Deeply felt ...

Just as a follow up to the last post - I love felting. Wool is my main medium for crafting, and knitting is probably the thing I do most, but there's also weaving, and spinning, and felting (and occasionally crocheting). There's wet felting (happy memories of working in a basement in a village in Fife, with the gas heater on inside and the snow outside and the door open as we were all working so hard on our felt slippers and trying them on as we went, leaving sopping footprints round the stone floor), prefelt (where the fibres have already been made loosely into felt and then you can cut them and work them - some people think this is cheating but it's just another way of getting there, from my perspective), and dry felting, where you are dangerously armed with barbed needles and use these to tease and harden loose fibre into sculptural shapes, or attach a pattern to cloth. There's also a hybrid called knitting to felt, an unpredictable science, in my experience, and that's what went wrong today.

Now, before I disgrace myself, here are a few of the better results:

As I said earlier, I'm not an expert in making birds, but I quite like this needlefelted one with its squiffy tail.

This is a prefelt wall-hanging, made on another lovely day in Fife where everyone had a great time and was happy with what they made - sunshine through tall windows, lots of soapy water and a buzz of creativity.

This is the back of a waistcoat, knitting from roving (unspun wool) then felted, then the tree was needle-felted on with more roving. Now, knitting to felt is, as I said, unpredictable. American books talk of hot washing the knitting in your washing machine with a trainer or two, and lifting it out periodically to see how much it has shrunk. From this you will gather (or you ought!) that Americans favour the trendy twintub machine, with a door on the top! I go instead for the front loading washing machine and gentle washes till it goes down enough - but for some reason, sometimes it shrinks, sometimes it expands, and sometimes it does both.
Now, I had this project in mind. I had seven lovely balls of Rowan colourscape wool, bought in a sale, and I thought if I knitted thick i-cords from it and made six squares of the i-cords, then stitched the last i-cord as a border round the six squares stitched into a rectangle, and felted it, I'd have a nice rectangular bedside rug. Well, it's taken ages, but today I finally felted it in the washing machine. And I can't help feeling that it's a bit more, um, three dimensional than a bedside rug ought to be!

Reminiscent of Madonna's 1980s look, I fear!

A little reworking might be required ...

A little progress

I've knocked one job down to two days a week for the moment, and the other three jobs are hovering, so I'm beating on with typing and editing and I'm now just over 3/10 through Fellowship with Demons. No ideas for the cover yet. It's based on a couple of documents I found long ago in the National Archives in Edinburgh, a real trial and a real oddity, a letter to Edinburgh Town Council from a basket maker. A lady had called at the basket maker's shop asking him to look after a hamper for her for a couple of hours and she had never come back for it, and when he opened it he found it contained human bones, and being a sensible tradesman, well aware of health and safety legislation as it stood in 1808, he wanted the Council to come and take it away.

I'd love to try basket weaving - did a chair seat and a stool once and my fingers have just about recovered. But craft is an awful distraction and someone started a craft thread on the Good Reads website, and it keeps drawing me in! Recently I discovered decoupage, but making your own shape, not just buying one, and it's completely addictive - I'll just put another few pieces on, I'll be finished in a minute, honestly!

Well, I never said I was any good at birds! I seem to be building up a small aviary, however: knitted, needlefelted, woven willow, that kind of thing. All awful. It's a way of passing the time.

A bit of a departure

Pewter casting - not something I thought would be a very accessible craft, but by chance during the excellent NEOS event (North East Open Studios), I came upon a lovely but bored-looking girl sitting at a table in the sunshine with a selection of odd white shapes in front of her. I wanted to know if some exhibits were for sale; she didn't know; I asked her what she was there for (more polite than it sounds, honestly!), and she explained that if I wanted to I could have a go at pewter casting. I did, and it was such good fun that in November I went to the Scottish Sculpture Workshop in Lumsden, Aberdeenshire, to have another go.

The funny white shapes were lumps of cuttlefish bone, just the things you pop into a bird's cage for them to hone their beaks on. The lumps are sawn in half, revealing two almost smooth but subtly patterned surfaces, so easy to carve that you can press a fingernail or a ring into the bone. Carve the shape you want to make, pop in a channel for the metal and a couple of vents for escaping air, and then tape the two halves back together. Then the fun begins (though this is the bit for which I took a back seat! I did spend a happy day dressed in fetching green Sparrows overalls made for someone much larger than me, but the protective leather look is not for me - I'm clumsy enough as it is). This is green sand (no, really), which is sand mixed

 

with, er, oil, I think, making it clumpy. The taped-up cuttlefish bone is set into the sand which stops the liquid pewter running out.

Then the pewter is popped into a crucible in the centre of a small portable furnace (never knew there could be such a thing!), and a gas flame is made to flow round between the crucible and the furnace walls.

Not a cold job: it was hot when I first saw this in the bright sunlight at NEOS, but at Lumsden, with the forge's wall-sized double doors wide open to the blanched winter countryside, it was still toasty. Not long until the pewter is melted - it has a low melting point, which makes all this possible: a hotter molten metal would burn the bone and wreck the moulds.

