Inch by Inch Textiles

Why this shopping bag was a dumb idea...

2012-01-16T13:27:00.002+11:00

Remember back here and here in 2009, when I was weaving plastic to make a shopping bag? I did say at the time it was "like a crazy woman" and indeed, it was.

First, here's the reason why I'm talking about this project again. I finally added handles to the bag and sewed down the top hem.

Such a small thing, but there are Reasons why this project has languished for more than two years.

First, the details. I decided to use the same yarn for the handles, so I wove the straps using pencil weaving. Some people call this finger weaving, but it gets confused a lot with finger knitting, which is basically crochet without a hook. Pencil weaving is an actual woven process and it's incredibly easy to manage. Unlike inkle loom weaving, it doesn't require anything that you don't already have in your house.

I tied about a dozen strands of yarn about 60cm long to my pencil. You can butterfly or tie up the loose ends until you need then, and that stops you getting tangled up as you go along. You need to use an even number of strands, and for this reason, a lot of instructions suggest cutting double lengths and attaching them to the pencil with a clove hitch in the centre of the length. Take the first strand on the right and weave it under and over the adjacent strands until you reach the other side. Repeat this process. As you go, you'll realise that the pencil is actually on the diagonal. Keep weaving until your strand is long enough or you run out of yarn. Tie all the strands together firmly, with an overhand knot. Slide the loops from the pencil and tie an overhand knot at that end.

You can make all different patterns using this method, just as you can with inkle loom weaving. I knew my weaving would be folded over, so there wasn't a lot of point in making complex patterns that wouldn't be visible. Here are the woven straps:

The handles I wove had one problem. As it's a diagonal weave, the handles stretched when I put tension on them. That's not entirely desirable in a handle on a bag that will hold heavy stuff, like shopping, so I knew I had to back them or support them in some way. I took some cord straps that I'd saved from another shopping bag. They were rather like short shoe laces. I machine stitched across the ends of the weaving, so it wouldn't unravel, folded the finger weaving around the cords and stitched it in place with blanket stitch, using the same yarn as the weaving.

Then I machine stitched the handles to the inside of the bag, at the same time as sewing the top hem down. Then I hand stitched both sides of the handles to the bag, for extra strength.

OK, so why was this a dumb idea?

Well, this kind of weaving works just fine with supermarket bags, which are soft and a little stretchy. The green plastic from cherry packaging that I used in one layer of the weaving worked fine, as it was soft and made a good woven fabric with the yarn warp. The other plastic, from the shopping bags from chain stores that we don't tend to reuse as bags, were too stiff to weave nicely and had incredibly sharp edges, when cut.

The result was a weave that doesn't have much structural integrity. Oh, and hands ripped to ribbons by the sharp edges! They really aren't suitable for this kind of project, which is frustrating. Part of the purpose of the project was to reuse plastic materials like this that normally get thrown out and this clearly isn't the way to do that.

I went ahead and assembled the bag anyway, but I probably ought to have stitched the weaving to the lining and then made the bag, as the lining is the main thing giving the bag some strength. I suspect that the plastic will cut the yarn warp threads fairly quickly, once the bag starts being used. I've already mentioned the stretchy handles, though that was easy to remedy and used other recycled materials. But I wouldn't say the bag is a huge success. So it languished in my workroom for all this time, since it hardly seemed worthwhile finishing it. It's finished because I just want to clear stuff like this out of my workroom, and out of my head!

However, it is finished.

Printing, dyeing, painting...

2011-12-19T23:39:00.000+11:00

... and all that lovely fun stuff! That's what I've been doing lately.

I'm really quite enamoured of the breakdown screen printing process. I've set up and printed several screens now and I have some really interesting fabric to show for it.

This one has been printed twice, and also been painted with the dye paints.

This one was printed with the screen after being used to exhaust the dye in an earlier screen, once most of the texture had disappeared. So it had a pink background, and some of the dye on that has acted as a resist to the second print.

For some reason this piece of fabric is narrower at one end than the other - it isn't just my poor photograph!

In this session, I was interested in finding ways to break up the very obvious rectangle of each screen print. I printed with and drizzled over some black dye paint, and I also used a sponge brush to blend some of the hard edges. Dye paint behaves quite differently from fabric paints on fabric and the results seem to be less predictable.

I've also been doing some Eco-dyeing, as dyeing with natural materials seems to be called these days. The results were quite variable, but I did create some gorgeous scarves.

I wrapped celery leaves and grevillea leaves in this silk piece and boiled it in a bucket with Ironbark bark and ferrous sulphate. The photo really doesn't do it justice. I've already hemmed it and it's in my scarf box, waiting for scarf weather.

Here's another dyed with beetroot.

This one is a pink-beige and is absolutely divine too. I have give a couple of others to friends for Christmas, and I have another two that really were nothing much and need to be added to another dye bath to liven them up.

I also made a cover for my handbag sketchbook. I've needed one for a long time, because I tend to throw important pieces of paper into the covers, and it's always falling open in my bag. I wanted something unfussy, not embellished, because embellishments would only get knocked around in my bag, and it had to have a fastener to keep it closed and inside pockets to hold all the essential pieces of paper.

The fabric was sun-printed back in Feb 2009, using paper cut-outs of daisies and clear plastic cups. I painted the flowers with Setacolor paints, making them look more like sunflowers. I'm very happy with how it worked out.

At present, I'm knitting, since it's been so unseasonably cool. I have sewn together my Highland cardigan from last winter and I'm knitting the front band. If it stays cool, I'll do the same for the arty striped cardigan, even though it's a little too warm to be wearing them. It's not quite that cold this summer!

More soon!

A long time between drinks!

2011-11-23T23:42:00.000+11:00

Anyone checking my blog would think I've been entirely uncreative since August. Not entirely so - I've been managing the Fibrecircle blog, the SCQuilters blog and a whole lot of other stuff, mostly for ATASDA, but I have managed to squeeze in tiny bits of creative stuff into my life as well.

Of course, I did a stack of knitting. I have two cardigans ready to block for sewing together, but they don't look terribly exciting as they are, so photos will have to wait. I don't know why I put off blocking - maybe because sewing knitting together is my least favourite job in all the world? One is my blue cardigan, knitted from Bendigo Highland yarn, which I just love. The other is my "arty cardy". Whenever I do anything for ATASDA, someone seems to tell me, "dress arty". I delight in making textile art, and I delight in making my own garments, but, no disrespect to others who feel differently, I just don't "dress arty". Fancy dress is torture for me, and while I can see that looking the part is important if you're out there selling work, it just isn't me. So I have made myself a striped knitted jacket for "arty" occasions. By my arty friends' standards, it's tame but it will have to be enough for me. Yes, there will be photos... though probably not showing me wearing it.

What else? Oh yes, the Forest piece I was talking about last time. I showed what the painted cloth looked like once I'd drawn and painted and generally played with it. It needed some contrast fabric for the bag so, naturally, I painted some. I mixed some grey-browns on my palette and slapped them onto cream quilters' muslin, deliberately making it streaky. I added in a few strokes of black, while everything was still wet, to add some depth. Once it was dry, I drew lines on it to make it look somewhat like bark. Here's a detail shot of how it looked:

You need the detail shot because it's hard to see the textured pattern in a photo of the whole piece. I used the bark fabric to make the top and handles of the bag, with the forest fabric as the body.

I wanted to keep the forest fabric whole, but I also think no bag is compete without an outside pocket. So I made a welt pocket with a zipper for the top of the outside pocket - it's there but it's hardly visible.

Here's the finished bag:

It has everything a bag should have. Four inside pockets with elasticised tops, for keys, wallet, phone, etc. That essential outside pocket. Long enough straps that I can sling it over my shoulder easily. It has one tiny drawback - that it doesn't take an A5 sketchbook as comfortably as I'd like, though it does fit in. My current bag is just that bit bigger, and I've got spoilt. This one is probably better for my back, since I'm not tempted to toss in the kitchen sink...

I also did some more block printing and stamping. I love making stamps and I love playing around with them. I made a couple of new stamps recently and have played around with them, to see how they work with my other stamps.

These ones are from designs I've drawn in my sketchbooks over the years, which I've now drawn (sorry)together into my Lost Treasures book. The upper one is from a sketch I made at the Arts of Islam exhibition at the NSW Art Gallery a few years back; the lower one from a sketch at another exhibition at the Gallery, of Chinese art. See how it pays to take a sketchbook with you?

I did some sample prints:

You can see a few of my stamps from back in May crept in to make secondary patterns. I was experimenting for another project I was working on, for Fibrecircle, on the theme Geometric. It hasn't quite worked out the way I planned, but so far it looks like this:

Basically, it's a little pot, using the stamps as decorative motifs. It was going to be a dice pot for my daughter, who's a keen gamer, but I haven't quite worked out a satisfactory lid for it yet - one that will keep the dice firmly inside between games. But it's a cute prototype.

The block printing was basically adding another layer to some of my paint rags. I had one that I'd used for playing with resists that looked very dark:

I stamped over it using white Permaset Supercover, which, as you'd guess, is very opaque printing ink. I used several of my stamps, plus a piece of window screen to give a gentle overall texture.

It may not look brilliant in the photo but the white has really give it some wow factor. I'm thinking it may be a journal cover when it grows up.

The other fun thing I've done lately is some breakdown printing. It's a fascinating process, in which you paint thickened dyes in patterns onto a screen, allow it to dry and then print using the same medium. The medium gradually breaks down the dried dye paint on the screen, with thicker areas acting as a resist. It yields these beautiful complex prints, related to one another but not quite the same.

I don't think I'm anywhere near done exploring this technique yet.

I've also made these quilt blocks:

and these:

(actually I've made 26 of these ones now), so I've not been entirely idle, have I?

Painting fabric

2011-08-02T17:34:00.000+10:00

One of the great pleasures of my life is painting on fabric. It's really a Zen kind of thing to do! You become totally absorbed in the pretty things you're making, and before you know it, time has flown past and you discover you should have been somewhere else half an hour ago. It's also surprisingly quick to do, if you only have a short time available, assuming you remember to set a timer a little while before you need to stop! Finishing that last little bit and washing everything up does take extra time.

My favourite way of painting is making paint rags. OK, so maybe they aren't always strictly speaking paint rags, but the best way I know to start a creative work is to browse my paint rag collection.

