Lavender and Art in the Sun.

The Carshalton allotment lavender field weekend is an annual event. Our local Corner Gallery owner Jackie Kahn had a stall today, selling a few lavender related pieces of art, pottery and cards, but her main focus was to have an arty related activity for the kiddies to enjoy free of charge, which I helped to run. Above is a table all set to go for them to enjoy making small mosaic type collages with fabric, crayons and glitter glue. Below are some of the amazing creations they thoroughly enjoyed making.

I was also invited to sell some lavender related, and other small pieces of art which you can see above.

I took along lots of lavender and green bits and pieces of fabric for the children to use in their collages, thinking that they would want to choose lavender themes for their art work! Oh how wrong I was!

As you can see, they chose a combination of animals, butterflies and a rather smart looking car!

I particularly loved the colourful tiger above.

I made a few lavender related postcards, and small pieces of textile art ready to mount in a frame.

What a thoroughly enjoyable day. Visitors cut armfuls of sweet lavender to take home, and there were plenty of other stalls to wander through, selling potted preserves, jewellery, soaps, cakes, icecreams, and of course lavender bags! The sun shone for us today, and  hopefully we have enthused some young artists to the idea of mixed media and collage.

Old Table Cloths and Lavender.

This is a sort of trial piece really, because I have an unfinished piece of embroidered tapestry that my Mum was making before she died, and another piece of embroidery stitched by my maternal Grandfather while he was convalescing after a serious injury during the WW1. I would like to use them both combined in some way in a piece of textile work of my own, but understandably, I don't want to go full steam ahead, and ruin two very precious pieces of embroidery!

So, I decided to combine some hand embroidery from an old table cloth, with a small textile piece of my own, and some paper cloth, and hand printed fabric that I made some time ago. above you can see how I have cut the embroidered flowers from the main cloth, and stitched them over the surface of my small panel. The cloth couldn't be used anymore, as it was badly stained in places, so I didn't feel guilty about cutting into it. However, the edges have frayed somewhat, but I guess it wouldn't be too bad if it was mounted and protected behind glass.

At the end of the day, I think it will be a case of really making sure that I choose the other elements very carefully, and make a really good plan of how the finished piece will look, something I didn't really do with this one. 

It's that time of year again, Lavender time, and our local lavender fields have been looking glorious. I am hoping that the weather holds until Sunday, when I will be helping our local gallery owner, Jackie, to provide some 'lavender' focused art activities for children, as well as hopefully selling a few small pieces of lavender themed art. Below are three that I completed today, they are postcard size.

My posts are a bit few and far between at the moment, but that's because I have been trying to sort out cupboards and drawers, and painting and cleaning other areas of the house ready to put on the market. I'm hoping to move to the south coast, which will be exciting, but in the meantime, there seems to be lots of preparation to get things ready before inviting any prospective buyers to view our home.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you'll pop by next time too.