Snowdrops

The last snowman has melted and there are signs of spring in my garden and hedgerows. Snowdrops in wonderful drifts, a welcome sight to lighten the heart.

Little quilt

Last Easter, Tony, Ted and I stayed in a lovely seaside cottage in Portpatrick, Scotland. The weather was bracing to say the least but the cottage was cosy and warm and I started to make a little quilt out of my Hedgerow samples plus a few plains from my stash. I used a simple hexagon template and started to assemble the quilt piece by piece using the “English method” which involves tacking each piece to a paper template. (A good way to recycle junk mail!) The first photograph shows how the work looks before the paper is removed.

I made good progress whilst on holiday but inevitably the sewing had to take a back seat when I returned home. I hate to leave anything unfinished so little by little I eventually managed to complete a tiny quilt. It was very satisfying doing the actual quilting by hand, although it looks a bit wonky if you look too closely.

Now anybody who owns a Jack Russell will know how they love to sit by a window and guard the house against postmen and cats, Ted is no exception. I found that the little quilt makes a good chair cover, which is easy to wash and looks less unsightly that the old towel which it replaced.

If you have never tried quilting before I hope you might be tempted to try, working by hand, little by little is very satisfying and unlike a larger machine project, is very portable, you can pick it up and set it down again, just like knitting

Back in the saddle.

First of all I just want to say thank you so much for all your kind and encouraging words in response to my last post. Things have been difficult here, mainly due to the increasing frailty of my elderly parents. I have also succumbed to the nasty bug that has been doing the rounds, anyone who has had the sore throat and cough will no what I mean, and I thought I had escaped it!

It has also been a particularly worrying time on the work front. One of my main licensees, Hudson and Middleton Ltd, who I wrote about earlier, has called in the administrators. This is yet another bad blow for Stoke-on-Trent and has resulted in many lost jobs. The company itself was doing well but sadly, it was owned by another company who supplied bone ash for the manufacture of bone china. One of its main customers was Wedgwood and when that went there was a domino effect. We are keeping our fingers crossed in the hope that a buyer can be found for what was Britain's oldest bone china factory.

Last week should have seen the launch of three of my new bone china mug collections and I was looking forward to my annual visit to the Spring fair in Birmingham. Sadly this was not to be, other licensees did better I am happy to report and although I did not get to see the stands and new products I was delighted to receive a nice package through the post. Padblocks, a company I met last year at the fair, have now produced one of my designs "Garden plot" as note blocks, slant pads, shopping lists and sticky pads. I particularly like the slant pad as the design stays the same no matter how many sheets you tear off, who ever thought that up was very clever, don't you think?

Cheerio, I'll be back soon!

I am having a little break from the blog due to unforeseen circumstances. I hope to be able to catch up with you all soon, in the meantime take care.

Robert Burns

Will you be eating haggis or perhaps partaking of a cup of kindness on Burns night?

I associate Robert Burns’ poetry with parties, and family celebrations, I don’t think New Years Eve would be quite so celebratory without “Auld Lang Syne”. His poetry seems to me to be full of viguor and energy, sometimes amusing as in “Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie”, and sometimes gentle and romantic as in “ O My Love”, which is your favourite?

O my Luve's like a red, red rose,
That's newly sprung in June:
O my Luve's like the melodie,
That's sweetly play'd in tune.

As fair art thou, my bonie lass,
So deep in luve am I;
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a' the seas gang dry.

Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi' the sun;
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
While the sands o' life shall run.

And fare-thee-weel, my only Luve!
And fare-thee-weel, a while!
And I will come again, my Luve,
Tho' 'twere ten thousand mile!

Don’t you just love “Till a' the seas gang dry”, so much more lyrical than “Till all the seas run dry”?

More bookbinding

Following on from the headband workshop (below), I decided to try to re-back the book I had used for the lesson. As we needed a book block to practice on, I had previously removed the badly damaged covers from an old but rather dear little book cloth bound book. I loved the very decorative cloth cover, so it seemed a shame to make an entirely new cover, better I thought to save as much of the original as possible.

First of all I removed the text block and because it was loose and torn, I also removed the cover. With a damp piece of cotton wool I gently dampened the cloth-covered boards in order to allow the water to eventually loosen the adhesive between the cloth and the boards. I needed to leave the covers for a while to prevent them drying out, so I wrapped them in cling film being careful to avoid over wetting. Several sessions of dampening was needed until eventually I was able to lift the cloth free from the boards. The original cloth was in a rather tatty state, so I carefully trimmed away the damaged parts before gluing to a new cover.

I hope that makes sense, I have seen this technique demonstrated by an expert which puts all my efforts in the shade. I am showing you my newly covered book not as an ideal example. I think I should have stuck the green cover a bit nearer to the foredge but no matter, next time maybe. I decided to choose a contrasting colour for the cover but you can if you wish paint the new book cloth with acrylic paint to match. On the whole I was quite pleased with the result but I don’t think I will be giving up the day job just yet!

Sewing Headbands onto books.

Until I joined our bookbinding group some years ago, I had not really noticed headbands much. The more expensive hardbacks that sit on my bookshelves have the more usual mass produced ones, maybe some of the older ones are hand sewn, I am not sure.

The workshop that I attended yesterday was my first introduction to the art of headband sewing, using the same techniques that fine binders use to create their exquisitely bound volumes. I have been to numerous bookbinding exhibitions and have been impressed by the exquisite workmanship that goes into the creation of a fine binding and now that I have tried out some of these techniques I have an even greater appreciation of their skills.

We started by sewing a single headband and progressed onto a double headband, which we all found much easier, oddly enough. The single headband was sewn around a thin strip of leather, which had been backed with vellum. We used two contrasting threads to compliment the design of the book. ( I should say that stitching the headbands happens after the book block has been sewn and before it is cased).

Once the threads have been chosen they are cut to the desired length and knotted together. It would take too long to explain in detail the sewing procedure; suffice it to say that the threads are looped around the core alternately after being secured within the text block. The core can be made of a variety of materials, cotton, cord, rolled paper, vellum or leather. I have found a lovely blog which explains this in more detail, called Journeys in the Bibliosphere.

The second exercise involved sewing a double headband around a two cores of cord, one thick and one thin. This core can be made of a variety of materials, cotton, cord, rolled paper, vellum or leather. The threads can be made of silk, cotton perle or linen, anything that is not too fibrous.

I am showing you my own feeble attempts at this craft and hope that you will not look too closely at my mistakes, believe me, sewing hand bands by hand is extremely difficult. Now I can see my work in close up I can see all the irregularities and gaps in the stitching!