For example, Fibrecircle's latest challenge is Forest. Actually, it's my challenge choice and I chose it because I thought it was easy! We've had a few that were fairly challenging, and everyone moaned. But perhaps, with challenge themes, it's necessary to moan about it a bit before getting started, because that's what everyone did about this one, too. I didn't have a plan when I picked the theme, though I did discover, once I went to visit the paint rag folders, that several had been earmarked, at some vague date in the past, for a Forest series. And when I used Forest as a subject tag here, all these other Forest works came up. Is it clever to work in a series and not even realise it, or does it just show a lack of imagination?

Anyway, I thought I'd share something of the process of making something with my paint rags, to encourage other people to have a go at painting on fabric. So here's my personal "how to paint on fabrics".

First of all, I had some neutral-coloured quilters muslin, which I'd pre-washed. I like quilters muslin to paint on, because it has a fairly high thread count, without being stiff or heavy. That means that my painted fabric can be used in all different ways, in garments, quilts, handbags, wall art and so on, so I'm not limiting myself too much at the outset. It also comes in 150cm width, which makes it economical and useful on a larger scale. You can also use homespun or broadcloth, although I'm not keen on the extra thickness and occasional nubs in the cloth, and mostly it's only 115cm wide. The important thing, with whatever fabric you use, is to wash it thoroughly first to remove any sizing. Most fabrics have been treated with something to make them less likely to crush and crumple while they're being displayed, and some will still have products, like formaldehyde, left over from the printing process.

My piece of cloth was used initially as a paint rag, to clean up after another painting session. It might sound weird to use good cloth for paint rags, but how often have you seem a wonderful pattern on a paint rag, but the cloth is old sheet or shirting or a worn tea towel or some other fabric that isn't suitable for your purpose? Anyway, here's what my fabric looked like after its first few uses as a paint rag:

OK, pretty boring, right? It's been used at least twice as a paint mop-up rag (see the stronger opaque red over the top of the blue?). The pink-beige colour is probably left over transparent paint from another later project, which has been washed over it to cut back the cream background. It was around in that incarnation for a while, until I decided to add some line, to help it on its way.

I used a mixture of Sharpie and Pigma pens. I started out drawing along lines of high contrast, like around the red and yellow areas and the dark browns. Then I could see there were elements of a forest scene emerging (OK, I admit it, my brain is fixated on forests. So there. ....How weird, several kookaburras just started laughing loudly in my backyard. Dead set. So maybe I am being subliminally influenced by birds?) Anyway, I drew other lines to try to encourage that effect, and stopped when I'd had enough.

Then it sat in my folder for a while longer, until this challenge came up. I mined the folders for ideas and this one leapt out, probably because it was further advanced than anything else and I'm basically lazy. I hauled out my Setacolor paints again.

An aside about paints. You can use a lot of things on fabric and get good, fast effects. Fastness means the way it will stay on the fabric, and there are two main aspects, wash fastness and light fastness, though there are other issues (crocking or rubbing, fastness to perspiration and so on). Wash fastness means it won't wash out the first time you wet it and will tend to stay put over repeated washings; light fastness means you don't have to keep it in a dark cupboard to make sure the colour stays put *over a reasonable period of time*. The *reasonable period of time* can be quite variable for commercial fabrics, and may mean just a few trips through the washing machine or visits to the great outdoors. And wash fastness and light fastness are separate issues, as being fast in one way does not automatically means it will be fast in the other. But I digress. In short, you want to use products that have a reasonable likelihood of staying on your work, long enough for people to enjoy it.

Ordinary acrylic paints actually have quite good wash fastness, as anyone who's ever tried to get paint of their clothes will tell you! But, if you want to use up those acrylic paints you have lying around, it's safer to add the same brand fabric additive, to ensure the medium is going to stay where you put it, even if the work goes through the washing machine. I never know what my rags will be used for, so I tend to err on the side of caution.

Specialist fabric paints are really the best, though. They have come a long way since they turned everything you painted into cardboard. I personally like Setacolor, made by Pebeo, because the painted fabric has a nice hand, they last well without going gluggy, they mix well, come in transparent, opaque and metallic, and I can buy them easily, in person and online. I'm also partial to Lumiere paints from Jacquard, because they have a fabulous range of metallic ones that are different to the Setacolors, and they have lovely dense coverage over all manner of sins. But they are more expensive than Setacolor, so I tend to focus on the ones that are different to Setacolor's range. For screen printing and stamping, I like Permaset, since it's water soluble until it cures and is heat set, making clean-up a doddle. But there are many other products around. The best way to decide which you like the best is to try out a few different ones and see what appeals to you.

The essential thing to know about fabric paints is that they are usually heat-set. That means they are not necessarily wash-fast on your fabric, unless you heat them to the specifications listed on the product. Usually a few minutes of ironing is all you need. Fabric paints will air-cure over time, but it's best not to rely on it.

OK, back to our Forest piece. I decided it needed some areas to be enhanced to make it really forest-like. So I painted some areas in green.

OK, that's a lie already. I painted it in many greens. Basically, I put red, blue and yellow transparent paint on my palette and mixed different greens as I went along. "Red?" you say. "But isn't green made from blue and yellow?" Well, yes and no. Try it sometime. Take equal amounts of standard mid-range blue and yellow and mix them into a green. OK, that's definitely green. Now take a little bit of red and mix it in. Is it still green? Usually, the answer would be yes, a slightly browny green but still green. You can add a surprising amount of red to your 50/50 green before it become a definite brown. Remember how red, blue and yellow mixed together make brown? Yeah, I figured you knew that one, because murky brown is the easiest colour of all to mix!

I also wanted to add some strong browns to my forest. Forests are not all green, least of all Australian forests, which can be surprisingly colourful. That wasn't my only reason, though. One thing guaranteed to make your painted fabric look blah is to have everything in a medium value/tone. Tone is generally an undervalued thing in the textile world. Quilters call it Value, because, hey, we've got to be different. If you look at a quilt with real wow factor, usually it has some strong tonal contrasts happening. Some areas are light and some are dark. Tone is always relative, so your darks don't have to be really strong or your lights equivalent to white. But, just as in a quilt, you need some of that contrast to give the painted fabric life. You probably can't see them in the photo, but this fabric also has a few tiny areas of bright white, which add a little zing and stop it all falling into medium tone.

The browns I mixed for this fabric tended towards blue a little, because I wanted them to be mostly greyed and muted, in keeping with the palette that was there. I didn't want my forest to be autumnal. There are a few very small areas of red-brown, again, to add a bit of zing.

When I finished, I used up the rest of my paints on the palette on these paint rags:

and this was the clean-up rag:

Yes, I've noticed that I generate more paint rags than I use! Actually, this project is also using up a couple of other paint rags from the folders, so I don't actually get smothered by pieces of cloth.

All these paints are transparent. That doesn't really mean you can see through them; it means that when you paint them over the top of another colour, the result will be a different colour to the one you painted with. So if you paint transparent yellow over blue, you won't get yellow, you'll get a greenish-yellow. I really like using transparent paints for this kind of purpose, because it results in very interesting, complex pieces of cloth. Sometimes, when I'm doing a final paint, as for this Forest piece, I would use opaque paints instead, because it would really matter what colour I ended up with. I'd want my yellow to stay yellow, no matter what was underneath. In this context, it didn't, and having the paint change colour according to the underneath colour actually added something to the forest scene, since things in nature are never just one colour. It's something worth experimenting with, because, after all, you can always overpaint with opaque paint if you don't like the result!
More about Forest soon...

Treasures

2011-07-25T18:59:00.000+10:00

I've been too busy and too crook to blog much lately. I have managed to achieve a few things, though.
I finished my Lost Treasures journal cover for the Fibrecircle challenge. It seemed to be one of those projects that generated interruptions. As soon as I would begin work, the phone or doorbell would ring and that would be that! But now it's finished and I'm very happy with it.

I've also been knitting madly. No photos yet, but I have finished knitting my daughter a duffle cost, and I've almost finished blocking it, which seems to have taken as long as the knitting! Once I do that, I can sew it together and take a photo before I give it to her. I've also almost finished my long cardigan in Bendigo Woollen Mills' Highland yarn. Just have to finish the second front and the back. I was knitting them in tandem to be sure I had enough yarn. I seem to have had plenty, even though it's quite a long cardigan.

I've also made some postcards:

Major work, it isn't, bit it's enough for now!

Treasures

2011-05-25T17:02:00.007+10:00

Over the weekend, I was storing up treasures. Not actual treasures, but some little things to add to my Lost Treasures journal cover. I originally made a couple of coins from two layers of fabric, joined with fusible web and edges with satin stitch. They looked vaguely coin-like, in the sense that flat round things with a firm edge might be called that! They were not really as luscious and rich and desirable as I wanted.

So I decided to try making some treasures with my hot glue gun. I laid baking paper over a wooden board (my silicon sheet would have been better for this) and started melting hot glue onto the paper. One word of caution: when people say "well-ventilated area", they clearly mean right outside in the open air. Using my glue gun in my workroom, with windows open and venting fan going, is clearly not well-ventilated enough! I truly felt not quite the thing after doing a really small amount of glue melting. I know I'm a canary-down-the-mine kind of person, but be warned.

My aim was to make various shapes, coins, jewels, chains and free-form objects, that I could later paint as treasures to add to my journal cover. The chains were a series of c-shapes added to an initial circle, rather than individual links, since I just wanted the general effect. The jewels were variations of a basic blob, since there's no way I'm going to get anything faceted from a glue gun. The glue coins were circles of glue with some inner fill, leaving lots of gaps and holes. The others were just little bits of pattern.
Most things I read suggested that hot glue gun elements can be painted with acrylic or Lumiere paints, once they're cool. While mine would take both Setacolor and Lumiere, I wasn't really happy with the way the paints went on, and I felt they might easily rub off with handling, such as on a journal cover. So I coloured the treasures in with Sharpie pens, which will write on pretty much anything. That gave me a good base to paint on. I could have tried Gesso, but the pens were handy. Alcohol inks would probably work too, since they seem to go on anything.

Here are my treasures, once they were coloured in with Sharpie. The gold one has been over painted with Setacolor Shimmer Gold (because it was handy and it's a nice gold colour). Some treasures are hard to see because they are the clear material of the glue.

The white on the fabric coins is Setacolor Expandable Paint medium. I decided to add some of that, paint it and then heat it, to give the coins some heft. However, the bottle I grabbed was the old one that has gone a little cheesy over time. I kept it because it gives really interesting lumpy, serious-case-of-mumps effects. You can see this in the next photo. All the shapes have been painted with a couple of coats of either Setacolor Shimmer Gold or Lumiere Pink-Gold.

