Yarndale Mug

After making this mug for when I'm at ceramics and enjoying it so much; I thought I'd make another for when I'm at A Good Yarn. We all had a lovely trip to Yarndale, so I've used the wonderful sheep logo as my inspiration.

There's a sheep on both sides. The biggest challenge was to try and match the colours because they are different before they are fired, compared to the finished result. Not exact but I'm very happy with it.

Of course, I have how I like my coffee on the mug. Here it is, just in case you want to make me a coffee!

A little "funny" that I made this week, my version of a heavily sealed envelope.

Recycled Wedding Vases

For my wedding all the table centre pieces were little hurricane lamp style vases filled with roses. I gave most of them away after the wedding to the guests but I kept two for myself. They'd been kicking around and not getting used. So I decided to decorate them with glass paints so they could be used for either vases or decorative candle holders. I made these awhile ago and didn't share them.

The glass paint was a little tricky to master. It worked better with smaller areas to paint, as the brush strokes were very obvious. Plus, I didn't have a simple way to draw directly onto the glass. You can draw on paper and put this inside the glass but this didn't appeal. So I did some freehand painting, which was very interesting and quite cathartic.

The first is a meandering vine with little flowers.

The second is meant to be meadow flowers. The blue flowers are my version of little cornflowers and the pink ones are a (very) artistic impression of a daisy.

On a more fibre related note, I won a blog competition last week - the blog was HilltopCloud's The View from the Hill. I had a very exciting thud on the doormat and received the latest copy of the YarnMaker. The magazine contains a pattern created by Katie of HilltopCloud, which is stunning and a brilliant use of tailspun yarn. I've been meaning to try this magazine for awhile and I'm very impressed with the quality of it and all the interesting articles too.