Poppy on Kilkee beach.   I have adopted a rescue dog - and am a tad behind with everything!  Those of you who follow me on Facebook will have seen quite enough of her already. She is great fun and keeping me on my toes. She is 11 weeks old and I have had her for 6 days. We are getting used to each other . . .  What breed is she - Yes! Good question - her mum is a Lurcher - her dad, unknown! She will be a surprise. One of the positive sides to my new friend is that I will be walking more - much more. Poppy enjoying playing with a radish!   Right back to the blog -  I had a stand at The Fashion, Embroidery and Stitch Show last month. It was a great show and I got to see a lot of you. Thank you very much for coming to say hello. Whilst I love living here in Ireland, I still do enjoy doing the the shows in the UK. It helps me keep in touch with what everyone is up to.  The best part of the show for me was the 3 groups of ex Experimental Textiles students who exhi

2 rather splendid corsages. My last workshop for 2015 was at Art Van Go, an excellent way to end the year. Viv and Kevin and the team look after everyone so well. They run a very comprehensive workshop timetable. Here are the workshops for 2016 -  bit.ly/1IjvI4U    I have a new one in August, Sticky and Shiny. Learning how to use all the glues and fusible webs with transfer foil. I think this is a long overdue workshop. Anyway - back to Making a Tyvek Box. As many of you will know, I rarely teach a workshop where students leave with something finished. teaching process is my passion. However, I thought it might be time to show how adaptable Tyvek can be and that students don't need to leave with just a bag of colourful, textured samples.   My Tyvek box sample.                   I took along the book Embroidered Boxes by Janet Edmonds. It has beautiful ideas for making boxes and has patterns for different styles of boxes with photocopying instructions. All of Janet&#

   A stunning piece of work combining Tyvek with decorated and painted Bondaweb. Denman College is the home of the W.I. The main building is Georgian and is set in beautiful grounds with many specimen trees. I always have great fun there - you seem to get a different type of student, I can't quite put my finger on it, but they are usually up for anything. You no longer need to be a member of the W.I.to enrol on courses so do have a look and see if anything takes your fancy - www.denman.org.uk The workshop I was delivering was On the Surface - my basic Bondaweb course with a bit of Tyvek thrown in for good measure. As the courses I teach at Denman are residential the students can work in the evenings which means we can get a bit more done. Usually stitch - a very important part of my teaching.    The group working in The Ferris Room - there were 10 in all. The maximum, such a treat to have low numbers. As the jam festival was on while I was there we weren't