I felt the shapes, especially the gold ones, were too plastic and extruded-looking, to look like something that is cast. So I added some of the new bottle of Expandable Paint medium, with a paintbrush. Using a bristle brush gave me patterns and texture in the way the medium went on, which gave the coins a sort worn texture, the kind that old coins have. I wanted that worn die-cast effect so I was happy about that!

I decided to make some more coins, and since the fabric ones hadn't been heavy enough, I cut circles from a medium weight card. For those pedantic enough to want details, it's actually the card that comes inside boxes of tea-bags, holding the rows in place. I love these little cards! Perfect for throw-away scrapers for glue and other media, sometimes big enough to be the basis of a bookmark, and easy to cut for little projects like this, that need a little bit of robust card. I painted the circles with the Expandable Paint medium, and marked ridges around the edges with an ice-cream stick. I had to do this to both sides of the card and fabric coins, to prevent curling when the medium expanded. Once they were thoroughly dry, I painted them all with Setacolor or Lumiere paint. A short zap with the heat gun, and I had some significantly thicker coins and jewels. The white medium showed through a little once it expanded, so I added a little more paint in places and gave them all a rub with Treasure Gold. And here they are:

The three coins on the left are the cardboard ones, the large ones in the right hand row are the fabric ones, and the little ones are made just from the glue gun, with Expandable Paint medium used to fill in the gaps. The chains looks surprisingly chain-like. I don't think I'll use the flower on this project; it was just me trying to get my hand loose to make the chains. When I laid them all out on the journal cover like a pile of treasure, it looks very much as I imagined. I plan to dangle the two fabric ones from the gold D-ring clasp with a couple of gold jump rings.

One thing I was going to try, if the coins still looked too flat, was stamping with the Expandable Paint medium. A few weeks ago, I had a stamp-carving frenzy. I love handmade stamps and I always keep some materials to make stamps on hand. At present, I'm mostly using those large erasers that you find in Dollar stores and the many Chinese shops near where I live. At 5in x 2 1/2in, they are a good size for most stamps, and the medium cuts easily and doesn't tend to crumble. These are the stamps I made recently:

I stamped them into my journal, so you can see what they look like. As you can see there are quite a few round ones, because I knew I would need coins and jewels for the journal cover. I also like to do positive-negative stamps, because they are so useful. I carved the top left hand one especially with these coins in mind. It has a tiny skull and crossbones. That's what I say it is, even though two different people have complimented me on doing such a good cow's head! I can only suggest that they obviously haven't looked closely at a cow lately.

A friend told me that, if you use the unmounted rubber stamps, you can actually stamp into the hot glue shapes before they cool down. That might require an extra pair of hands, though I suppose you could reheat a cooled one with the stamp at the ready. She says they must be unmounted, because they have to be flexible to come off the glue blob, once the glue is dry. But I notice that The Craft Curmudgeon on this forum recommends using any rubber stamp and putting the blob and stamp in the fridge or freezer to set. Some people also seem to recommend inking the stamp first, which they suggest makes it less likely to stick permanently to the glue; other say to brush it lightly with vegetable oil first. This suggests you should experiment with your least-loved stamps!

More knitting

2011-05-24T17:29:00.000+10:00

Here's a photo of The Coat so far. It's really been easy peasy, once I realised that the cables didn't do anything fancy where they crossed. I wanted them to do a clever over-under interlock, and of course, they don't. I could have made them do it, but I was worried I'd get distracted and forget I'd changed the pattern, if this really does take me two seasons to knit. Anyone living in northern climes might wonder about knitting being seasonal. I know the Yarn Harlot would be astonished to learn that there are places in the world where you Just Can't Knit, sometimes. I suspect she might want to come down here and prove me wrong. But I defy even her declared ~~capacity~~ ~~for~~ ~~self~~ ~~delusion~~ enthusiasm for knitting to cope with Sydney in February! Not even to make a sock.

I also mentioned the one I'm making myself in Skye, from the Bendigo Heather range. I took a photo from the sleeves I've knitted, so you can see how gorgeously flecky it is. I'm tempted to buy some of the few colours they have left, before it disappears completely.

But then again, there's the whole vexed issue of storage. And how I'm trying to get things out of my workroom, instead of bringing new things in.

Speaking of getting things out, I am also slowly making a knitted scarf from leftover wool. The pattern, to the extent that one need a pattern, is also from an Interweave free download, Knitting Scarf Patterns from Spin-Off, called Spontaneous Knitting by Charlene Anderson-Shea. The idea of knitting scarves lengthwise using different colours of leftover yarn is not new, by any means. I was doing that when I was a teenager! What is clever is the idea of using moss stitch (she calls it seed stitch), which, when you do it in different colours each row, results in a line of what looks like running stitches along the scarf in each colour. You can see it here if you go down to Page 8. It almost looks woven. I've done about a dozen rows and am liking it just fine. I'll post a photo when I've done enough to look like more than a frill.

Two steps forward..

2011-05-22T17:22:00.002+10:00

...and one back, or is it the other way around? Either way, I can't say that the past weeks have been hugely productive of wonderful creative things.

First there was the knitting. Whenever the weather turns cold, my thoughts turn to what I can knit this year. I cunningly bought some gorgeous yarn last year from Bendigo Woollen Mills. It was from a range called Highlands, which they have almost sold out now, so I guess other people loved it as much as I did. The shade I bought is called Skye and is, unsurprisingly, blue. It has little brown and white flecks in it, and I was a little dubious, since brown flecks sometimes just look like you've been through hedges and ditches recently. But no, it seems to be knitting up beautifully. Two sleeves are done. I always begin with the sleeves, since I find them so boring at the end. So far, so good, you say.

But they have been tenderly laid aside, probably until next winter, or maybe the one afterwards, while I tackle The Coat. My dearest daughter (I only have the one) has been complaining for some time of the sheer impossibility of finding a knitted 100% wool coat to replace her treasured and aging one. So I am making her one. Of course, this is the very year when the Fashion Gods have decreed that hand-knitted look-alikes in wool are so terribly cutting edge and, now I've begun, I've seen several of the very thing she wants just hanging innocently in shopping malls. (They look innocent, but really, they're smirking.) Of course, anything I make with my own two hands will naturally be superior to anything mass-produced, but I have a sneaking suspicion that, as the winter makes its presence felt, she will be tempted by those smirking imitations! The solution? Knit faster!

Fortunately, the pattern I'm knitting, the Aran Duffle Coat by Judith L. Swartz, from the Interweave free cardigan patterns download is thick and uses huge needles like crowbars. So it knits up fast. As long as you don't assume you know what the pattern is doing and have to pull out the first 10cm or so, because it isn't doing what you expected. If I have the teeniest complaint about the pattern, it's that is doesn't have a nice clear picture of the cable pattern. Oh wait, it does. Sigh. But now I've done.. ooh, a good 30cm of the back. She'll just have to wrap herself in a blanket for a few months.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to finish a challenge from Fibrecircle. Those who know me, and anyone who visits this blog more than once, will know that I'm not naturally friends with deadlines. So it will come as no surprise to learn that the due date for this challenge was the first week of May. Good grief, it's only a journal cover! But somehow it has been a huge, yes challenge, to get it finished. I can guarantee that, as soon as I start to think about it, the phone or the doorbell will ring. Guaranteed! While it's lovely to have contact with my friends (though, I admit, less lovely when it turn outs to be someone selling me their religion), I'd really like to get this done and out of my head!

The challenge was Lost Treasures. Here's where I got to last time I took a photo:

Exciting, non? But then it rearranged itself into this:

Better! It's almost finished now and looks like this:

The thing behind the title is an island. (Yes, for the one inevitable clever clogs out there, it *is* roughly shaped like Cyprus. Upside down. Cyprus always looks like an island that's going somewhere in a hurry.)

The fastening is a cheat, really. I wanted to use a lock and key and then I wondered just how useful my journal would be, if I had to unlock it every damn time I wanted to use it. I'm a lazy cow; I would grab another one rather than bother undoing something. So I thought about something with straps and a buckle. Nope, too lazy, and besides, I didn't have a buckle the right colour in my large stash of buckles, and I wanted to finish this sometime before I die. So I decided on D-rings. But hey, we're back to undoing and doing up again, aren't we? Well, no. It actually has a sneaky snap fastening underneath the whole thing, so the ties are just to allow some expansion as my journal gets into middle age. I couldn't show you the snaps, because my camera was so shocked at the cheat that it refused to give me a decent shot.

See these box things? One upon a time, I had a Plan to make something inspired by my friend's photos of his travels in China. There were all these lovely market shots so I started playing around with the shapes. After a while, I decided that it looked rubbish, so I chopped it into three pieces and threw the bits into my fabric file. Moral of this story, never thrown anything away. Then again, this might be why a visit to my workroom is fraught with danger of avalanche?

The map piece is on the back. I gave it rough white edges by painting over torn paper, and I cut the edges accordingly,so it looks a bit like it's torn from a larger map. It's attached with fusible web and stitched on with latitude and longitude lines. The fabric was a commercial one, but I painted it with transparent Setacolor paints to give it a bit more colour.

I just need to make some "jewels" and coins for it. I've been experimenting with the hot glue gun, although the shapes are, what's the word? Organic. To say the least. And they don't seem to take paint very well, though Lumieres seem to stick the best. My best result was colouring the shapes with Sharpie pens, which have the benefit of sticking to pretty much anything, and then painting over the top.Oh well, playing with media in my workroom does beat robbing banks, I suppose.

Progress!

2011-02-19T17:54:00.000+11:00

There's some progress to report on the tidying of the workroom, and quite a bit of progress on the orphan blocks quilt top. I now have twelve 12in blocks:

Looking good, isn't it? I'm amazed at how quickly they go together! I've started with the awkward sizes, 7 1/2in blocks and so on, and they are much quicker to make into 12in blocks than I'd ever imagined. I'm only working on them in the evenings, when I watch TV (not that often) and occasionally during the day. I still have a pile of 4in and 3in blocks to play with, as well as a number of the 6in blocks I pieced from 1 1/2in Half-Square Triangle units. You can see one of those in the bottom left hand corner. I added slightly oversize pink sashing triangles to two of them, to make them 8 1/2in finished, and then added the pieced border to this one. I am generally making them in pairs, so there is some continuity between the blocks. They'll probably have sashing between the blocks in the end.

