A Good to be Alive today

I finished this painting today and it was a gorgeous sparkling Spring day down at Trag. Just the day to sit and watch the sea.

I tried a new technique with this painting and learned lots. I used coarse texture gel for acrylic paint and painted it all over the canvas, using more where I wanted more texture. It worked out well but I will remember not to paint it on the horizon as it is then difficult to get a straight line. I painted the rocks by covering the whole thing in white first then used dabs of black, brown, umber and yellow . It looked very blocky so I then dragged a watery purple across the whole lot and the colours blended. The sea and sky were a bit flat so I asked Paul for advice and he suggested a watery wash and that worked really well. The sand was done the same way with a watery dark brown wash. The power of the wash!  

Yum Yum Yarn

I have found a gorgeous new yarn by Prism called Delicato. It is hand dyed Tencel which is a wood pulp fiber. It is laceweight so it takes quite some knitting to make a scarf this long. The colour is called Blue Lagoon and the photos do not really do it justice as they are much more vibrant and greener. It is called the "poor mans silk" but my lovely friend who is now wearing it says it is softer than silk. I love the yarn so much that I have ordered three more colours but I must wait for four weeks till they dye more.

Pathway Series

I have completed two more Pathway to Heaven paintings. The blue one is for my lovely little sis and I have the green one hanging in my hallway. I am now going to do the weaving for the square one and I think I like the wider weaving version. I might stop then and paint something different but then again what if I added some land????

Exhibition at The Eldon

Our art group have a show at the Eldon Hotel at the moment. We had the launch this week. We were responding to an exhibition at the West Cork Arts and had to take one element we liked from a painting. We then worked in groups of four on large canvasses combining the elements we liked. My contribution is the purple sky in the first painting. It was an interesting way of working as we had to do lots of  negotiating

Back to Oils

I am much happier with oils. Here is a painting I have done as part of my Pathway Series. I will weave over the top of it. This one will be shown at the Weavers Guild exhibition  in Bishopstown Library in May.

A watery sea

We used watercolours at the beginning of this term but they are not for me. It is good to try new mediums but I would need to develop much more patience to be any good with watercolours. Here is my effort.  

Snowflakes

I fixed a broken necklace for my friend Julie. The spacer beads in her necklace were lovely and I discovered they were called snowflake spacer beads. You can use just one or twos, threes whatever. The purple cracked agate necklace has three 4mm snowflake spacers. I used 2 x 12mm spacers in the black agate necklace.  

Picking Primroses

It was the first day of Spring yesterday and I was inspired by these yellow cracked agate beads to create a necklace. The small beads are moonstone. I used to go walking when I was small on a Sunday with my parents and brothers. We would walk from Bandon to Innishannon to visit Margaret Sugrue and her family. I would walk along, Neil would sit on the pram and Donal would be inside. I can remember picking primroses for Mrs Sugrue. I would arrive with my bunch of half dead flowers and she would make such a fuss of them putting them in a lovely vase in pride of place on the tea table.    

All set for Gdansk

It is going to be cold when my sister visits so I made her a cosy neckwarmer. It was an unusual pattern. You start off with one stitch and increase each end on alternate rows till you get to 32sts. On the first row after that you k2tog at the beginning, knit to the 2nd to last stich and increase one stitch and knit one. On the next row just knit along. You repeat these two rows till it is long enough then cast off one stitch at both ends of the alternate rows till you are again left with one. I used two yarns, a Debbie Bliss kids silk mohair and a Collinetti Jitterbug yarn and it is very soft to wear. The colour looks quite purple in the photo but it is in fact a vibrant fuchsia