In goes the pewter - or unicorn's blood - and then we wait, not long, for it to cool and harden. And then you open the moulds, just a bit too early so there's a bit of 'ooh! ouch!'. It's so easy that I was carried away and made seven little pewter thingies, but these are the two I like best: the tree because the mould looks just as good as the pewter (and we had to fight for this one and do it twice as the mould leaked the first time), and the sycamore seed because I just about managed to match the two halves of the mould and it is patterned on both sides.

So you can see how I'm spending my time when I should be writing! (and it's not improving my photography skills, sadly ...).

Here's the website for the Scottish Sculpture Workshop - lots of great things going on there!
www.ssw.org.uk

Fellowship with Demons is nearly 1/5 typed and edited, despite Christmas card making and writing, mincemeat brewing, watching Skyfall and The Hobbit (I know, not the book, but still wonderful), and doing the pantomime and Nativity play and bird-ordering and wrapping. This year I remembered to make double quantities of marzipan, thank goodness, but haven't iced the cake yet. Oh, well - days to go yet, aren't there? Aren't there??

Seasonal scramble

 This is what the garden looked like a couple of weeks ago - definitely a late-summer look, still a little warmth in the sunlight, greenery, blackberries, all those late summery things. Then we get this!

Winter sneaked in on autumn before autumn was quite ready to go out - trees against the snow were shocked yellow and gold, caught half-undressed as winter came through the door. All gone now, again, of course, but we managed a snowman - about three feet tall, but mostly because it was on a two foot high table ...!

Right, well, despite the fact I'm holding down three concurrent jobs this week I've managed to finish reading the next book, and it's not quite as bad as I remembered it! It is now called Fellowship with Demons (a bit of a change from Kith and Kin!) and I've just about started typing it. No publication date yet, and no cover design! Thanks for the recent lovely reviews for the first four - you're very kind people! Now, back to work.

Salmagundi Special!

A Splendid Salmagundi is now out on Amazon! This was not painless - most of yesterday and possibly the day before were spent by the contributors endlessly pressing the Refresh button on Amazon and updating each other every five minutes on the progress - or lack of it - and indulging in horrendous and quite unnecessary vegetable puns! However, the end result seems to be worth it - once I can, on my dodgy temporary BT connexion, get it to download ... Tell your friends, and buy this unique concoction!

                                                      (waiting for Amazon to upload ...)

Rosehips and Salmagundi

Child labour is a marvellous thing. With a bit of help I have some pots of rosehip jelly and some pots of blackberry jam, and two happy children not particularly badly scratched or muddy! Of course in the Second World War children were indeed paid to collect rosehips to provide Vitamin C to a population missing its citrus fruit. It's a bit of a dilemma, though - the big rosehips are quicker to top and tail but not as tasty, while the small ones are better but fiddly.

An odd fruit, really.

Very excited about the new Goodreads UK Kindle Forum's joint opus, A Splendid Salmagundi, due out soon. A Goodreads Gallimaufrey was the first in this (I hope lengthy) series, a mixture of poetry, short stories and recipes from members of the forum, whether published authors or not. This time I've managed to be organised and have submitted a couple of short stories - not really my field but fun to try from time to time! Anyway, it's going to be a really good read despite my efforts, so buy, buy, buy! And thanks to all those who have the patience to put it all together!

The smell of autumn is in the air - a lovely season. Curlews are stitching their way between the straw bales in the fields, the leaves are contemplating turning, and it's blowing a gale. Thanks to the wind I had to tack along the seafront on the bike today, but managed to avoid hitting the stoat that slid out of the grassy bank just in front of me and pottered across between busy commuter traffic to the other side of the road. The first peas have finally appeared on the allotment (we're eating our weight in broad beans and tatties), the first students have appeared around the university, and at last I can pull out some winter woollies. I am not a summer person!

I have changed the cover on Service of the Heir this week as my kindly graphic designer went to Edinburgh and took some photographs in Greyfriars Kirkyard, where Murray's father is buried in the course of the book. There were so many good photographs it was hard to know which to pick! I've never been that happy with the cover so this is a vast improvement. Of course, it's not quite the same as the cover of a book in a bookshop, where people might easily be drawn across the room by a good cover - Amazon and Smashwords don't exactly lay all the ebooks out for you to take your pick based on appearances! But I'm waiting to hear if Waterstone's is interested in stocking hard copies of Death in a Scarlet Gown, so appearances are becoming more relevant, perhaps.

Advertising is expensive! I've just been on a site called Bookriot and it claimed to have simple, easy to pay advertising. Well, yes, they do: and I thought $11 was quite reasonable for 1,000 views of your advert. Appparently, however, they don't sell advertising in such small batches: when I went to check out I discovered I would be paying $1,100! Needless to say I backed off fast - an innocent abroad, definitely! But I need to do something to improve North American sales - I wonder what?
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