The real challenge has been to keep it interesting. I got bored with piecing sashing for the 7 1/2in Nine Patches (top left and elsewhere) but I still have some of those blocks to use. I have a lot of different sized Log Cabin blocks too. Some may become a border, just as they are, but the odd-shaped ones need something to be added to them. Unless I get too bored.

I've cut out a couple more of the blue and white Bear's Paw blocks, for when that time comes! That's an old UFO, dating from 1998. The original blocks were a friendship swap from a group of quilters who were library staff at Kuring-gai Library, back when I was Turramurra Librarian. I think I received five or six in the swap and I've gradually made more over the years, so I now have 15, 14in blocks. It will be a quilt one day, and a lovely reminder of some very good people. Wonder how many more I need to make? I guess I should decide how big I want that quilt to be!

Summer mindless activity

2011-02-06T17:09:00.000+11:00

As I mentioned in my last post, summer is not a good time for me. This summer, my usual slothfulness has been exacerbated by my ongoing attempt to tidy and sort my workroom. I'm determined to jettison all that Stuff we collect, that isn't really what we like to do. I am not a polymer clay person, and I probably won't ever play with that material again, so why do I have a whole half shelf of a cupboard devoted to polymer clay materials? It might seem like good sense; if I ever do want to do things with polymer clay, I'll have everything I need. But what if I can't work efficiently at the things I like to do, because there just isn't space to put everything away neatly at the end, so I can work on something else? Keeping stuff I don't use becomes a whole lot like hoarding, doesn't it? I have friends who can use that Stuff, so it's going to leave my house.

Obviously, while my workroom is in turmoil and every surface is covered with Stuff, I can't really spend much time painting fabric or sewing on the machine. (Or even walking on the floor of the room).

So I did my annual audit of orphan blocks. Every quilter has them, I'm sure. Well, OK, there are those rare people who know exactly how many blocks they need for their quilt, and in exactly what colours they should be, and that's what they make, and every block is perfect. But I am not that sort of person. I start out making blocks and maybe one just isn't quite right. Then there's the times when, after mindlessly making a large number of blocks over many months, I suddenly think to count how many it is I actually need for the size of quilt I want to make and, oh dear, I seem to have a few extra. I've reflected on this phenomenon and it really dates from the time when I stopped making patterns out of quilting magazines and books, and started just choosing a block, deciding on the size and look I want, and simply starting. Most of the quilts I make these days use lots of different fabrics, even if it's in a limited colourway, because that's the look I like.

There's a sort of pattern emerging here, about disorganisation and a general lack of structure, that is completely at odds with my true character. No, honestly... I mean it. Truly...

Usually, my pattern with the orphans is to take them out of their carefully-sized packets, admire them, decide they are too good to toss or give away, think that none of them speak nicely enough to one another to be put together in a quilt for life, and put them back away again. But because this coincides with the whole ruthless-cleaning-of-studio thing, I tried a whole other approach. I took everything out of the carefully ordered-in-size envelopes, and put them into colourways. A red-blue-green-ivory colourway here, an autumn tones one there, some kiddy brights, a cream/beige-blue-pink colourway, a pretty floral one, and so on. I grabbed my boxes of different-sized half square triangle units and sorted them in the same way. And the leader-ender boxes. And, goodness me, I have enough orphans and their friends to make several quilts. Honestly, who'da thunk?

So I've decided the time has come. I've picked the largest packet - the red-blue-green-ivory one - and here's what I have. (I didn't bother to lay out all the 1 1/2in half square triangle units - life is just too short!) The blocks in the top left hand corner are 12in finished. I also have these half-square triangles from the leader-ender boxes, which aren't going to get sewn any time soon, since I can't reach the sewing machine.

I'm gradually hand piecing everything up to 6in or 12in units. I know I could assemble a quilt with the blocks as they are, by adding appropriate filler units as I go, but whenever I try to do that, I lose interest quickly. I have to think about that, and lay things out on the design wall (in the impossible studio) and rearrange them and think some more. That's all too hard and back it would go into the Orphan Blocks drawer. But working out how much to add to a bunch of 7 1/2in-finished blocks, to make then 12in- finished blocks - that I can do, in my current mindless state. Once I have a whole lot of 12in and 6in blocks, I will think about adding sashing, since that helps to give scrappy quilts some coherency. Baby steps, all the way. Did I mention I'm not big on planning out quilts, every step of the way?

Already, I've made these 12in and 6in finished blocks.

The 12in blocks are from the 7 1/2in ones you can see in the original photo, and the 6in are from 3in-finished four patches and the 1 1/2in HSTs I didn't bother to photograph. Actually, I've made a few more of the 12in blocks, but today has not been an ideal day for photography.

I've pulled out a few blocks and units from the pile with lights that are a bit too beige, and tossed them into the other cream-beige packet. I don't much care if some things don't get used - these are free quilt blocks, so to speak; I've already done the work on them. I also don't really care how far I get with this project before I have a tidy workroom or get bored with it. Whatever I do now makes this closer to a quilt, and that can't be bad!

Isn't this fun?

Not very creative!

2011-02-04T20:05:00.000+11:00

Not much happening in my textile life lately. January never is a peak time for me, creatively. I have been piecing quilt blocks but the interminable job of restructuring my workroom continues. I have made a lot of space, and have more things to toss and rearrange, which should allow me to work more efficiently in the space. Well, that's the plan! If only people wouldn't keep wanting to sleep in my spare bed, so loose stuff gets put back into the workroom again.

Still, it's February now, so I hope to get some more creativity flowing!

Early Christmas present

2010-12-18T22:46:00.001+11:00

My quilt group had its Christmas party last week, and we gave each other our Christmas presents. Since October 2009, we've been making each other quilt blocks in our chosen colours, every month. You may remember we did the same thing back in 2008? This time, Karen chose red and white blocks, Lorinda chose blue and yellow blocks, and Sharon asked for shabby chic Birds in the Air blocks. I chose batiks on dark blue so I received these 39 gorgeous blocks from the girls. Here's how they looked laid out on my floor:

They're sitting on the paper bags they came in, so you don't really see them at their best, but I don't see myself taking better photos this coming week, on account of there's some small religious holiday happening soon. They really do look brilliant, and I've made some more blocks along the way, to bring them up to a more useful number. I'm not sure how I'll set them yet, but I'm thinking they need more dark blue background, to make the colours really pop out. I haven't actually quilted the last one, so there's no rush!

Here are the blocks for the others:

Sharon's Shabby Chic Birds in the Air blocks

Lorinda's Blue and yellow blocks

Karen's red and white blocks

Don't they all look great? The amazing thing is that we so rarely use the same fabrics, even though we all tend to shop locally. I guess it shows how much choice we have in patchwork fabrics these days!

More fabric drawing

2010-10-25T21:10:00.000+11:00

I'm really enjoying drawing on fabric, even when I don't actually have a plan for what I've made. I have a large collection of paint rags, some painted or printed deliberately, some the by-product of painting sessions, but most a combination of the two. I trawled my folders today and found this piece:

It's a bit boring, but it's been hanging around since 2006, so I decided to use it for drawing today. Here's how it looks now:

You'd hardly recognise it as the same fabric, would you? I was planning to cut it apart but I actually like it as it is. Back into the fabric folder, I guess!

Another t-shirt

2010-10-25T20:44:00.001+11:00

I've been busy making things for the ATASDA Open Studio on 6th & 7th November. Here's another painted t-shirt. This one is inspired by my granddaughter Kate.

The Open Studio will be held at Epping Creative Centre, Dence Park, Epping, in Sydney, Australia. Lots of interesting work from talented textile artists - should be fun!

Aaah

2010-10-25T20:36:00.000+11:00

For one reason and another, Saturday was quite a stressful day for me.
When I got up on Sunday morning, this is what I found on the kitchen bench next to the newspaper:

Isn't that lovely? I guess he really is a keeper.

Wandering around Paris

2010-10-18T22:41:00.000+11:00

As I mentioned earlier, I spent a few weeks in France recently. I didn't especially go looking for textile-related things, but they seemed to find me, as they usually do.

One place we always visit in Paris is Hotel des Invalides. It's not so much that we have a passion for Napoleon's tomb, although that is pretty impressive. But the accompanying museum calls us back every time. It's the only museum I've ever visited which has medieval armour shoved casually into piles - here a stack of pikes, there some mail, over here a collection of helmets glaring fiercely at passers-by. And cannons of every description guard the central cloister. They do have more formal exhibition spaces too, of course, but the casualness of quantity grabs me every time. This time, we visited their excellent WWI and WWII exhibitions, which we'd previously missed. They have a chronological pathway you can follow, beginning with late nineteenth century exhibits, or you can amble about in your own order.

I was fascinated by the military uniforms. Many of them were surprisingly stylish for something that was essentially utilitarian. It's always hard to take good photos and most of my shots were for my own interest, but here's a page's uniform from the late 19th century.

All that work, so you had someone to fetch your drinks and take off your boots! The fact that armies had pages is itself an interesting comment on how warfare was waged in those far-off days.

And here is the embroidered traycloth for Marechal Petain's guards. Not, I gather, for the Marshall Himself but for the chaps detailed to look after him. The mind boggles.

We quilters know a lot about commemorative fabrics, but did you know there was fabric made commemorating the end of WWII? Here is a Victory dress, made in France just after peace was declared in Europe. I'm not sure if it was ever worn, and I can't somehow see it as the height of fashion, even in those times, but someone went to the trouble of making it.

Another place we go back to again and again is the Louvre. This museum is just the most brilliant place, and one of my favourite places in all the world. It's vitally important that you have A Plan when you go there, partly because it's huge, and partly because you can get sidetracked so easily from the things you wanted to see. Our plan this time was to have a third try at the Egyptian, Greek and Etruscan antiquities, which have been unavailable each time we've visited the Louvre. Just unlucky, I guess. This time we were in luck, and they were on display in the fullness of their glory. All of them. They have a lot. Many happy hours could be spent looking at them, more happy hours than we actually had, to do them justice. But we tried.

See this fabric? Ordinary looking, you think? A simple tabby weave linen, with a twisted fringe. It's from the 20th Dynasty in Egypt, so we're talking about 1100BCE. About three thousand years old. Pretty amazing for a medium that is generally considered ephemeral. I guess most of us who work in textiles are accustomed to the idea that what we make won't last forever and, let's face it, it's probably won't survive for three thousand years. This isn't the only example of Very Old Textiles in the Louvre - they have quite a lot of ancient Egyptian textiles.

