New day, new course

This week has been all go. The carpenter arrived on Monday afternoon and put up the new guttering for the workshop and now I have straight guttering and pipes with no holes for water to cascade down the walls creating damp patches. Bliss!!

I had 3 waistcoats to do this week which were completed by Tuesday and then a body appeared at the door on Wednesday evening asking for his gold waistcoat. Dr Burland had visited my stall twice in the last two weeks but not given me an order, he kept saying he'd be back...but he thought he had given me the order and wanted it for the following day's trip to London. Well, I'm not a miracle worker yet (working on it) and we agreed to a delivery date of Thursday next week. I took two more orders for dress waistcoats at the Thursday market for two friendly barmen and had a lovely chat with a guy called Peter. He was up from Plymouth to see a doctor at the local hospital, he said it was the best hospital in south west England and he had decided to take a walk through the town whilst waiting for his lift. He seemed a well travelled man and had lots of interesting stories to tell, making 15 minutes pass very quickly. I think that was the highlight of the day because it became very boring after that - lots of tourists but no sales.

Today I am 'resting' and have been playing with tyvec, fleece and hand dyed cotton. I made a cover for a mirro tile but it isn't finished yet...watch this space!

Also I finished my first journal according to the instructions in the first lesson of Creative Media Journaling Techniques with Sue Bleiweiss. We have had to pick a theme and as I like motion and Klimt I started with some Klimt quilting material in lovely shades of orange, tan and burgunday and black.

Then we had to marble some papers to add to the inside. Well, my first try was a disaster, I tried orange/black/yellow paint and it looked like a child's attempt so I tried again, filling the dish with shaving foam, adding drops of burgundy/yellow/copper and these were much better. I'll send these up to Sue and see what she thinks. We have to submit photos of every item so she can make sure we are all doing the work and not having problems.

Well that seems to be lesson 1 completed. Sue is a great teacher and I am now looking at my fibre art books in a new light. I got out three of them last night and they seemed to come to life, and I knew I could have a go at the instructions they contained in the hope I'd get something similar to all those lovely pictures.

However Sue seems to have had a mental abboration, as she has been issuing challenges right left and centre. I had to write them all down in the order of the finish date so I could at least have a stab at getting something up on the web in time. She also asked us to put down 10 words that we thought described us, mine were: Positive = Enquiring, Exporing, Learning, Challenging, Planner and In at the Deep End. Negative = Frustrated, impatient, hesitant, need structure. I'm sure my sons and daughter would come up with a few more, and they would be very interesting, but let's not go there!

I still haven't finished off my brown paper exercise but I did find an article in one of Maggie Smith's books that should help me meet that exercise - tomorrow is another day...and another challenge.