North Cornwall Holiday Journal 2013: Virtual Tour Part 2

Glad you enjoyed the first part of the tour through my journal. Here’s part two.

Finally finished. I really enjoyed the random nature of this, with days all over the place and some days contributing more ideas and pieces than others. No rules – my favourite way of working.

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Story sticks of the merfolk

“…the merrow took up her story stick; shook it until the clattering of stone and bone brought silence and then began her tale…”

This is the piece I created to go with the first full day of our holiday, Sunday 11th August. We spent a wonderful afternoon and early evening at a quiet, secluded and sandy beach just north of Padstow and these were some sticks that I picked up at the top of the beach.

I had no fixed idea of what I wanted to do with them, but later that evening I decided to start wrapping them and embroidering around them, much to the bemusement of some of the rest of the party.

This one, with its lovely weathered ends, has been wrapped with a soft slubby browny grey blue thread, overwrapped with a variegated turquoise silk thread and embellished with tiny turquoise chips, stitched down with a fine silk thread which shades from sand through to sea.

The middle one was wrapped with a hand dyed silk strip at one end and then over with various other hand dyed threads.  which were left loose to form a tassel to which I added a brass dragonfly charm to remind me of the huge dragon flies we often see here and also some beads and sodalite chips.

There is some needle weaving at the end of the silk wrapping and some buttonhole stitch over the longer threads in the middle. The slubby thread at the ends has been criss-crossed and a cream buttonhole thread used to tie the crosses together.

For the last one I had some variegated thread I wanted to showcase, so after I’d tied some scraps of silk round the stick…

…I wrapped most of the rest of it in the thread.

Some detached buttonhole stitch just to see if it would  work, and then the ends of the silk were finished with little Fimo charms and a cluster of beads.

All three story sticks were then stitched onto a piece of my own eucalyptus hand dyed silk matka.

Who knows what stories the merrow (the mer-folk) might tell with them.

Also…

More treasure from the sea.

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Beach

The last of this year’s Holiday Journal patchwork pieces is finished.

Based on the turquoise sea and golden sand of our glorious last beach day at Hawker’s Cove it started like this:

With the addition of gentle waves of space dyed turquoise silk and lettering in a turquoise and sand coloured hand dyed silk thread it became this:

One of the delights of this particular beach were drifts of tiny shells, mostly vivid orange and mottled tawny scallops.

Tiny and perfect, they made the ideal addition to the block.

All seven journal pieces are finished now and I’m mulling over how to stiffen them and ‘mount’ them in order to form the walls of the box they are to become. 

Other projects, including one with a nastily looming deadline are coming to the fore.

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