Like this dress. It's very simple, but those lines across it are actually pleats, which I guess are what allows the wearer to put it on and to move once they have it on! This dress was discovered at Assyut, in middle Egypt, and dates to the Middle Kingdom. That's about 2055-1650BCE, so this garment is anything from three and a half to four thousand years old. The middle Egyptian excavation I went on (twenty years ago now!) found a similar dress, which was dated to the end of the Old Kingdom-early First Intermediate Period - so that's about twenty years older than the oldest date for this dress. Styles didn't change much, so Egyptian women were clearly not fashion victims, out in the boondocks of civilisation, anyway.

And then there's the jewellery. No, not the flashy gold stuff - this is more your everyday dress wear. These ones date to the Middle Kingdom - three and half to four thousand years old.

These ones are New Kingdom - three to three and a half thousand years old:

And this beautiful beaded curtain is positively new - it's from the Late Period, so only about two and a half thousand years old.

And all that was just the beginning of the trip. I may share more later...

Going all girly

2010-10-18T21:24:00.000+11:00

Last Saturday was Kambra Challenge day. I've mentioned this annual challenge here previously. We've been challenging each other for more than a decade now, and the results are always fascinating and unexpected.

I couldn't make the unveiling this year, which was a shame, because I really wanted to see what the others did with our challenge fabrics! They were eight dyed fat eighths from Lisa Walton at Dyed and Gone to Heaven:

Challenging fabrics, aren't they? They're so very... what's the word I want? Oh yes... pink.The challenge, from Donna, was to use these fabrics, plus a single print fabric. The group reactions were predictable - I don't think we've reacted with enthusiasm to any challenge yet! The problem was to avoid something really cloying.

However, the one group in the world that really loves pink is small girls, and I just happen to have one of those in my family. Granddaughter Kate is rarely seen without some pink about her person, so she seemed the logical person to receive my pink project. I wanted to make her something she would use, but I just didn't love the fabrics enough to make her a quilt. So a small project was needed.

It was quite hard to find a fabric that worked well with the pinks but wasn't too sickly. I didn't find any commercial fabrics I liked, so I decided to paint and print my own. I used Setacolor paints and an Indian woodblock.

And here's my project - one side:

...and the other:

Kinda cute, isn't it? I'm pretty sure she's going to love it.

If you want to see the other Kambra challenge works, they're over here on the Kambra Challenge blog.

Time to play

2010-10-12T18:09:00.002+11:00

Back home again, after a fantastic trip to France (of which more later). It's so terribly hard to get out of holiday mode, don't you find? I managed to wring a few more days out of my holiday but this week, my computer is reminding me of things I ought to do, and the usual activities that fill up my days are happening, so I can't really pretend any longer.

One of the things my computer is insistently reminding me about is the ATASDA Open Studio weekend, which will happen on November 7 & 8 at the Epping Creative Centre, Dence Park, Epping, where most of our meetings and workshops in NSW are held. The idea is for ATASDA members to showcase their work, which is not only different from more traditional kinds of textile work, but different from each other's work as well. Normally, this would just be a reminder to me to show up on the day, but in a fit of madness, Fibrecircle decided to take a table for both days, to show off our work and maybe even sell a few things. So I really need to make a few things, and maybe (gasp) finish a few things, so I can show people the kind of stuff I make.

So today, I drew and painted a kid's t-shirt. As you may have noticed, I'm rather interested in graffiti lately. (I must say I was disappointed in the Paris graffiti I saw - perhaps I just wasn't in the right places?) I've always been interested in layers - palimpsests on old documents, sgraffito work, walls with patterns marking traces of past occupancy - basically, traces of what went before and the interesting things that happen when you superimpose unrelated things. Graffiti is part of that interest, I guess, since graffiti artists seem to have no concern about what's already on a wall before they add their work, and even sometimes seem to incorporate it into their designs.

My graffiti designs are not that complex - they're time-consuming to draw and paint, and are much less layered than I'd really like. I think there's more to do with this idea, if I stay interested.

Anyway, here's the t-shirt.

It's a kid's size 4 and I'll probably be selling it and other stuff like it at the Open Studio weekend.

And there's going to be an election!

2010-08-14T21:16:00.000+10:00

News to you? Either you don't live in Australia or you've been living under a rock. (Is it a large rock? Can I come and join you?) I am so over this election campaign. I never thought to hear myself say this, as I've been interested in politics all my life, so I am shocked at myself.
But this is such a non-campaign. I've rarely heard so much said about so little.

I have another plan. How about every ballot paper, House of Reps and Senate, henceforth includes the option None Of The Above? If NOTA wins (as I suspect this time, it might), we hold another ballot in four weeks. But no-one currently in parliament is allowed to run again for at least five years.
No-one.
Yes, this does mean they can't run next time either.
Goodbye Tony.
Goodbye Julia.
Wayne and Joe, you're out too.
Sorry, Bob, you might have done better but the electorate didn't like you enough either. Maybe you could ponder what it means to run the country as well as saving the world?
Now, who is left that might just have an idea about where this country might go? There must be someone... (and no, Nick, it ain't you.)

And how about we change the way we do things? No more having weeks of, "will they call an election?", followed by two weeks of "yes we did, but we aren't campaigning yet", and then tarradiddle US-style Campaign Launches where every creaky ancient politician is dragged out of retirement to tell the wildly-applauding party faithful, and the omnipresent cameras, just how great the latest batch is. And then two weeks of being as nasty as possible to the others, without actually stating any policies that might distinguish one from another. No more. Hooray, I hear you say? But what would we have instead?

Nothing.
From the minute the PM steps out of the Governor General's office, no party may advertise.
No new policies may be launched to public fanfare (or, more likely, indifference).
Anyone kissing other people's babies in shopping malls will be arrested as a child molester. (Hey, anyone else would be!)
Any politician who holds a press conference about *anything* is immediately disqualified from running.
Let's see the politicians running *from* the cameras for a change. With a paper bag over their heads.
Let them sit quietly in parliament wondering if they've done enough.

Extreme? Not really.
Guys, if you didn't bother to tell us what you stood for before the election was called, we don't believe what you say you stand for, once it has been called. Sorry, but we just don't.
You've had your chance to show us what you stand for, what ideas you have, what vision you have for Australia, during the past three years. If you didn't bother, you don't deserve our vote.

Me, I just wish I could vote None of The Above.*

*Opinions authorised by Nola in Bennelong for the entertainment of regular readers

Now we return you to your normal viewing. Thank God for textiles!

Actually, I've been quite busy...

2010-08-14T19:45:00.002+10:00

... though much of it has been on real world stuff and not involving lovely textiles.

However, I have not been idle. I finished a jacket I've been knitting this winter, from yarn I bought at the Sydney Craft and Quilt Fair in 2009. OK, I know I didn't 'fess up to buying it back then, when I was crowing just a smidgen about how little I bought. But, in my defence, I did buy it at the very end of the last day I was at the show, after it had been calling to me all day. And since the Exotica stand was immediately opposite the Bendigo Woollen Mills stand and the tub of yarn was right where I could see it all day, I think it was just meant to be mine. And that's all I have to say about that.

The cable was down the front of a jacket on the cover of The Knitter, Issue 3. That jacket had other cables and was knitted in quite a different yarn. Why make it the same way as the pattern you actually really liked in the beginning? That would be obvious.

I'm not sure if it's a hard cable or I'm getting dumber (I do have my suspicions about that) but it took me several tries to get it right. I hate those cable patterns with weird deformed X's and Y's that all look the same. For some reason, I kept cabling back when I meant forward (or vice versa) and it wasn't until I stopped knitting and worked out what it was I would do, if I were making that cable *without* the pattern, that I actually saw what I had to do. So, strangely, it seems I am much better working without a pattern than I am when I follow one. Scary thought...

So here it is, my very classy masterpiece.

It has a moss stitch band, which gives the edge some definition. Here's a close up of the tricky cable:

Not that tricky, is it? The problem was that little outer curve on the larger twist, which cables the other way. Of course it does! Obvious, isn't it? It really is a lovely cable. The yarn colour is a beautiful greyed purple-maroon, somewhere in between the colours you see here. Evidently, it's one of those colours that are impossible to reproduce electronically...

I also found another garment I knitted earlier, in the workroom this week. I'm not quite sure why it was in the workroom, because when I tried it on, it fitted beautifully and looked great. I think I had some idea that the zipper wasn't put in well, or that the neckline didn't sit right. I am rarely my best critic when it comes to finished garments.

This one was based on a picture in a magazine, possibly Family Circle, which I cut out back in (ulp) the seventies, because I loved the shape of it. I think it was meant to be knitted in Herdwick - remember those yarns that were all heathery, in neutral tones? The unattributed designer was inspired by the garments of the 1940s, and it had something of the feel of a bomber jacket. The yarn I used is actually reknitted. I know, nobody does that any more but I loved this yarn so much, I couldn't bear to say goodbye. It would have been a Patons yarn, probably Totem, which started out as a medium silvery brown. I knitted it up in the late eighties or early nineties as a traditional gansey, the fishermen's jumpers from the ports of the UK. From memory, I used a design from Whitby, the port closest to the place my mother's forebears emigrated from, in the mid nineteenth century. They came to South Australia and their marriage was the 51st in the new colony.

I wore that jumper for years, but alas, a moth decided it was the perfect home for her new babies. I washed it and set it aside because I really didn't want it to be the end. By now, the yarn had aged to a lovely silvery beige, the colour of a well-weathered fence. Eventually, I unravelled it, setting aside the spoilt part. I modified my basic cardigan pattern to something I thought would end up similar to the picture from the magazine. It doesn't look quite the same (I think that one had a collar) but I'm very happy with how it turned out.

There's a neat little shaped slot at the neck, which I don't think was on the original either...

...and it has a ladder pattern up the sleeve (not visible in the main photo).

It actually looks great when I'm wearing it but I don't think you need to see that!

Playing with photos

2010-04-05T13:28:00.000+10:00

I haven't been blogging much lately, becaue I haven't been marvellously creative. Most of my time and energy has gone into The Maharajah's Garden, the travelling suitcase exhibition for ATASDA. The two suitcases of textile artworks, Saffron and Jasmine, will travel all over Australia from March 2010-March 2012, visiting schools, groups and galleries, for no more than the cost of onward registered postage. There's more information, and hopefully soon some images of works, on the ATASDA web page.
However, I thought I'd share some images I prepared for the Fibrecircle group recently. For a long time, our list of things to try has included manipulating photos on the computer to use in our textile art. That's something that's a bit difficult to work on in a group situation, so I made us a little sheet showing some of the effects you can get with the same image, using effects that are found in most graphics programs.

