Blast from the past - Deer 2002

Or rather I should say art from the past.

If you have been following me on my old blog, Twitter, Facebook Ravelry etc etc you will know we have moved home several times in the last 2 years, some of them traumatic, none of them permenant until (fingers crossed) now.

We've just come back to Exmoor from a christmas visit to our family in Suffolk and have brought a van load of boxes back with us, I haven't seen the contents for nearly 2 years.
So as you can imagine its really exciting unpacking them.
The boxes we brought this time are nearly all boxes of books, my poor long suffering Dad still has boxes of treasure filling up his spare bedroom back in Suffolk.
I keep finding embroidery and quilt books, which has made me reminise about my past life.
Back in the day's when NDS was just beginning I used to be a textile artist, I started dyeing fabric for my embroideries and quilts, at the beginning most of it was brown or yellow and dyed with whatever I could find in the hedgerows or in my garden.
I thought it might be nice to add a record of my art work and early dyeing attempts to my blog as they no longer have a website of their own, that disappeared when NDS took over my life.

My earliest dyeing attempts were in 1998/9, but I can't find any photo's.
The earliest example of my dyeing I can find is the photo below, it was a quilt called "Flower's for Tower's" and was made in response to 9/11 in 2001, I think it ended up in a private collection in America.
The pale pink/beige colour was probably dyed with bracken or tea or maybe even eucalyptus. The gold was onion skins.

The following photo's are of a series of quilted embroideries inspired during a holiday to Scotland.
One evening we came across a huge stag standing in the middle of a road, our local Suffolk deer seemed to disappear in the summer which made me think that maybe our deer went on holiday to Scotland too.
The bottom layer of these embroideries was pieced with my naturally dyed fabric and then I added layers of lovely nylon net to add more colour!
If only I knew what I now know about dyeing things might have been a bit different :-)

The trouble with free patterns

Like a lot of professional designers I have another job to support my designing career, which like many of you probably already know is managing The Natural Dye Studio

NDS dyes and sells yarn, luckily its a successful business as it supports the 3 of us.

Pattern support is an essential part of a yarn company, my designs are designed to help sell wool (and of course, I do love to design!)

A few years ago I decided to offer a couple of free patterns to encourage new customer's to try our yarn.

My most successful free pattern was the Angel scarf

On reviewing it a few weeks ago, I found it has 2657 hearts and 264 projects on Ravelry. It pleased me to see that many people love my designs and are inspired to spend their time making them, however I was a little shocked to find that there's only 1 project out of 264 made with NDS's Angel lace.
So, in these financially tight times I decided to discontinue offering it for free as it wasn't encouraging wool sales.
Since then I have recieved 3 or 4 messages a week asking for the free pattern and am shocked to find a couple of the messages have been quite stroppy, one being down right rude! As you can imagine it has made me a little fustrated being harrased by one or two irate crocheters who have feel it is necessary to demand from me. The pattern was on for two years, I believe that was a generous amount of time to offer a pattern for free and hope that the majority of customers felt satisfied with this.

However I've decided, due to the patterns popularity, to re-offer the pattern for free but only if accompanied with a purchased skein of Angel lace, therefore trying to appease the demand and also help it benefit NDS.

Hobbit hole & moving on

Today is our last day of living in the hobbit hole.
We are moving a couple of doors down the street to a much bigger flat.
I'm sitting here surrounded by boxes, I should be cleaning our new bedroom as it hasn't been used in years.
But I need to drink coffee to wake up, so I thought I'd fill my waking time with a bit of cathartic reliving the past.

The hobbit hole was a new chapter in our chaotic life, the perfect escape from the nightmare we had been living through for the past 3 years.
If you don't know the story you can read all about it HERE on my old blog or you can follow the links below to the individual blog posts.
Its a story of .....
Redundancy and imminent repossesion
Making ourselves homeless
Living illegally part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4
Despair

The hobbit hole was the place we finally relaxed into and felt safe.
It was behind a big gate, down a little alleyway, hidden behind an old pub and had its own private courtyard.
I still felt really stressed whenever Loki barked at the sound of the gate being opened and still dreaded answering the phone just incase it was someone threatening me with eviction or a court order.
I guess it takes a long time to recover from what we had lived through.

This is the lounge and was taken on the day we moved in, its almost the entire flat,

There are also 2 small bedrooms and a bathroom

We have lived here in Lynton in the hobbit hole for 7 months.
During that time we have been made to feel welcome and accepted into the community. I doubt our new friends will ever know just how grateful we are to them for accepting us with open arms.
The summer was amazing even though it rained constantly, every weekend there was something new to do.
Raft race, dog show, fishing competitions.
But the hole is now cold, dark, damp and cramped as we have shut the french doors.

And its time to move on to better things, into our new hobbit mansion.

The new flat is massive and only 2 doors away so we will still be living in the old part of the village.

This is the first landing and gives some idea of just how huge the flat is.

 Its 2 floors of huge rooms and has a huge kitchen

 and even larger lounge along with a fireplace and shutters.

And a view or rather several views

The only problem is it doesn't have an outside, but we live in a small village cradled in hills, with the sea on one side and the moors on the other. Our outside is only a 2 minute walk away.

I think I've drunk enough coffee am now off to clean some windows and my new bedroom.
:-)))))

Tiny sneaky peak

Just a quick post as its a dyeing day today and Dais won't be a happy bunny if I don't join her in the dye room soon.

Over the past few weeks I've been very quite about my crochet.
Mainly because I am working on lots of secret things.
This is what I've been doing.....

November and December's motif clubs.

One thing which will go to its new home in the new year.
I can show you a very tiny sneaky peak, but I'm not going to tell you anything about it except I have removed most of the green and replaced it with a new colour and am much much happier about it.

Three designs for next year's project club
Crochet Triangles Club

One for a magazine, in fact it this magazine
Simply Crochet Magazine
The first issue will be out in the new year and I am very very excited about it.