Month: February 2022

Review – Craft Books from Pen & Sword

Anna

I received these books in exchange for a review

I was fortunate enough to be sent some craft books from Pen & Sword to review. I chose Modern Brush Lettering, Paint Make Create and Colourful Fun Embroidery.

All the books are colourful and cheerful, I love the design and styling. The photographs are really lovely and show clearly what to do with step-by-step instructions. I had trouble taking my own photos of the books as my teenager kept trying to make off with them; I think the embroidery one is her favourite but she was also trying out the brush lettering as soon as I put the book down!

Modern Brush Lettering is the book I was most interested to try. I have some brush pens I bought a few years ago but never got on very well with. I’m better at art now so I wanted to give them another go. The book gives you a good introduction to lettering and has some practice exercises as well as a couple of alphabets, then a selection of projects for the seasons of the year. Another alphabet or two might have been nice but I found the instructions clear and there was good information about supplies and lots of different ways you could use the lettering.

Paint Make Create has a wide selection of projects using different kinds of paint, from watercolour to acrylic to fabric paint. There were a few ideas I wouldn’t have considered, such as the flower cake topper, and I’d love to give the abstract art collage a try. The teenager wants to try decorating a tote bag. This book is by the same author as the brush lettering one and a few of the projects are similar but there is enough variation and it has given me a lot of ideas for things to try!

Colourful Fun Embroidery is the third book. I don’t do a lot of embroidery but this book looked so bright and cheery! Now I just want to get a lot of hoops and fill them with colourful words and patterns and hang them all over the house. My favourites are the simpler ones with a phrase and some decoration and I like how all the templates are in the back of the book for easy tracing.

The first place I started with these books was the brush lettering as I already have everything I need – I’d like to try it out with watercolour paint and brush as well as I think that would work nicely.

brush lettering practice!

Categories: art, craft, review1 Comment

2021 Books

Anna

I read fifty books last year!

Reading was another one of those things that fell by the wayside when the children were small. I missed it, but I felt like I didn’t have time, and I didn’t know what I wanted to read. I’d take the children to the library and maybe get out a book for myself but never get round to reading it. I read on my kindle sometimes while knitting but not a huge amount.

In 2018 or so I decided I wanted to start reading more again. In 2019 I started making lists so I can tell you I read twenty-four books that year, and twenty-three in 2020. How I managed so many in 2021 I don’t know – a combination I think of being furloughed for a chunk of the year, and the library continuing to offer free reservations (which I LOVE and hope never goes away), and also the library being open meaning that every time I went to return books I found something interesting on the shelves! Our local library service has also started using Libby, which is so convenient. It means that whenever I’m at a loose end I can quickly find a book that’s available and start reading it straight away. If I can’t get into a book after fifty pages or so I put it down and move onto the next one – life’s short and there’s always something else I want to read. I only count books I finished on my reading list.

Here are my favourites from 2021!

The Wayfarer series by Becky Chambers is actually four books (The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet; A Closed and Common Orbit; Record of a Spaceborn Few; The Galaxy and the Ground Within) and I loved them all. They’re all set in the same future universe where creatures from many different planets live and travel throughout the galaxy. None of them is plot-heavy but the characters are great and the world-building in particular is incredible.

Josh and Hazel’s Guide to Not Dating by Christina Lauren was the best romance novel I read last year. Very fun, with some excellent pining and a great resolution. So good I finished it then immediately read it again, which is very unusual for me! Other romance novels I enjoyed in 2021 were The Bride Test and The Heart Principle by Helen Hoang, Life’s Too Short by Abby Jimenez, and Act Your Age, Eve Brown by Talia Hibbert (I read the other Brown sisters books in 2020).

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik is a fantasy story, of the fairytale type. There is magic and fairies (not the good kind) and well-drawn characters in a world that feels very real.

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro I only read because the Libby app had it featured on their front page for a book club thing – I didn’t do the book club part but I read the book. It’s speculative fiction, Klara is an Artificial Friend bought to be a companion for a teenage girl, and I love books with an unreliable narrator who sees the world differently. Very thought-provoking.

The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey is more speculative fiction! Which I do enjoy very much but tend to stick to female authors. This one is about cloning, so lots about ethics and what it means to be a ‘real’ human being, with an intriguing mystery at the heart. Got a little bit scary for me in places but I pushed through because I wanted to find out what happened.

So far in 2022 I’ve read eight books – so on track for a similar amount this year as last, if I keep it up.

Categories: readingLeave a comment

Locus Vest by Katya Frankel

Anna

One of my favourite autumn/spring outfits is a knitted tank top over a long-sleeved t-shirt. I used to have a grey cabled tank top but it gradually got more and more felted until it was tight across my shoulders so I have sadly parted with it and knitted myself this nice new red one.

The pattern is the Locus Vest by Katya Frankel and I knitted it in Sirdar Country Style DK yarn, which I like because it’s warm and quite woolly but not TOO woolly (pure wool makes me itch, even through a t-shirt). The lace panel runs up the front and back and I love how it looks but it did mean I had to pay attention on every row, which means I wasn’t in the mood for this every day, and consequently it took over a year to finish. But I’m very glad to have it now.

My next knitting project is a stripy tank top knit using the leftover yarn from my Eastern Jewels blanket. This was initially moving faster due to being mainly stocking stitch, and also stripes always knit up faster; but recently I’ve been forgetting about it and leaving it to one side while I do other things. Hopefully writing this post will remind me to pick it up again.

Categories: craft, knittingLeave a comment