The base image is a view taken at Fountains Abbey, UK in 1995. The second image shows that original image Inverted. Inversion on a black and white image puts the darks where the lights were, and vice versa - like a photographic negative. On a coloured image, it also inverts the colours to their opposites on the colour wheel. Here the greenish shades of the original have become purple. The third image shows the original image Posterised. Posterising an image cuts down on the number of tones, making it more flat and poster-like. You can see in the image the various tones in the original have changed to green, grey, yellow, black and white. I really like Posterising images, because it really changes the mood so effectively! It's also a fun way to see what's really there. Sometimes our eyes get hung up on the detail of an image, and Posterising really cuts to the chase.

While we're playing with Posterising, it's often quite interesting to Invert, then Posterise. In these images, the photo was inverted, as in the second previous image, and then Posterised with different settings, emphasising different tones.

I mentioned black and white images. This is the same image converted to black and white, using different levels. The third image is the first one Inverted. You can see that playing with the settings of the conversion gives quite different moods and emphasises different elements of the photo. Inverting the black and white image changes where the light falls. I find converting to black and white is often a useful step, if I want to take shapes from an image. It seems to clarify things, and often is a good intermediate step in changing a photo to a line drawing.

Most graphics programs are designed to improve not-very-good photos! So you usually have some means of correcting exposure. Playig with exposure settings can also significantly change the photos you want to use in your art. You can often set a light source, and of course over- or under-expose to create a mood. The first image above had a light source set at the actual light source (the door at the end), while the other two were over- and under-exposed.

Most programs have a number of distortion options. These are just a few - the best bet is to play with your software and see what you can do with it. These are Ripple, Distorting upwards (you can go in any direction), Blast or wind effects (and the same image Inverted), Wind effects Posterised, and Faceted. Ripple and Faceted look rather like water reflections - or as if your image is about to disappear!

The first three images here use the Emboss function, which is found in most programs. It changes the image to look like a low relief. By itself, it's pretty boring but if you Posterise it as well (two different settings shown here), it really emphasises the shadows of the embossed image. The images in the second row show Tiled (or Puzzle) images, with different values of disruption. I haven't found a way to use this function in my textile art yet (other than patchwork) but it's interesting!

These images show various kinds of blur. Gaussian blur, Motion blur, Motion blur Posterised, Zoom blur with the focus above the light source, Zoom blur with the focus below the light course and Zoom blur with a narrower focus, off centre left. I like the way that the door at the end becomes ambiguous - perhaps a figure?

These images play with the Equalize function. Basically, it's a brightness adjustment, that changes all the bright areas of your image to the same level. The first image has been Equalized, the second Equalized and Inverted, the third Equalized and Posterised, to further flatten the image. Compare the third image here to the third one in the first set of images, which was simply Posterised. Different effect, isn't it? If you were going to emphasise the two images with stitch, you'd take them along different paths.

Last of all, changes in hue can really affect the mood of your image. The first has the hue manipulated, the second has changes in both the hue and the saturation and the third in hue and exposure. Each has its own mood.

This is just a quick gallop though some common possibilities. It really isn't a substitute to playing with your software to see what you can achieve. But keep in mind, you can spend hours playing with images like this, but how useful is it if you don't take that next step and actually print one out to work with?

And, gee, I've been quilting too!

2010-02-28T16:45:00.000+11:00

Of course, I'm nearly always quilting, in some form or other. I don't always remember to put up what I've done. Remember those swap blocks I did with my quilt group back in... can it be 2007? I've finally put them together into a quilt top. I did say you wouldn't see it until it was a top, which was a pretty rash thing to say, considering I have unfinished quilt projects dating back to... um, 1996, I think. Maybe earlier. (Hangs head)

But here they are, together at last. Of course, it may need to have a border added yet. I'm still thinking about it. Well, that's my excuse for not immediately beginning the quilting. I'm planning to hand quilt it, on the basis that hand quilted projects get finished because they aren't fighting for their time on the machine, along with the garments I make and the machine embroidery and the bags and... well, you know, all that other stuff.

It's the first quilt I'll have that's made from all reproduction fabrics. I love the look of these modern-antique quilts, but when I make a quilt myself, I blend all those wonderful repro fabrics with other fabrics in my stash - whatever works together. So I've never actually made a quilt with all reproduction fabrics. It's also a fabulous reminder of a group of friends who've been meeting together now for more than a decade. And guess what? We're making swap blocks again this year. I've chosen batik fabrics and dark blue backgrounds, which should be striking! Why did I choose batiks? Well, I have this box of batik fabrics, many of which I bought.. yep, in the nineties! So as I make blocks for the girls, I'm making myself a block too, from my own fabrics. Of course, it's not making a dent in my batik fabric stash at all.

Which brings me to something I've been thinking about for a while. I suspect I'm not the only quilter who has an obscene amount of fabric. Somehow, even when you're on a Low-Fibre Diet, as I've been for some years now, fabrics still find their way to your door. I've just bought a bunch of fat quarters for the swap blocks we're making, because somehow it seems mean to use all fabrics from my stash, some of which were definitely not bought yesterday. Only new and glossy will do. And of course, people give you fabrics, because it's your birthday or Christmas, or they are cunningly downsizing at your expense... So my stash is increasing at a greater rate than I can use it. So far, so ordinary.

But really, isn't this just another example of what we women in the developed world do? We buy Stuff. We buy more Stuff than we ever have a hope of using, and we can't pass it on to our kids because they want their own new Stuff. We buy things to replace other things that work perfectly fine, because the one we just bought is new and shiny, because it has brag factor, because it shows we have a lot of money to spend on Stuff. I've thought for a long time that the rampant consumerism of the society I live in is obscene, when there are so many in the world who have almost nothing, and I consciously choose not to buy new things unless I really need them. But fabric is somehow different. It's as if I give myself permission to exempt the fabric I buy.

But fabric isn't neutral. I buy cotton fabrics, and cotton takes water and fertiliser to grow, and often has a significant effect on the physical environment (as any mass monoculture inevitably does). The processing of cotton is not environmentally neutral either, nor is the printing process. I'm not singling out cotton as being necessarily worse than anything else we might buy; it isn't. But it's cotton fabric that we quilters buy and store away in boxes for the "one day" that will never come.

How can we justify buying all this "product", that we freely acknowledge we will probably never use? For some people, I know this simply isn't an issue. But I've started to think about it and, frankly, I don't like what I see myself doing. I'm not going to take the high moral ground and declare I'm never buying more fabric... I don't trust extreme points of view, even in myself. I just hope I can learn to be more discriminating, more able to resist the siren call of the new.

And do you know what? While I was writing this, I remembered that some friends gave me a box of fat quarters for my Significant Birthday a few years ago. And yes, I found it includes a whole lot more batiks. So I definitely won't be shopping for that quilt anytime soon!

Time

2010-02-28T15:33:00.001+11:00

Time is such a slippery thing! It seems like only a moment since we celebrated New Year and in a moment we'll be in March. How did that happen? Of course, I know how that happened. January was full of birthdays and lazy summer days, and February has been Suitcase Month. No, it's not my own travels I've been organising; it's the travels of Saffron and Jasmine, sister suitcases of The Maharajah's Garden travelling suitcase exhibition. About sixty member of ATASDA have made works for the exhibition, and a further 45 have made bunting pieces, to be tied together to dress up the show, or treated as individual works. The exhibition begins to travel in March, first to our Branch meetings in Sydney and Brisbane, and then all around Australia for at least two years. The range of work is amazing. Each work is accompanied by a techniques board, explaining the inspiration of the work and one technique used by the artist. Such a diversity of techniques! We on the organising committee have all found new things to try. Images of the works should be on the ATASDA website sometime in March, if all goes well.

Now the suitcases are just about ready, I feel like a mole, emerging blinking into the light and wondering what to do next! I have managed to find a little time to do creative things this month. I made my graffiti fabric into a bag, using some suede leather scraps that were the perfect colour, given to me by a friend from her stash. She in turn acquired it from someone else's stash a few years ago. The bag looks fantastic...

..but there's a tiny problem. Although I checked the leather closely for faults, it isn't quite the same leather it once was, I fear. As I sewed, I began to notice myself turning a delicate shade of pink. No, not an allergy, just the leather colour, coming off all over me. Like the fool I am, I pressed on, instead of pausing to take stock. Yes, the bag looks brilliant, but it's completely unusable, because it crocks colour onto everything it touches. Not only that, but, despite using the appropriate leather needle, stitch length and thread, the leather is simply pulling apart along the stitch lines. I suspect that leather might be older than I am, and it's decided that it's had enough.

So, I did finish my graffiti bag by the February deadline, but it's going to have to come apart again, once I acquire some new red leather. I am so in love with the look of the bag that nothing else will do!

So the moral of this sad tale is : if things start looking a bit odd when you are in the midst of a creative flow, STOP!! Do not go on mindlessly ignoring the problem. Who'd have thought, eh?

Graffiti art

2010-01-26T17:48:00.001+11:00

Remember the graffiti fabric I did with the Fibrecircle group last year? You can read about it here and on my blog here. I decided to add some colour to my piece, so I painted it with Setacolor transparent paints. I used the transparent ones because I wanted to retain the layering of other elements underneath, whether they were painted or not. Here's how it looks now...

I just love it!

Several people who have seen it asked about the colour blending. I wanted to make it like graffiti as much as possible, so I worked on the assumption that most graffiti artists don't actually carry a huge sack of spray cans with them. I figued it was more like primary colours plus a black, at best. So I limited my palette to red, blue and yellow. The blue is actually an opaque paint, which I mixed 50:50 with the base medium, which made it transparent. Where I wanted to blend colours, I sometimes laid down the brighter colour first, eg yellow, and then overpainted it when it was dry. Other times, I painted up to a wet section with the second colour and then brushed the two colours into one another with a damp brush. Texture was added from the drawings over which I was painting.

We are supposed to make it into something before Feb 8, but I'm not sure I can bear to cut into it.

