After finishing Tori-iru, my studio was utterly and completely trashed. There was no flat space that was uncovered, including the floor. Scraps of fabric, batting, paints, threads and heaven knows what else were everywhere. I took a day to sort things out again and to breathe deeply and let my mind relax.

When my mind relaxes, my finger twitch, so I also made a little progress on my Must Have Cardi (this is a link to someone else’s blog with a good photo, since the Patons website is super-slow and reluctant to cooperate. The Ravelry link is here ), finishing off a sleeve (the back and two front pieces are already complete). One sleeve and a collar/plackets to go! I’ve been wanting a neutral-coloured cabled cardigan for some time now. It’ll be nice to get this one done. It’s taking much less wool than I thought. I still buy for a large person (and end up knitting a small or medium – yay!).

The next project is to get a new batch of stuff into the Etsy shop and to work on a piece for an upcoming show.

I also am setting aside a little time each week to fiddle around with painting technique.

Yesterday I played with “blow trees”, which are trees made by dropping a blob of paint or ink onto paper and using a straw to channel a stream of air at the liquid. You then blow the paint around the surface of the paper. It’s quite a bit of fun and the results are more controllable than you might initially think. You can direct which way off-shoots go by touching the edge of the straw to the ink trail where you want a branch to go. The leaves are daubed on afterwords. While I just used paint for this round, I think some embossing powder might add a nice texture to a final layer.

The effect with watercolour paints is quite nice because of the crisp edge that can be achieved. I only spent a very few minutes on quite a small scale with this idea, but it certainly bears revisiting. It wouldn’t work so well on fabric, of course, due to the bleed factor. On paper, though, it has a myriad of possibilities ranging from trees to rivers to map details and rock texture. Just one more tool to add to the Techniques Toolbox!

Now back to the design wall. My personal challenge for this next piece is to work small and monochromatic. We’ll see how well that works (or doesn’t)!