Saturday 31 October 2020

Journaling 2021 with Valerie Sjodin

I bought a 2021 calendar this week.  Now I'm wondering why.  What will I put on it?  The two in-person workshops I have booked in January may yet get cancelled.   The one I was planning to do in mid-November has been cancelled!  But this is life currently, so we just have to make the best of it.

My friend Valerie keeps a journal each year which focuses on a particular word.  As you know I choose a wrod of the year also.  Although it's still only October Valerie has started to think about what she will be doing in 2021.  I thoroughly recommend you looking at her latest blog posts about this.

How to plan and organize a Word of the Year Bullet Journal

and

Choosing a Word of the Year

Next week I'll update you on my 2020 journal so far.  And show my answers to Valerie's questions.

 Thanks for joining me today
Bernice

Tuesday 27 October 2020

The Colours of Covid-19, 2020

I wrote this for a writers group I belong to.  It's my take on colour and may not match the purist's psychology of colours.

What colour is Covid-19? Is it red because there is danger in contracting it? Red as a warning to stay socially distant?

Red is a passionate colour. We think of hearts and Valentines. But too much red around us will make us irritable and angry. Too much Covid does that too!

What would you choose as the colour of lockdown? I think it’s grey. Any number of shades of grey (not just 50!) For some it will be dark grey leaning towards black as they drift into depression. For others life will be another shade of grey. 

Grey fog, brain fog, life that feels like a dank, dark, late November afternoon. 

The Spring and Summer have passed in glorious technicolour but in the main our lives have stayed grey.

But there’s always hope!

Hope is vibrant. Hope is yellow. The sun. A light. A candle flickering in the darkness. The pulse of the beam from a lighthouse in the night.

Yellow is optimistic and cheerful, uplifting and enthusiastic. We all need a bit of yellow. We all need hope. Hope for the future.

And when this is all over there will be blue. Not the Blues – beautiful songs as they are. But the freedom of blue.

The ocean. The sky. Freedom to meet. Freedom to travel. Freedom to hug!

Thanks for joining me today.
Bernice


Saturday 24 October 2020

Text, Texture, Textiles 2

This week saw our second Art Textiles Group day.  Much of the day was spent using fabric rather than sketchbook work.  Although we did end the day in our sketchbooks.   If you missed it, my post on our first day is here.

At a studio day I had dyed some fabrics, written on the fabric with dye and used a thermofax screen.  I had washed the fabrics so I was able to continue at this week's session working on top of these dyed fabrics.

I used Formusol which is a type of bleach to write onto the fabric.  You can begin to see the bleach working on this.

 When it was dry I ironed it and you can see how it took the colour out.

It didn't work so well on this piece because there wasn't a solid block of colour

In the afternoon we played at using different tools to apply dye to fabric.  We first put masking tape across to make different areas.  We removed the masking tape and left it to dry.  This is it washed and ironed.

I also overdyed some previously breakdown printed fabric

I painted a couple of pages in my sketchbook with dye and wrote on them with the Formusol.

I have no idea where all this going but it's fun playing.

Thanks for joining me today
Bernice

Tuesday 20 October 2020

Some Autumn Colour

No matter what is going on, the seasons change.  Autumn is here with lots of colours.  The theme for our photography group was Autumn colours.







I had decided that I wouldn't take trees this time as I have taken so many over the years.  But just in case you're missing colourful trees, here are a couple from Westonbirt in 2015.

Thanks for joining me today
Bernice

Saturday 17 October 2020

Last one from Norfolk

Our last night was spent at The Buckinghamshire Arms at Blickling.  From the landing window outside our room was this amazing view of Blickling House.


 
We drove to Norwich to the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts to see the Art Nouveau exhibition.  This was a particularly informative and well laid out exhibition with a one way system. I'm not very fond of stained glass but these two examples were great.

We drove into Norwich and had a walk round, including Norwich Cathedral.



We stopped off for lunch in Huntingdon on the way home.  Although it was 3.50pm by the time we got there.

I hope you have enjoyed our trip around North Norfolk.  Thanks for joining me today.
Bernice



Tuesday 13 October 2020

Some questions to answer please

I'm interrupting my Norfolk series to ask you to answer some more questions.

Thanks to all those who answered my questions about my blog last month.  I really appreciated you taking the time to reply.  The concensus was to carry on as usual.  For me to blog about all the things I listed in the Taking Stock post.

As I said, I have more questions, but this time I've put them on a Google Form.  That was a whole new learning curve!

I'm contemplating putting together a series of short video courses on a variety of mixed media topics.  There's a possibillty of textile ones as well, at a later date.

These courses would be for beginners, although they would serve as reminders for those who have some mixed media experience.  They will come under the umbrella title of Simply Create.

Although I can think of several topics to cover, it's more important to know what you would like to learn.  What media would you like to know about? What techniques would you like to know how to do?  Click on the link to the Google Form to let me know.

See you on Saturday for my last post from Norfolk.

Thank you so much
Bernice


Friday 9 October 2020

More boats and birds

The weather was much better on the next day.  We drove along  the coast dipping in and out of lanes to the sea.  Eventually we stopped at Brancaster Staithe.  Be  prepared for a lot of photos today.













 We moved on to Burnham Overy Staithe







We drove to Blakeney for lunch and saw this windmill at Cley-next-the-sea on our way to Cromer.


We drove through Sheringham and didn't stop.  It was heaving with people which seemed odd to us on a coldish Wednesday at the end of September.  Perhaps they were all like us - just keen to have a few days away.  At Cromer we had a walk along the pier and along the promenade.



Thanks for joining me today.  Next time, our last day in Norfolk including some Art Nouveau.
Bernice