Write it On Your Skin

I’m going to try and make a more concerted effort to write about the music that is important to me, so whereas I waxed lyrically about Jake Morley the other day, there is one man I’d kick Jake out of my audio bed for, any day of the week and that’s Newton Faulkner and he just happens to have a new album out, Write it On your Skin, which as it happens, I absolutely adore and it has kicked Many Fish To Fry out of it’s continual loop top spot.

Newton Faulkner is one of those guys who plays cheery songs about being miserable but how it’s all going to turn round and get better, I dare you to listen to his latest album and not smile. I love the imagery conjured by Newton’s songs, this is going to sound weird but there are certain artists that when I hear their songs, the images I see in my head are embroidered, Eliza Doolittle is one and Newton Faulkner is another and this album has got the mental imagery going into overdrive. I like lines such as;

It’s such a long shot

Everything we’ve got

Just living on this rock

Surrounded by the sea

With our shoes off

Balancing on roof tops

You put your faith in preachers

I put my faith in me

Chorus from Longshot by Newton Faulkner

We’re never told, we’re never told when to give in

We never know, we never know when it’ll end

So we better go, so we better go when it begins

The earth will shake as the mountains crack

And all that’s taken is given back

The Golden Age is coming round the bend

Just roll with it baby

Let go and shake a little tail feather

Go with it, just roll with it baby

Let go

And all the things that held us back

That drained us like an hour glass

Will disappear like sugar in the snow

Sugar in the Snow by Newton Faulkner

Having gone through phases in my life where Faulkner’s other albums have also been on continual loop, this album does sound, in places, slightly different, there’s more of a band behind the man with the guitar in a lot of the tracks this time, but it’s done well.

There is also the added benefit of a further six acoustic tracks at the end of the album; four of which are tracks from the album and the other two, I Need Something and Dream Catch Me, are absolute classics from Newton’s older stuff, a real treat.

I think overall my favourite tracks from this album are Brick by Brick, Write it On Your Skin and Longshot, have you heard this album? What are your favourite tracks?

The mother-in-law’s birthday present

Now I’m pretty sure my mother-in-law doesn’t read this blog, although she does check out my Flickr account, so I guess she could have figured out the link from there but I doubt it, but if you are reading this Shirley, don’t read on!

Recently(ish) Mr.Lacer said that “as my embroidery was quite good now,” (huh – sorry I’m being all female but I always have to try hard not to interpret the phrase ‘quite good now’ as meaning ‘well you were a bit rubbish before’, although the phrase ‘quite good now’ is nowhere near as dangerous as ‘you’re so slim’, as soon as I hear that phrase, my brain is like on auto-translate and it immediately translates to “you were fat before”, let that be a warning to you Mr. Lacer (who I know is reading this), if by some miracle I stop main-lining coke and chocolate and actually loose some weight). Anyway, fairly recently Mr. Lacer asked me (because my embroidery was ‘quite good now’) to embroider something for his mum’s birthday, my ears instantly pricked up on this because as it happened there was something I had always wanted to embroider for the mother-in-law, ever since I had opened my copy of Sublime Stitching’s Embroidered Effects, a few years ago, the Mah Jong table cloth, however I hadn’t sort of figured in exactly how big the mother-in-law’s table is, put it this way, it’s a giant covered snooker table, there you go.

This was ‘commissioned’ before my wrist surgery (wrist doing good by the way, still wouldn’t be able to do yoga on it (not that I was really doing yoga before . . . but it’s something I’ve done in the past and have always meant to carry on) and it’s got a Frankensteinesque great big red scar (which will fade), but about in the past week I’ve come to realise I can do most things reasonably comfortably again), so I couldn’t tackle the table cloth straight away but for the past few weeks it’s all I’ve been doing (in between working like a dog at work).

Marking out where the transfers and the border would go, was a day long job in itself.

Then there was doing the border first, which went on and on and has left me so traumatised I can’t remember the name of the stitch, but trust me, I COULD DO IT IN MY SLEEP

And then there was the four lots of Mah Jongs complete with quite cool running stitch swirls -

-and four lots of corner patterns, each featuring a Mah Jong tile

And then when that was done I had to some how find a gap of more than half an hour where it wasn’t raining, to launder the thing again, luckily, all the transfer marks came out and the red was actually colour fast (phew, red is always a bit of a risk)

Then it came to photographing it, unfortunately I don’t have a table anywhere near as big and the light is funny (i.e. normal) in the flat today, so I couldn’t get any good photos.

Next time I’m at the mother-in-laws and if she puts the table cloth out for lunch, I will try and photograph it better there. This is one of those projects where I have felt a bit picky over some of the small details but when you hold it up and look at the piece as a whole, it’s wow, I’m really pleased with it.

NB: The tablecloth is from the Casa range in John Lewis and it was a pleasure to work on, it’s linen, which is why, despite the laundering it still looks a little creased but I think that adds to the old vintage look of the piece and the fabric is wonderfully soft and got even more nice to handle as I worked with it. I’ve investigated tablecloths to embroider before but have always found that they were too expensive and/or had a pattern in the fabric (even the ‘plain’ white ones) that made embroidering them a bit pointless. So, if ever I’m in the market for a table cloth for me (would have to wait to move first), I hope John Lewis still does them.

PS I forgot to add why I wanted to make my mother-in-law a Mah Jong tablecloth, well, my mother-in-law has a way better social life than I do and one of the many, many things she does is play Mah Jong, which is why, whenever I saw the tablecloth in Embroidered Effecrs, I always thought of her.