^{I have an interest in teaching and working with learning disabled children and since my old school has children with varied abilities. I emailed my old art teacher Zoe who is the head of the art department to enquire about supporting and teaching in her classes.}

Hi Zoe hope you are ok? I have started my second year at uni and we have been asked if we could find volunteer work or just general work experience in the area we want to focus in, I am interested in teaching or working with children with learning difficulties. I was just wondering if there is any chance of me coming back to school to do some work shops with some of your students or just generally to help out in any of your classes. I would be very grateful if you could help out. Thanks

Hi Leanne,
Sorry for the slow reply. I don't check Facebook everyday!
Lovely to hear from you! I would love you to come in! I have a particular yr 9 group that need a lot of support due to special needs. They are a gorgeous group! Let me speak to the Head and get his permission and then maybe you could come in and we could have a chat about where to go from there. I would be happy for you to do workshops or support or even both. When can you do the placement? How long for? Any particular days?
Looking forward to hearing from you. I will speak to the Head on Monday and let you know. I'm sure there won't be a problem.

For the next 5 weeks I will be doing a competition brief I have chosen a brief from the Hand & Lock website, The brief is based on embroidery and mixed media. I had to chose from five themes and I have decided to focus on the theme 'For Fun' I picked this theme because I wanted to be more experimental.

'For Fun'

A trend characterised by subtle humour and the joyous spirit for relaxing moments. The colours for

this trend are graphic and simple, but also fanciful. Play on ideas like a fun childish game of irony,

seduction and spontaneous competition. Visually bricolage, puzzles and colour blocks, random stripes

and zig-zag combinations are great for surface pattern. The fabrics have a silky aspect, cupro blends,

with light and structured bases, chintzing and mercerizing. Continuing the playful seduction theme

you might include a boudoir atmosphere featuring the frivolous and the innocently sexy, with peek-aboo

effects, satin ribbons on tulle, stocking knits with nude tiger stripes, ombre Chantilly lace and

anatomic pin-tucks in guepiere mood. But fun is also sport; sailor symbols, overprinted anchor motifs,

stripes, rainbow tints for oilcloth, stretch terry, loose and tight fishnet, wet-effect lamination, abyss

scenes and coral type encrustations. Completing this playful atmosphere are the accessories; borders

with heat-transfer pieces, screen prints on satin ribbon covered with dotted tulle, passementerie with

cord and tubular braiding knots, nautical stripes on ribbons.

Experiments with Oil, Watercolour & Nail Varnish

These are a few oil mixing experiments using water colours and nail varnish, I wanted to create a magical feel firstly I picked the colours from my palette and mixed them with water and oil, I then poured the mixture onto my sketchbook page and blew over the wet oil. I successfully created the details of a butterfly as the colours of my pallette developed I gain new colours.

Knitted Bollard Covers

I came across some unusual knitted bollard covers in different colours on Angel Meddow, Manchester, these were good random finds relating to my summer brief. I love the idea that people can create pieces of craft in an urban surrounding and how these pieces are thoughtful in a sense making people happy when they see them. A few days later, I went back and the knitted covers had gone, it was quite sad that either people had nicked them or ruined them, or were they taken down?

Further Development Work Exploring Bleach.

After I created the first bleach experiments of butterflies, I wanted to develop them further. I tried to add more texture to the photographs using different ways of creating surface images of flowers. I wanted to create something that was different but still linked with my Urban Fauna and floral theme, so to create these experiments, I lightly covered my images again in bleach then washed it off I then dripped more bleach over the image again, then I washed the image and was left with different coloured drips and marks, adding more texture. I scratched onto the images with a fork I then noticed that a yellow colour was coming through which I really liked the look of. I think these two photographs are the best pieces of my work and I am starting to really enjoy experimenting with different houshold chemicals.

Experiments Using Bleach.

After looking at the artist Maria Mochnacz's work, I felt inspired to experiment with some spare photographs I had left from the pack of preliminary studies developed in the summer. I thought this would be a good chance to experiment with different things so I thought I would experiment with bleach, for these images I used a house hold thick bleach and cream cleaner to get the effects that I created, I used different techniques such as: dripping, scratching, rubbing and washing. I felt the most successful ones were the scratched ones because when I scratched hard into the photograph, different colours started to appear such as: deep oranges, purple, light pink and blue. I felt this worked well on the image I had taken of the detailing of a tree. I scratched again and then poured bleach over the top, this made the photographs feel heavy, which made the bleach run. When this happened I noticed the colours started to run into each other creating further colours,

which I think looked quite exciting. My other experiment that worked very well was a photograph of a butterfly, but this time I used a dripping technique. For this I stood up from a distance and then using a big brush dripped bleach over the butter fly then scratched out some detailing out of the background. I think that sometimes the bleach was a bit heavy and took out some area's of my photographs which was something i wasn't keen on, I think if I was to experiment more with different photographs i maybe be able to get a lot more different textures and details.

Love Anna James

I was browsing the internet when i came across an Love Anna James, Anna James transforms twentieth century designs into quirky pieces of twentieth century furniture into quirky pieces of contemporary art. Each piece is restored by Anna before she creates hand painted designs. I love that her pieces are different and unique, i don't think i have seen anything like these pieces before, I enjoy the fact that she puts a modern twist on old interior. I am not a big fan of Interior fashion but I have felt inspired by these pieces I love the creativity that are in these beautiful pieces.