Sunday

Thanks for the comments and emails, good to know your thoughts on this thorny question, which has now been dealt with.

I have been working on some of the exercises for Sharon's course, and having a ball doing stuff I have not done since my children were young. The task was to try what I used to think of as brass rubbing - where one places paper over a textured image and gently rubs with a pencil, or in the case of traditional brass rubbing, a wax heelball. Sharon called this frottage, but when I googled to check the definition I came up with something completely different, and I was not doing that!

Anyway, I was amazed at the number of very ordinary objects that resulted in an interesting texture that almost looked like a photograph or two dimensional image due to the different shading. This was a collage I made, and can easily see it as a stitchery or in fabrics....The items used were the chimney of my slow combustion fire, the top of a tupperwear container, a cedar weatherboard of my house, and some Eucalypt leaves.

I'm a sucker for old books, and rarely pass anything that is vaguely stitching or needlework of the kind I favour, so this little book had to come home with me from a local market this morning - a bargain at only $2! I don't actually do much canvas work any more, but the ideas and designs inside would work as well for other stitchery or textile projects.