Five on Friday

1. We had a cake crisis last weekend i.e. there wasn't any, so I invented a quick scoffable teatime cake:

I scaled down the lemon polenta cake recipe from here by only using one egg, and added blackberries instead of blueberries. I managed to get six cupcakes out of the mix, which cooked in about 25 minutes. Oh yes, I also picked my first kilo of blackberries - at last! 

2. The Girl succeeded in her audition for the South Downs Youth Orchestra, and so now Mr G and I have to find something to do for 2½ hours in Lewes, with all its wine bars and eateries, every Friday evening. Shucks, life is hard.

3. I had the notion to do an "imagery survey" of my house. Something to do with finding my visual language. I took an empty sketchbook (well, it was almost empty, so I ripped out the two pages of chicken sketches from 6 years ago) and wandered around the house drawing whatever caught my eye.

I tried to make a record of colours, as well as shapes and details.

Then I painted the pages.

I haven't finished yet! More another time.

4. I faced my sketchbook fear, and used some of my discoveries from my survey to draw a couple of pages, just off the top of my head, no planning:

I'm very pleased with them. I can see these becoming stitched panels, without any further ado. In fact, I said to Mr G "this is easy - why do I make it so hard for myself?" to which there was no answer...

5. I've started work on sampling ideas for the teaching year ahead. This half term we are concentrating on free machining. Hopefully we will progress smoothly from appliqued owls and such, to thread painting - which sounds terrifying to those who say they can't draw or paint, but I've found that if you just keep stitching like a mad woman, all will be well:

There's probably a little bit more to it than that, but let's not scare the troops before we've even started!