Moving On

Longer days set me looking to the future

Wishful thinking that Spring may be just around the corner.

Moving interrupts service

After much planning and a good deal of dreaming the time has come to start dismantling the home, for another move that I hope will be the last for a good while. This time going back to where we started, back in the last century. 

I have an idea that although I have been back much, there is a lot that I have no idea how to do (topping up an Oyster Card for one!) -  it will feel a bit wierd not being the indulged foreigner, and I will have no excuse not to understand aparently simple and obvious things. 

But that is all in the future, and now, yes now, all I have to do is take things of the shelves, wrap them and box them, reflecting on how we gathered just so much stuff. So many souvenirs and memory triggers that make the packing so slow.   

All this means that posts may become a bit more intermittent than I had hoped  for 2014. If you have the patience keep with it - I have great plans for the autumn. 

Frank finds his love  

Great news on the canine love front - out walking last weekend we bumped into Frank's mystery girlfriend, and after a wonderful walk (OK, so he introduced her to the joy of jumping into sulphurous smelling river mud, resulting in sticky black paws and legs, but no one's perfect). In any event, they did get to share a sunbeam in the garden together afterwards. I think that they make a splendid couple. It's a good job you can't smell the mud from the photo. 

 

Retro Stencilled Tea Tray

All this packing has created a general mess everywhere, but the is a corner of this house that I have preserved for the all important therapy of making stuff. Quite pleased with how this one turned out. 

 The tray came from the Danish flea market on Refshalevej 166 ( See my post on it here). The lovely graphic was from Graphique's Etsy shop and I made the stencil using sticky vinyl and the Cameo Silhouette. Especially pleased with how the tea pot turned out.    

Stencil Wood Sign

I've still got the Cameo Silhouette cutting bug, and I picked up this scrappy piece of wood on the beach a while ago that I thought would be great for a stencil cut using the Silhouette. I wanted to use an extract from the poem written by Bessie Anderson Stanley in 1904 called "Success". I worried that it wouldn't quite fit, but it did in the end thankfully! 

I used the tutorial on the Silhouette site to work out how to make stencil letters without the middles falling out of the "e" and "o" s etc. I know it isn't exactly perfect, but I think I like the look. I used Acrylic paint and finished it with lime wax for a soft shine. 

I have lots of ideas to make some more, and sitting in the garden, stencil brush in hand, is the perfect place to be at the moment.