This month has been geared more towards school holidays than personal creative development I have to admit. The felted vessels have been so much fun but then again, so has watching the boys hack into ice with a screwdriver. Hopefully next month with small boys at school this blog may become a little more prolific. I will follow up with tutorials on what we have learnt in the next few days though. Next month embroidery challenge do you think?

Wish you were here...

Dear Kate

I'm still feeling really pathetic and look forward to getting back to normal.  I can't believe this month has been a write-off for me creatively, although I have to feel that perhaps the universe was telling me I needed to slow down?  Who knows, but it's getting a bit boring!  I wish you could have been with me when I picked roses on Monday.  I walked through the garden smelling them and remembering doing just that with you only a few weeks ago.  I made my selections on both smell and looks and have been enjoying them dotted all over the mantelpiece ever since.  The roses above are so exquisite looking - do you know what type they are?? 

We had a wild storm come through here this afternoon - only half an inch of rain though - and it felt like we might blow away at one point - and that's in a brick house!  We were lucky that nothing major came down on the house, but there are plenty of branches down around the farm.  Sophie slept through it, thankfully - it was enough trying to calm Tom, who is petrified of thunderstorms.  I had to talk him through all the good reasons there were to have storms - they bring rain, they clear the air, etc, etc. and then he calmed down enough to lie beside me on the couch and read.  It was so companionable having him there and he was so quiet, I kept on peeking looks at him and thinking: I can't believe he's going to school in less than 2 weeks time!

I loved hearing all about Archie and Hugo playing with the ice - can't wait to see the pictures.  Tom's been drawing pictures of buildings, cars, trucks over the past week and then cutting them out, ready to make his own city.  We still had your tent box here and I cut it down the side, turned it inside out and stuck it back together so you could only see the cardboard, rather than the printed outside.  We then stuck the pictures all over the box and he's had a great time playing with it.  At least one of us 'bunch of Bowlers (as Tom calls us) is being creative at the moment.

Speak soon.

Lots of love always,

Lucy xoxoxo

PS  Is one of your boys missing The Sleep Book by Dr Seuss??  It appeared in our bookshelf as if by magic - or as if it could have been left here by a Bruning...

On doctor's advice

Dear Kate

As you will know, I'm practically a doctor and am prescribing a dose of chocolate for you to eat every day.  Brand and type are immaterial, although the benefits of eating dark chocolate are becoming a mainstream belief.

I enjoyed seeing your milk bottle butterflies this afternoon.  I don't know whether you remember the mobile I made for Tom at our last house?  It was a milk bottle mobile - inspired by -- was it Hugo's or Archie's? -- that I saw at your house in New Zealand.  Anyway, it had milk bottle butterflies.  They looked great but they nearly killed my butterfly cutter - did you have any problems pulling them out?  Mine didn't seem to cut neatly, I recall, and it was a bit of a pain.

I hope you're feeling better tonight.  I'm still not 100% and look forward to what will hopefully be a quiet week at home.  It's interesting to read your take on letter-writing.  I actually have most of the letters you've ever written to me - as with letters from the rest of the family.  I have trouble throwing them out.  They're a record of our lives up until the point of email.  In fact, I even printed out a few of the early emails, especially when Tom was born.  Some day I will work out a good way of collating these letters, but for now they're in a series of boxes.

Speak soon.

Lots of love always,

Lucy xoxoxo

PS I've posted my yummy chocolate brownie recipe, in case you're interested!

Milk Bottle Butterflies

Dear Lucy,

It's really hard getting into the habit of having two blogs - I think you are a succour for punishment having three, it must be like having an extra mouth to feed except that the extra mouth wants to suck from your creative mind, in a really nice way of course. If you read my last post you will see that I have been sick so the creative process has slowed down a bit. I have had lots of constructive time staring at the ceiling visualising ways to cover felt vases in resin.

