Cerys' curtains

This was the biggest stencilling job I have taken on so far. My niece Cerys has the hugest window to her room (lucky her) and her Mum and Dad wanted some personalised pink curtains to cover it. They have chosen butterflies as the theme to her room, so the job description was just lots of butterflies!

I took the opportunity to find some decent ink this time...I had been using Dylon fabric pain previously to do t-shirts but it is expensive and messy as it is very runny. This time I used proper screen printing ink (permaset aqua) which is water based and doesn't create a hard plasticy finish. It washes well and remains soft. We wanted pinks and purples this time so I got the dark red and purple and a transparent white mixer and made a colour chart of possibilities...which was a nice t-shirt for the Bean.

And then to the butterflies! We went for a mix of mid-pinks and purples and a random spatter of 4 different sizes of butterflies.

Yes it took a long time. Yes I had to cut each butterfly out separately! 262 butterflies and 4 curtains later and I love the result.

Summer memories

OK I know summer is long long gone, but events have got away with themselves and I haven't blogged for so long! Just thought I might get back and catch up and of course looking at the photos makes you long for those lovely warm times! So I just thought I'd kick off with a picture or two of when the garden was still producing and it was warm enough to wear a sleeveless top!
Neither of my children likes tomatoes unless they are just freshly picked from the plant. I have no idea why this is, but they will eat bucket-fulls if they can pick them.

and as I am really the only person in the house that likes tomatoes, and none of us like courgettes, this is the fate of the majority of this produce. We roast it up with some onion, garlic and chilli and then wizz it up to form a nice sauce base which freezes and comes out any time we want pasta, curry, pie, whatever!