inally back home from 3 glorious weeks in sunny Spain,and an amazing trip to the beautiful Seville where as you can see from the photos above of little details that you see as you amble through the city, there was an abundance of yellow...something to do with their famous oranges perhaps? Don't let anyone tell you that Spain is not the most beautiful country in the world, with its stunning mountains ranges, rolling plains, soaring eagles and rich cultural heritage....
iane Foster, my new best friend, is not only very clever with words, handy with the soldering iron, but she is extremely kind and generous! True to her word she has made all her classmates a dobber which is a jewel like image encased under a glass blob which is then soldered to another to produce a deliciously chunky pendant which I ABSOLUTELY LOVE!!!
ery excited about making bracelets at the moment and I've made one for my fab Goddaughter Phoebe...she's very arty so she might just appreciate that its handmade! 
ne cover button is very much like another cover button until you wrap some pretty fabric around it and make it into a bracelet! The fab Jone Hallmark - polkadotponie - showed me this bracelet when she visited last month, and it caught my son's eye, despite being 17 years old and 6ft 2, he immediately fell in love with it and was the proud owner by the time Jone left for America. I wanted to show it to you all here on my blog because it is so wonderful and covered with Jones gorgeous textile designs, but when I looked for it, I realised he must have taken it with him on his world challenge to Africa!!??!! Could it be that he considered this thing of beauty a lucky talisman? We are really missing him here as he is away for 30 days in the depths of Uganda...I hope that the bracelet is working its magic for him!
ailing on my brothers beautiful yacht Soutache proved to be as spectacular as usual, despite the moody weather we all had a wonderful time aboard the floating 5 star boat. We sailed from Inverness past John O' Groats and up to the Orkney Islands. The ever changing seascapes and grey atmospheric mountains made it impossible to let us pass by without an illustration or two! Here are some of my collagey watercolours.....
uly has certainly been eventful, with the beautiful things that I saw while in France providing enough visual stimuli for about 6 months. Billie Spille the incredible artist who is a friend of the Armitages, opened her home to the workshop ladies....look what they brought back with them.....while Billie's work is a amazing as ever, ( I love her industrial chimney pots) her husband Dean had painted these exquisite watercolours on old letters! what a treat to see this work.....
did n't manage to burn the midnight oil on the Julie Arkell workshop, due to the 10.30 lights out curfew, but was still pleased with what I made. I had lots of ideas about what I was going to do, but sitting next to the wonderfully creative Sue and Jone, I ended up experimenting instead. Here are some pics of the mad things I made....
fabulous week at the wonderful Julie Arkell workshop has left me with some great inspiration, not only from the delightful Julie but from some very talented women also on the course......here are some snaps that will continue to make me smile for a long time....
eautiful Petersham Nurseries in Richmond has the most stunning display of wild flowers seen within the M25 and so I took Jone and Sue for a visit before we all went off to France...paper thin poppies, sweetpeas with the heady scent of Jasmine and home baked cake in the air, mmmm...
ravelling around the world is a hot topic in our house at the moment as one child is off to Uganda and the eldest is in Koh Samui....got me thinking wistfully about my own travels around south east Asia with Samantha all those moons away....when I looked at my diary which I kept while travelling I realised that I had been to all the places that Francesca had been texting me about! Here are some pages from that diary/sketchbook and my Heyday!