I hate writing in the form of a letter. I am just not a letter writer. Every now and then I force one out but I would almost prefer to lose contact with someone than write to them. I find it so hard to use my voice in it because something in my urges myself to be my most polite version and it just stultifies me. Then you are besieged by the vision of an actual person reading with a smirk, screwing their face up if you utter the phrase, "utter the phrase" or something like that. Writing a letter challenges my every insecurity so this is fun for me.

Anyhoo, enough of the whinge. Not much felt making this week apart from starting on a felt bird necklace, however, Archie and I did make a discovery. You can use paper-cutting stamp things, you know what I mean, on milk bottle plastic. Very exciting... our floor is littered with translucent butterflies as though they all flew in one night to our warmly lit house and promptly died. It makes me think that I had better get onto my next felt vessel so I can stick felted birds or butterflies to them... and then hopefully sink them into resin.

Love you like I do my toes,

Kate xxooxxooxx

Too hot for felting!

Dear Kate

It was far too hot for felting this evening, so I've been sewing instead.  I worked on some of my felted flowers (which I've been making my brooches from) and the more I looked at them, the more I found myself imagining how they'd look adorning a felted vessel... and I'm looking forward to trying it out.  I bought some baking paper today to use as a template for my next lot of felting.  Hopefully we'll have some cooler weather towards the end of the week and I'll be able to work on my next felting experiment.

Speak soon.

Lots of love always,

Lucy xoxoxo

A Little Felt Balloon

Dear Lucy,

I am about to go for a nap so thought I had better pass on these photos to you. The balloon was perfect at the end for shaping the felt once the structure was thick enough. It also squeezed a lot of water out too which was an added bonus. I can't believe how much stuff sticks to my felt at home. When I was felting at Mum's, everything remained pristine. Maybe I should change my headquarters over to Mum's house, think she would mind?

Love Kate xxooxxooxx

Wet felted bird's nest

Dear Kate

I'm sorry it's taken until now to write.  We had friends to stay last night and I haven't managed to get around to any further crafting.  Instead, I've uploaded my images from creating my wet felted vessel on Thursday night.  I just love this one.  It reminds me of a bird's nest.   I want to fill it felted balls and eggs tomorrow and I'll post better photos then.  I can't wait to make some more vessels but I'm having trouble fitting everything in at the moment!  Don't worry, I will get back to them though and try some more shapes.  

I can't wait to see your efforts from today.  Inserting the balloon into the vessel at the last moment (to hold the shape) sounds like a great idea.  I saw an article about felting in an English Country Living (from Eve) and they used an old detergent bottle filled with warm soapy water to wet the wool fibres.  This seems like it kills two birds with one stone and could be worth trying.  I'm not sure which liquid soap though?  I'll have to read the article properly and get back to you.

I hope you'll send me some real letters this year!  Remember when I was in Ireland, we were both great at letter-writing.  You always used to send your beautiful cards with pictures of baby Archie - what a lot has changed since then.  Joe's just calling out in the background to say it's going to be 41 degrees on Tuesday - you were lucky with the cooler weather when you were over here.  I'm not looking forward to that intense heat.  Hopefully it's not too windy and we don't have to worry about fires...

No doubt we will speak tomorrow.

Lots of love always,

Lucy xoxoxo

Felted Vase

Dear Lucy,

The surprise is, I am going to be the first to write to you. How long have we spoken of writing to each other with our ideas and now with the tiniest bit of courage in my tea-warmed hands, here I am. So, as previously discussed, January is felted vessel month. As this is just a first letter, I am going to include some photos that I took last week when staying in Australia with Mum. We will both have to do tutorials at a later date because all I really am doing is breaking the ice that stretches between our two countries.

Hope you are well and I love you,

Love Kate xxooxxooxx

January project - felted vessels

This month we are making felted vessels. As many as we can and with as many techniques as we can discover. Toward the end of January we will start posting tutorials on our most successful attempts. Until then we will continue experimenting and will show all our workings....