustrating to know exactly what colours I want them to be, but not to have them at my fingertips. And worse, to run out of a colour when a toy is half done. Thanks to a much needed royalty check I was able to splurge a little at Wingham Wools - hence the mysterious lump. I hadn't quite realised how big nearly 6KG (13.2 lbs) would be...like a child at Christmas I upended the sack. Out spilled dozens of wool bundles, like so many tubby, multi-coloured kittens tumbling over the floor.



Being the original anal retentive I had to line them up in a vague colour chart...



Sighs of deep satisfaction from one contented artist. My trousers have holes, my boots are falling apart, but I have enough wool to felt a menagerie of creatures. Priorities.

Found - a lovely set of 1960's toy making books -



Some retaining the original patterns -

Also found - an early 1962 Oxford University Press edition of the Pied Piper by Robert Browning, illustrated by Howard Jones...





Arrived - Lily Laguna, my second bird-mobile, has found the perfect home with Gifling where she is living in another artist's studio, so will feel very much at home. Thank you Gillian!

Discovered - my new site of the week, illustrations to die for, a new name to me - Jean-Baptiste Monge. If you like Brian Froud you will love, love, love this artist's work. And he keeps a blog too. It is all on French, so if, like me, your language skills are a little rusty, then the Google translation tool does a very good job - simply put the url of the page in, choose which language to change from and away you go!


(What have I been needle felting? Ahhh...this and that...)