Knitting and other pleasant pastimes

2009-11-09T21:23:00.006+11:00

I love to knit. Every winter, I can't want until the humid weather goes away and it gets cool enough to pick up my knitting needles. I learnt to knit when I was seven (remember those knitted squares I talked about here?) and there's hardly been a year when I didn't knit something in the winter, except for those few manic years when I was studying days, working nights and raising kids in between. So when I bought some luscious wool from Bendigo Woollen Mills this year, in a gorgeous purple colour that's right in fashion right now, I was in seventh heaven. Pattern, gosh no! I had a picture of what I wanted , and I am woman, I can make anything!

So I cast on merrily and knitted what I thought was the pattern. Nope, not quite right. So I pulled it back to the basque and tried again. (Me, knit a swatch? Why?) Nope, still not quite right. And again. OK, time for plan B. I'd bought a copy of the gorgeous new Knitter magazine and there was a pattern I'd made years ago, that one where you knit double rib, cast on extra stitches and then drop them, so you get a beautiful wavy pattern. OK, that's so easy, I'll do that one. Not using their pattern, of course, which was made in cotton for English summer wear.

I knitted the back and one of the sleeves, and then it dawned on me slowly that this pattern uses way more yarn than a normal jumper. I knitted grimly on. Nope, it was clear to me from halfway up the front that there was not, in fact enough yarn. A quick email to Bendigo assured me that no, that yarn was now discontinued, even though I only bought it a couple of months before. A quick check on Ravelry for surplus yarn- no dice. Out it all came again. (Isn't it good that it knitted up so quickly?)

On my travels around the Quilt and Craft Fair in June, I found a pattern at the Bendigo stand that was just what I wanted. The First Time Around. So, older and ever so slightly wiser, I bought that pattern even though, like most knitting patterns, it wasn't designed for Fat Ladies, just so I could see how they did that pattern. Easy! A short while later and I had my first (and only) jumper this year.
Isn't it pretty? It just needs a press and it will be ready to wear. Next year.

A taste of what I've been doing

2009-10-13T22:04:00.008+11:00

Here's a little taste of my latest collaborative project. I'm doing book pages with the Fibrecircle group and this is the very first page I did. Of course, I forgot to photograph it, so I've had to wait until it was being swapped to grab a photo. It's for Helen's book, which has the theme "Faraway Places". She supplied poems as inspiration and I chose this one by Oscar Wilde:

The almond groves of Samarkand
Bokhara, where red lilies blow
And Oxus, by whose yellow sands
The grave white turbaned merchants go.

And from there to Ispahan
The golden garden of the sun
When the lone dusty caravan
Brings cedar and vermilion.

I know where Samarkand is, but where is Ispahan? I discovered that the name refers to the modern city of Isfahan or Esfahan, in Iran. It looks like a fascinating place to visit. It was originally the capital of the Elamite Empire, of the Medes (612-549BC). Then, after some time in obscurity,it was the capital of the 10th century Seljuk dynasty, a Turkish empire that was fascinated by Persian culture and spread from Anatolia to Spain. The third golden period for the city was the Safavid Empire, in the 16th century, under Shah Abbas the Great. The modern city still contains many beautiful buildings reflecting this diverse history.

I looked at lots of photos of the city, and then made a sort of compilation sketch, using shapes from the bridges and an image of one of the mosques. For my colours, I was mostly inspired by a description from a traveller of the 1920s, Robert Byron, who wrote, "under avenues of white tree trunks and canopies of shining twigs, past domes of turquoise and spring yellow, in a sky of liquid violet blue… across bridges of pale toffee brick, tier on tier of arches breaking into piled pavilions; overlooked by lilac mountains… Isfahan has become indelible." Helen supplied the beautiful hand-painted background fabric, and I painted the mountains and buildings, and suggestion of road.

It was a hard work to photograph. The image has lost most of the detail of tiles on the mosque and the river on the right. But it does give a bit of an idea.

And now for something completely different!

2009-09-21T23:11:00.006+10:00

Last week at Fibrecircle, we spent the day graffiti-ing fabric. We'd planned ages ago to do it, and this week, after the seriousness of all the ATASDA AGMs, seemed like a good time to be childlike again. We used a piece of donated fabric, and each person moved round the table so every part of the fabric was drawn on by everyone. Then we cut the fabric into equal parts.
Here's my section:
Isn't it fabulous?

Now I have to do something with this fabric by early next year! I am toying with adding colour - graffiti is usually coloured in flat areas, or maybe adding more texture (which I can do by stitching). Will I use it whole or cut it apart? I'm sure you'll see more of this over the coming months.

More about the book

2009-09-21T22:36:00.015+10:00

Once I'd painted the cover picture, it was April 1 and I started work on the pages. April 3 was the first quarter of the moon in April, with the full moon on Apr 10, and the last quarter on April 17. The new moon fell on April 25. I won't show all the pages here, partly because that would be tedious to look at, but also because, when you are working quickly on the final sheet, not all pages turn out as you imagined! Here are some of my favourites:
The first page I did -

April 6, a Fibrecircle meeting day - paper tissue collage
April 11 - undeciphered scripts This page shows a page of the undeciphered script of the Indus Valley civilisation, with the letters of UNDECIPHERED SCRIPTS hidden among it. On this day, I was thinking about the parts of everyone that are hidden from view, that appear unexpectedly.

The next two are pair of pages about limitations, associated with the changing season, the waning moon and my life at the time.

Tissue poppies for Anzac Day, for those dead in war and the new moon, with the words of the poem that begins "in Flanders Fields the poppies blow", written at Ypres by Dr John McCrae, who himself did not survive that terrible war.
A fantasy landscape, just playing around with colours. Painted with Setacolor paints over the original blue background.

It actually took me until mid June to assemble the book in its final form. I added colour with Prismacolor pencils to the end papers, and added text.

This was a brilliant project to do, I really had a ball. It was structured enough that I wasn't trying to find things to make each day, but free enough to let me follow whatever elusive thread captured my attention. I learnt a huge amount by doing it, although I now see ways I could have done things better (of course!). I think I got way more out of it than I would have done making a quilt (or a bag) for the challenge. If you want to see the other challenge pieces, they're on the Kambra Challenge blog.

Lots of new stuff to share

2009-09-21T20:57:00.010+10:00

I've been quiet here lately because so much of what I've done lately has been secret. Finally I can share one thing that took up a lot of my life back in April. I belong to a group that does a challenge every year. This year, the challenge was to make something with these fabrics, a pack of 40, 7in squares of 20 Hoffman 1895 Bali Watercolors, blue-green color roll.

I was away for some of the challenge period so I wanted to make a small project, that I had a good chance of finishing in the time frame. I thought about making a bag, or using the square to embellish a garment. But when I looked at the fabrics, they reminded me of phases of the moon, so I decided to make a book that referenced the moon phases over one month. The moon in astrology relates to emotions, and receptiveness to change, since the phases of the moon mean it is in constant change. In the past, I've made diary-style year quilts, which were about what was happening in my life during that year, but I wanted to make something that focused on my inner life, what I was thinking and learning, rather than what I was doing. So I made April Moon. (I worked through lots of possible fancy titles, but in the end, simple seemed best!)

I decided I needed to keep the pages separate until after I had done whatever I was going to do, so I was free to stitch them if I wanted. Then, as I went, I could assemble flat sheets into signatures, and stitch the signatures to the spine tape, so final assembly wouldn't be too time-consuming. (I'm never really motivated by those final fiddly bits!) The Bali fabrics would be used to edge each page, so the colours would show the moon phase. I also wanted the book to be able to stand up, but each page to lie flat when it was opened, which influenced me towards a more standard book binding, with a spine tape attached to a cover, with end papers.

First I made the cover and the base pages. I didn't want to be daunted by cream quilters' muslin pages, so I painted all the pages in shades of blue. I used the same paints to make monotypes for the end papers and the cover. The end papers were printed from a glass plate with rubber bands scattered on it. The cover monotype was pulled from paint on the glass plate. (The overlay shows where the spine was going to be) Then I began to sketch in paint details of my imagined moon garden. It was utterly absorbing, as the more I added, the more areas I could see needed more work. Eventually I stopped, and this was my moon garden cover:

Oh yeah...

2009-06-12T15:44:00.002+10:00

Remember this one? It was for a challenge called Purple Prose from my quilt group, Bees Knees, way back in - gee, can it be 2004? I did a little more work on it recently too. It now looks like this:
I need to do a little more work on the division between the edge of the wall and the rubble behind it (funny how you can see these things when you take a photo!) and then it might be ready to stitch.

And what did I buy at the show?

2009-06-12T15:15:00.006+10:00

Actually, I didn't buy a huge amount. As everyone who knows me will attest, I have been saying for years, "I have an obscene amount of fabric and I don't need any more!" If I begin making quilts now and continue 24 hours a day until I fall off my perch, it will still be a case of "St Peter, don't you call me, 'coz I can't go". Despite that, fabric has a way of wandering into my life uninvited...

I did buy these gorgeous silk sheets, all ready to go through my printer, from Lynne at Batik Oetoro. They don't count as fabric, do they? Perched on top is one of the little Ezy-Carve printing blocks. I bought a large one of these from Lynne some months ago but it's being saved for Something Special. So I bought a small one just so I can have a go at using this medium. You know I love making stamps to use in my textile work - you can see some of the latest, made from cheap erasers, on the Fibrecircle site.

I also bought an Embellish-Knit, one of those gadgets that make French knitting at a mile a minute, instead of laboriously stitch by stitch. So you can expect to see French-knitted embellishments on everything I make in the foreseeable future. I remember making French knitting with a wooden cotton reel with four nails hammered into it, a pin and some of my mother's leftover knitting yarn. Times have certainly changed.. A big thank you here to Prudence Mapstone, from whose stall I bought this little beauty. I also bought the reprint of her book, Freeform, and when she heard it was for the ATASDA library, she gave us a very generous discount. Thank you so much, Prudence, it's very much appreciated!

Of course I haven't mentioned the fabulous Indian wooden print blocks that I bought from Batik Oetoro a week ago. But that wasn't at the show, so they don't count, do they?

Sydney Craft and Quilt Fair

2009-06-12T14:35:00.005+10:00

I've had a great couple of days at the Craft and Quilt fair at Darling Harbour. The quilt show is fantastic - so many really clever and creative quilts on display. Not only are there 390 quilts in the Quilters' Guild show this year, but there are also special displays of the Bernina Challenge quilts, the Down Under Quilts calendar Challenge, the AQC challenge quilts, a collection of small works from the OzQuilt Network, the Quilters' Guild challenge quilts and The Best of the Best - the quilts that have won in each state show in the past year. My favourites were the two by Jenny Bowker, one in the Best of the Best (it won at the ACT show) and one in the Bernina quilts, (you can see it on her blog here) and this one by Helen Godden, this year's featured artist, which you can see here in her Pennie which won FIRST PRIZE in the miniatures section. (And this from a woman who once declared she was never going to exhibit anything!) Way to go, Pennie darling! See, we were right, you *should* have been exhibiting all those other marvellous quilts!

