The tree is now up and covered in my favourite vintage baubles.
With everything still to do for Christmas, I am well behind on the mince pie production, I can't seem to stop making these enamel brooches!!
I think it must be a displacement activity?
I am starting get into the festive mood and have begun to decorate here and there starting with the mantle piece.
When the sun shone through the windows this morning the decorations took on a life of their own throwing rainbows,
reflections and shadows.
Of course I have a great deal of spare time and Christmas pushes my creativity
into overdrive, so I can't help but experiment with bits of steel and enamel
and have made these broaches just to see if I could. The faces are enamelled using a stamp I have had for years, the legs swing...all very silly, but great fun to make.
A number of experimental enamelling techniques are gelling together
for me in these steel labels. Sgraffito drawing into wet enamel and screen printed transfers.
Etched copper fired with clear flux to achieve these warm red tones.
The transfers are from photographs I have taken at the Grant Zoological Museum at UCL and
the Oxford Natural History Museum. I am also starting to include lustre to get the iridescence found on beetles, but the photos do not show the twinkle.
Consequently I have a number of sketch book pages underway. I have posted
a few in various states.
Non of them are anywhere near complete, but it gives you some idea of how I build up these drawings.
A quick list of techniques used here, gum arabic transfer, photo copy/magazine and acrylic transfer, white acrylic paint drawing, indian ink washes, bleached Quink ink, label collage and a sneaky bit of pencil drawing.
It is still all a bit hit and miss, but I am enjoying the challenge.
I particularly like the effect of this stamped and sifted red.
If in doubt hit the sketch book, I have been trying to find a way to include the moths into my
beetle work. I want to create a homage to the museum collections of insects, particularly the Hope Entomology Collection in the Natural History Museum, Oxford which I am going to take a closer look at later this month.
In the meantime the magazine, Cloth.Paper.Scissors has included the moth collagraph house in their readers challenge 'home sweet home' in the Nov/Dec issue. I called it a light house!! Get it?
This set of teaspoons will be at Nature in Art, Gloucestershire in their Contemporary Craft Exhibition. www.nature-in-art.org.uk 
And this spoon and fork set will be at the Twenty Twenty Gallery, Much Wenlock for their Christmas show. www.twenty-twenty.co.uk
In the mean time I am still working in my sketch book.
