Playday

Today has been a playday in my studio. I needed to make a birthday card for a friend, so decided to try working with some brass shim that has been sitting on a shelf in my studio, waiting to be tried out. I held it over a gas flame to colour it, then cut it to size and embossed it with the flower design you can see. The colours are hard to photograph, but range through golds, blues, greens and purples. The bacground fabric contains all of those colours, and I've machine stitched the shim to the fabric and then added some beads. The embossing needs a steadier hand - but then I'm not very good at drawing with a pen! (I used an empty ballpoint pen to make the marks on the back of the shim.)




I still felt like playing, so decided to try making one of the coffee cuffs that feature in the latest Quilting Arts magazine. It's used for holding a cardboard coffee cup and, as I regularly burn my fingers while trying to carry my coffee back to work from the coffee shop, it seemed like a fun idea to try. I used a piece of embroidery that was an off cut from a larger piece. It's coffee coloured, so won't show the spills (I hope!). The piece wasn't quite big enough, so I cut it up and pieced it back together, so that the cuff pattern would fit. I don't have a cardboard coffee cup to try it out on and the finished cuff seems a bit big, but I'll have to wait until I'm back at work to buy a coffee and try it!