Birthday specials

Today was my birthday and it was a surprisingly good birthday, complete with 'I am 38' banners made by our eldest son. I was taken out for lunch unexpectedly and am currently having mussels cooked for my dinner. I also received two lovely books. The Quilts of Gee Bend was on my Amazon wish list, though it was still a surprise. I'm looking forward to reading it as well as enjoying the images.

The other book was completely unexpected, but was bought because it reminded the buyer of patchwork with the blocks of colour and textures of the bricks etc. It is interesting and I'm going to enjoy perusing it. It is also funny as I was going to give the buyer one of the Banksy books of graffiti for Christmas as I like the humour in his work.

With my own work, not much was done today for obvious birthday reasons. However, I did receive a lovely new Pfaff sewing machine to try out from the kind people at VSM. It looks amazing and fun, with lots of different stitches to try out for novelty value, but also with lots of useful extras like the automatic feed through and needle down positions. I just need a quiet few days to get to grips with it.... Soon hopefully.

Here are some images from my work earlier in the week. The first is the result of digital print onto scrim. It has a lovely translucency to it. The other two are knit. On Monday, it was really successful with no disasters and the black and white piece has felted well. Tuesday was a different matter. Two pieces fell off and this second knit piece looks a bit insipid, but will look great when projected onto, but it not only fell off, it also developed a huge hole on felting. Got to try again on Monday now.