Couldn't bring myself to blog yesterday, it was a very sad day with not very good news. At last the medics have got to the bottom of mum's heavy nose bleeds. She has a tumour at the back of her nose, a very very rare type of tumour apparently, a plasmacytoma. Its a condition that arises when the body makes too many plasma cells, normally a carcinogenic procedure. These tumours are usually found in the bone marrow but do, occasionally but rarely, occur elsewhere in the body. Primarily they are found in the tonsils and behind the nose. The underlying cause of these is Myeloma, malignant tumour of the bone marrow. She's undergone a full skeletal xrays and lots of blood tests and has to go back for more on Monday and to see the Haematologist. If, as we all hope, there are no other tumours and her blood tests come back clear for myeloma, then they will excise the tumour and that should be that. However they weren't terribly optimistic about this. We should get some answers next week and will take it a day at a time. If it is myeloma then chemotherapy and radiotherapy would be the way forward. However, Mum's 92 and very frail, these last few months have really taken it out of her, the family feel she'll refuse and I doubt she could cope with that sort of regime. Keep your fingers crossed there's only the one tumour.

In the meantime to keep myself occupied I've made some cards from the fabric I painted, stamped and stencilled to death at Ushaw. The first two are part of a stencil with 8 lozenge shapes and it was intended that we use different embroidery stitches and keep it as a sample. I'm not a sampler type person and got fed up after I'd filled in six. So I overprinted the lozenges with paper I'd transfer painted some time back then cut them up into card sized pieces and sewed running stitch backgrounds.
This bottom card was a piece of monoprinted fabric but I was a bit heavy handed with the paint and it's rather densely painted. I overstamped with with some flower shapes and embroidered and beaded them.

The May speaker at our local EG branch has overcommited herself and withdrawn so I've been asked to come and talk about some of the fabric postcards I've sent and received. I thought I'd take these three along also to show people they can make cards from workshop samples rather than throw them in the drawer.

Now I have to go and continue making something from the workshop pieces I brought back from Ushaw.