The Things You Like Keep Happening

There are still quite a few lace bobbins to sell on ebay. The whole thing has gone well from auction-purchase to ebay-sales. People who collect lace bobbins are kind, polite, honest and appreciative and I have had sales to Sweden, Denmark, Massuchusetts, Tokyo and all over England. The whole thing has been a pleasure. The remains are shown below and will be on line before christmas. It encouraged me to sell some left over stuff from the garden and that has gone well too. A woman just came and paid £5.70 for a small garden ornament that I was going to take down to the tip. The other thing occupying my leisure is my art classes. Paul Dillon at the Darlo Arts Centre does watercolour classes and I have done a couple of courses with him but this year he was offering a more-mixed media course using resist to portray things like shine, frost etc.
Resist is applied before you paint. You can use special rubber pens or oil-crayons. This pic shows the original photo we used as a guide. On the left is my interpretation on smooth paper and on the right is the same approach, colours, resists etc but used on rough but regularly textured paper.Paul had used rough paper and was demonstrating the effect shown in the top-right-hand quarter of this pic. I was so dismayed. I had set up my lesson on SMOOTH paper. I rushed back to my area and peeled a sheet of very textured paper off and carried on with two sheets at once.
This is the application of the same resists, paints and effort for each image. The first pic below is done on the rough textured paper and follows what was done in the class. There were fifteen of us and none of them were the same. The next pic is the "mistake one" done on the smooth paper. It was admired all round, and even by Paul. It does have a more dramatic look, and as many people commented a bit like batik. That was probably because I over-applied the resist but who cares. It was admired, even by the teacher!!!

On my way to art class I popped in to Watsons to put a bid on "Fridtjof of Nansen" (yes it was two volumes 1st, and folded maps were intact) which they had listed at £20-£40 est. Well I examined them and they were really good and generally in good nick. So I left a bid of £75, making the mistake that others often do, that no-one else would know what they were really worth. They sold for £80 to the other person who knew.

I'm still a bit sore about my own parsimonious approach. I must be willing to make 20% profit. I am still hooked on doubling my money.

In the meantime I'm knitting scarves and shawls from the Tunisian wool and mixing it with other stuff and I'm getting my craft space sorted.

Cheers Gillian