today's other project

i have been thinking of playing more with paper for a while so i made my first collage today. last night i made some paper beads - the first lot were of pages torn from an ancient falling apart book called old and new london. then i moved onto making some from strips of japanese silk paper - which gave me the idea for the bogong moth cocoons...

anyway back to the collage - i had stashed one of those cheap stretched canvas box jobs you can buy at places like the warehouse so hauled it out and covered it with black gesso. while that dried i made my beads and set them to dry on some old double pointed knitting needles that make my hands hurt if i knit with them.

this morning i played with a few ideas and ended up tearing a couple of pages into small squares and just pasting them onto the canvas with mod podge. the vaguely heart shaped piece is made of torn scarps of japanese silk paper.

now i am handstitching with perle 8 cotton run through my beautiful lump of beeswax to ease it through the layers. it's fun reading the words as i stitch. i see more of these in my future :)

as i write i am listening to beth orton accompanied by the dulcet tones of the new dishwasher manfully installed by urbane scrumping this morning. so far so good - my mozz on cleaning appliances hasn't kicked in yet although when i returned from a foraging trip to psarakos and a much needed cruise through the carwash (where i carelessly left my front number plate - see, i am just not meant to clean things...) then was a mysterious feline wailing to be heard.

toby was stuck somewhere - i checked every cupboard (even the one above the stove - he is that sort of cat) and inside the oven. i had to lie on the floor and home in on the direction of the shrieks and yep he was stuck behind the dishwasher.... i pulled it out and he ricocheted out like a black streak and was indignant for some time.

here are a couple of gratuitous billthedog photos (all taken by w)



and the errant number plate has been retrieved....