MILLYPENNY

 A few weeks ago, I spent the weekend at An Grianan with a group of like-minded friends. We had great fun over the weekend, either sewing or messing around with dyes and paints. It was lovely to have a venue where you could keep working and have your meals served up to you, so no time wasted in cooking etc. I forgot to take many photographs as I was messing around around with gloves, dyes and paints. Here's an action shot of our art room, you can see by the mess that there was plenty of work happening here.   I spent the weekend screen-printing and mono-printing. Here are two samples of what I created over the weekend. Now I just need to decide what to make with them.   A photo from our Show and Tell meeting on the Saturday night

I spent last weekend up at An Grianan, Termonfeckin, Co. Louth with some contemporary quilters from North and South Ireland, which was great fun. It was lovely to be able to spend a whole weekend on craft-related activities with food served up to us. My sewing machine is currently in for repairs so instead I spent my time dyeing fabric and working on my sketchbooks and altered books. The 5 members of the Genesis group (that I'm in) all managed to get up to An Grianan. We are planning a group project for next year and needed common fabrics, so we all did our dyeing at the weekend. Each of us dyed 5 metres of fabric, this fabric will be then divided equally amongst the Genesis members at our next meeting. So each of us will end up getting 4 metres of fabric from the other members, which should ensure that we have plenty of fabric for our project. Apart from a horrible drive home (in extremely wet conditions) I'm already looking forward to next year's residential weeke...

I took Ineke Berlyn's workshop "Sheer Landscapes" at the weekend course, which I really enjoyed. Ended up with 2 finished pieces from the workshop. Last weekend I went up to An Grianan for the bi-annual Irish Patchwork Society weekend. The workshop involved working making a sheer landscape using organza, sheers, cotton fabrics etc. bonded to a sheer organza background. Ineke brought clear A4 display frames with her (available from stationary shops) which were a really good idea to frame textile pieces, especially sheer ones where they would be enhanced by the light passing through. This photo shows the finished pieces from the workshops: