Quilting

My latest project for the nursery is a decorative quilt for the cot. I have never made a quilt before but am enjoying the process so far. I will have to get a move on though as we only have about 2 and a half weeks to our due date!

I am keeping it quite simple with patchwork squares and some appliques. Hopefully it will be finished soon and I will reveal the whole thing!

Oh yes, oh yes

Here is a clip from an animation project I was involved with recently. I created all the artwork and the film was made by creative agency Dave.

Its basically a training video for the call centre staff of insurance company Churchill.

It was lots of fun to do - especially as I didn't have to animate it myself!

p.s. The soundtrack isn't really music with strange animal sounds - the real sound has been covered up to protect Churchill's top secret training techniques. (I know what the real script was but if I told you I'd have to kill you...)

Seeing stars

And spots!

I have just listed a boy's version of the cot decoration in my etsy shop. This one is stars in the more manly colours of red and blue. Had our bump been a boy I would have liked this colour scheme for our nursery. If they've made a mistake I will have to remove this listing and keep this for myself! I do hope not though as he would have nothing but pink clothes!

Blood, sweat and Lloyd Loom

We bought this 1931 Lloyd Loom armchair in Newmarket a few weeks ago for the nursery. It was badly painted in a light blue and had a few areas of damage to the weave but as it was just the shape we had been looking for we decided to do it up ourselves.

It was a bigger job than we thought it would be! The cleaning up and repairing of the weave wasn't too bad apart from poking out all of the old paint clogs with a palette knife and screwdriver, but when we started painting we realised it wasn't going to be as simple as we first thought. We ended up painting the entire thing with tiny water colour brushes as we found it was the only way to get the paint right into the weave without clogging it up. I don't even want to try and work out the hours of labour it took! When you're eight months pregnant you do not want to be sitting on the floor with big swollen feet at 10 o'clock at night painting a chair with a miniature brush!

Finally we got it painted just before losing the will to live and I have made a new seat pad and matching cushion and got it settled into the corner of the nursery.

We love it and hopefully baby will appreciate all our hard work!

Summery bits

I've just got hold of some screen grabs of a temporary website I did some illustrations for recently.  They were for an online conference for Unilever.

They were having a 'summer' theme so I basically provided them with some summery illustrations which they used to make the website look a bit more appealing!

North Norfolk

We took the bump on her first holiday last week.  Obviously we couldn't fly anywhere this year so we took a trip to the North Norfolk coast with my sister and her family.

My 6 month old niece had her first picnic at the seaside and the inevitable first taste of sand.

We were pretty lucky with the weather but spent our last beach visit sitting under a beach hut at Wells Next The Sea during a hail storm!

Despite the odd shower a good British holiday had by all.  Except that I lost at Scattergories which I'm normally quite good at.  I blame the baby brain.