Cabin fever

So often my children force me to do things I would have never believed possible. This week being chicken pox week number two, I am again under house arrest for more time than I feel comfortable with, for the second time in three weeks. I am having fantasies about driving off into the sunset with music blaring, and of getting some fresh air and exercise (it must be bad, I don't often hanker after getting out of breath!). But enough about me, Spotty Boy has been really very unwell and has done the full range of upset, from downright whiny, to screaming out loud, to slumped in front of television for hours, to a profundity seldom seen in a crying seven-year-old in the middle of the night: "The world is so huge and I am so so so small...".

The confinement has had its bonuses: lots of tidying time, not a stitch of washing left in the dirty washing basket, ironing done and I've managed to do a little bit of felting. The aim was to do a couple of smaller cheaper items for North Somerset Arts Week that I might try to sell unframed. I went back to my favourite subject matter (maybe wishful thinking, I could do with being by the sea):-

The next day I was deliberating whether or not I should get a ruler and rotary cutter and crop them into rectangles when I realised that they have both unintentionally turned into perfect squares, if you were to trim off the frilly bits round the edges. One is 23cm square, the other 20cm. I found it out when I was playing around with an old 25cm Ikea box frame that fitted the bigger one perfectly. And actually not having a mount made the frame look like a cute little window, almost a porthole. It looked great! The old frame looked too tatty (and too Ikea) so I have ordered some new box frames, one in a deep blue for the top one, one in white for the other, and another teeny long thin white one for one more sea scene (in almost bookmark dimensions) I did a while ago. A bit of stitching on the waves and maybe beading and we will have three simple little framed pieces that I know I will be really pleased with, and that I won't have to put a big price on. I am now considering two things:

• If I could lay my hands on a cheap secondhand round porthole mirror, could I open it out, take out the mirror and pop a felted sea and sky inside instead?
• If I did another sea scene and got a deeper box frame, could I put the sea scene at the back and put a few real pebbles in the foreground, as if on the beach? Obviously it would only work when hung on a wall, and could be horribly rattly in transit (and possibly damage the frame or glazing). Would that look good or just cheesy? I have spent too long at home in the company of a sickly seven-year-old, and might just have lost the plot a tiny bit with this one.

So much for making something unframed...