Don't you just hate it when you press the wrong button! Happens to me all the time! More haste less speed as my Granny would say. I still have no voice and in fact have a good case of laryngitis but at least I'm not in pain!

After doing all the necessary paperwork and a tad of housekeeping...just enough to keep the house still habitable....I decided I had to play. My new aquisitions had been sitting looking at me balefully for over a week and much as I wanted to use them the time hadn't been right but this morning I decided to go for it. There were gales in the night with heavy rain and when I waved Martin off to work this morning the front lawn was covered with leaves of all shapes, sizes and colours. Some of them were pretty much past it but some were just crying out to be gathered up and used as inspiration. This is a small selection. I love the reds, especially those changing to yellow with the orangey overtones.

Then I sorted out some fabric. I had dyed a piece a yucky green. Well actually I had hoped I was dyeing it a dark Christmassy green but it came out bright grass green and not a colour I go a bundle on. This was a new fabric which I won't be using a lot of in future. Anyway I decided that this would be good for working on with paintstiks, permanent markers, fabric crayons and oil pastels plus the odd water soluble pencil. I had a brilliant idea to begin with that actually wasn't that brilliant! I covered the back of one of the oak leaves with Markal paintstik, turned it over and then ironed it onto the fabric. This gave a really good print but the heat of the iron completely destroyed the already aged and brittle leaf. I then rubbed paintstik over several of the shapes and got some interesting effects. The very dark brown one is the ironed on one. Well having tried twice to upload and insert a photo I'm going back to Picaso. I can't be doing with this when I've got a dinner to get and there are some very barbed comments coming my way.

Anyway I then went on to outline the leaf shapes with pencil and colour them in with various coloured markers. The effects were completely different to the paintstiks. I had a lot of fun doing this and can see it being a popular technique in this house from now on. See photos above. I shall have to get some dinner but will post more later.