First things first

2009-06-12T14:17:00.003+10:00

I've had a busy few weeks, or you'd have seen this sooner! At the last ATASDA meeting, Pamela gave me this gorgeous little painted bookmark she'd made. Isn't it just beautiful? She said she's been playing with paints, and I can see we can expect wonderful things from her. Thanks so much, Pamela! You may not know that I'm a bookmark freak (goes with being a book freak, I guess) so this one is going into my collection of the most treasured ones.

Playing in May

2009-05-28T18:13:00.020+10:00

I haven't posted much lately but this doesn't mean I haven't been busy, both out there in the real world and in the quiet of my workroom.

First, remember the flowerpot? I haven't touched it since I last posted about it here, but I've added a little more paint and I think one more painting session will bring it up to the point of stitching. At last! Here's how it looks now: Mostly I added highlights, and it just needs some shadows on the white flowers and a little more paint on the edge of the step.

My friend Tricia was working on a piece at Fibrecircle this week and it really confirmed for me that this needs hand stitching, not machine. The Jan- Irvine-Nealie style of stitching isn't what I have in mind but rather using seed stitch so suggest the roughness of the brickwork behind the flowers. The hard machine line will be too strong. Stay tuned!

I've also been making quite a lot of monoprints on fabric. I have always been interested in monotyping and monoprinting but I recently bought a book called "Monotype: mediums and methods for painterly printmaking" by Julia Ayres, which has made me quite excited about the process again. I mostly make this kind of print with fabric paint left over from whatever project I've been painting on, but I think perhaps the monotype may just be the main activity for a while! Here's some things I've begun lately: A simple monoprint pulled from a glass plate and then over-painted.
This is a straight monotype (not altered from the original print) made as a coffee mug insert.And here it is in the mug:
This one was the ghost of the first print, over-painted. The designs need to be quite bright to be visible and exciting under the thick plastic outer layer. In this one the plate was repainted, with the original image as a guide. It was inverted before printing, and then over-painted once it was dry. They are all very different, aren't they? That's the fun part about making monotypes and monoprints!

I've also begun painting another of my "paint rags". It's an odd shape - 21 1/2in x 8 1/2in. Originally it looked like this:
It immediately said "boats on the shore" to me so it was set aside. I envisage the larger ship as a hulk, dragged up on the shore and left to fall apart, with the smaller boat pulled into its lee. I was trying to capture the rust and rough texture of the old boat, but I still have some way to go.

I've been trying to organise my paint rags a little lately. I haven't been marking them in any way and sometimes it's hard to remember what each one looked like before it was painted or printed again, to keep my records straight. So I am giving each one a number (I'm up to 60 already, so St Peter better not call me too soon!)and that should allow me to track each one as it gets painted or embellished, until it finally ends up in a work of art (or in the bin!). I know, you can take the librarian out of the library....

Oh, I forgot!

2009-05-03T17:36:00.005+10:00

I also made some Artist's Trading Cards. I've been meaning to do some for ages and then a challenge from Helen at Fibrecircle got me going. We did a series of collaborative drawing exercises in March and Helen challenged us to use the drawings as the basis for ATCs. My drawing was supposedly imspired by Patrick Caulfield and, after it had gone round the table to everyone to add something, it looked like this: Not particularly like Caulfield's work, is it?

I decided to use the flower elements, so I drew them freehand with a black felt tip pen onto a piece of fabric I had coloured by monoprinting in an earlier Fibrecircle session. I monoprinted another fabric as the backing, and used Shapewell, a stiff woven interfacing, as the inner layer. I had originally planned to give the cards areas of flat acrylic, like Caulfield's work, but they seemed to need something more delicate. I added small areas of paint and stitched around them in black machine buttonhole stitch. They are much prettier than previous ATCs I've made.

Other things I've been working on

2009-05-03T17:09:00.008+10:00

So much of what I've been doing lately can't be shown for a while yet, but I thought I'd put up these two things. The first is something I was working on throughout April, off and on. I wanted it to be a scene by moonlight. It started out with a monoprint, pulled off a glass plate: I really like monoprints, because they are so uncontrolled. They're a useful fabric to have around, because they look less obviously painted. I often use monoprinted fabrics as the basis for something else, but I also use them when I want a small amount of fabric of a specific colour, with some texture in it. So I often use up the leftover fabric paints from other projects by pulling a few monoprints off my glass cutting board, which is about A3 size, onto quilter's muslin. The fabrics go into my 'special fabrics' cupboard, along with all my samples and other play stuff.

I already had a rough idea of where I wanted to go, so this one didn't make it to the cupboard. With some painting it became this: A lot of the elements are roughed in here. It's very dark at this stage, because I hadn't added any light tones, except what was there as the pale blue background. After a couple more sessions of painting, it now looks like this: It was slow work because I was blending colours all the time on the leaves. It was a great exercise in tonal values. Often, the same paint reads dark in one place and light in another. It has a huge number of shades in it, because I was blending paints on the palette and often on the fabric as I went, to bring a shade up a little or darken it down. Heaps of fun! I think it's done now. The challenge for me with this piece was to make it look like a moonlit path, without making the garden look dark and scary and basically uninviting! I wanted it to look like a path you might actually go down, if you wanted a little adventure.

A second fun piece is this one: I was just playing around with paints, because I had them out anyway. I wanted to make a surreal landscape that didn't use traditional colours. I love the way it turned out. It's not anything earth-shattering, just a fun piece!

Collage

2009-03-31T17:15:00.010+11:00

OK, time to unveil one of the things I've been working on. At Fibrecircle in March, Helen brought brown paper envelopes and challenged us to make a collage. The envelopes contained articles from Australian Geographic magazine. I didn't want to make a paper collage (been there, done that) so I chose to collage my photos onto fabric. I chose a painted fabric from my stash that looked like this: It was originally painted as one of two backgrounds for a book page swap in a now-defunct group called Art Divas. I collaged scraps of paper from the magazine photos, plus some from an accompanying map (I love maps!). It all looked a bit tacked together, and the blues were still very strong, so I added colour with fabric crayons and metallic pastels. I connected the roads on the maps with black marker pen lines, like a mud map. I like mud maps (the sort of map you draw in the dirt with a stick to show somewhere the way) and they've appeared in other pieces I've made. I added some images for planes from a single photo. I'd cut the maps with scissors, which was a mistake. I much prefer ragged edges.They still looked too blobby and not connected with the background. So I lifted them off and tore them apart and glued them back roughly in the same place. That looks much more interesting! I added in some strips of orange organza to provide some shadows.
I was starting to feel good about what was happening. But would I bother to finish it, when I have so many other things to think about right now? To make myself finish it, I challenged the other members of Like Minded Artist to join me in this exercise, choosing pages from their own glossy magazines and making a quick collage, due the end of March. Now I had a reason to finish mine!

I felt it was all look a bit much the same - not enough tonal contrast. So I splashed on some of my Setacolor paints:
Amazing how changing tone can change the mood! I also found an image that included a plane's shadow. I added it because I liked the ambiguity. It doesn't look like the shadow of one of the planes in the collage. Is it another plane? Is there another plane somewhere we can't see? The other planes are so bright that the dark tone makes it more ominous, suggesting it may be an enemy.
All along, I'd planned to overlay the collage with organza, which I'd then strip back in some places. This was partly for practical reasons. I had attached the paper elements with a simple glue, because I knew I wanted to stitch through it and I didn't want anything that would clog the needle. But that glue is not known for its permanence, even on paper. An overlay would help to hold everything in place, even if it wasn't actually stitched down. I had some organza I'd painted a while back, just to see how organza took Setacolor paint. It gave the surface a very muted pattern, like a moire. I traced the mud map and map roads onto the organza, overlaid it and stitched it down with a meandering pattern.
Oh wow, shiny! I'd forgotten that organza really hogs the limelight! I started snipping the layers back, sometime adding a few of the snippets underneath areas I didn't cut back. It looked better but still distractingly shiny. I thought about melting the organza but I'd have to work very carefully, so I didn't char the surface underneath, so I rejected that option. Finally, I decided to try a layer of light matte gel medium. I figures this would tend to make the organza opaque, and glue everything down. Here's how it looks now: It's still a bit shiny, where the organza didn't lie down flat, but it's interesting rather than distracting. The gel medium made the marker pen run in a few places, something that actually adds something here but is good to know about for the future! And yes, I do think it's done now.

Just a little teaser

2009-03-27T19:44:00.008+11:00

I've been busy lately but sadly, most of what I've done is Sekrit Stuff, so I can't put any of it up here. But I thought I'd give you a teaser, so you can see I have been busy and not swanning around the Caribbean on a cruise ship or lying on a beach in Bali, like some lucky friends of mine.

So what are you looking at? OK, one of these 2in virtual strips represents my Kambra Challenge 2009. Remember, I belong to a group that has been meeting for an annual challenge for, can it be a more than a decade? You can see some of our previous challenges here (and yes, most of my unfinished ones are still unfinished). This year, our challenge was to use a pack of 40, 7in 1895 Bali Watercolors in delicious blues and greys and browns and the unveiling date is fast falling upon us. I don't want another unfinished quilt so I have a cunning plan... Another of these shows my piece for a Like Minded Artist challenge that came originally from a Fibrecircle activity. It's coming along nicely and may even make the Mar 30 deadline, after which time you can see it in all its glory. And another image shows a slice of another Fibrecircle activity, which we were challenged to use to make into ATCs. These are due on Apr 8 and then I'll show them, either here or on the Fibrecircle blog. And not only will Fibrecircle members get an ATC, but a couple of people who have set me ATCs might actually get one back. Progress! Of course, along the way I've painted a whole lot more fabric pieces, which at this stage look remarkably like painted fabric so I won't bother to put them here.

Meanwhile I'm also thinking about my Voyages and Passages piece for ATASDA's Palm House exhibition in 2010. So many possibilities!

I haven't been entirely locked in my workroom. Yesterday, I went on an expedition with my friend Carol, to Petlins for some essential weaving supplies, and via an Aladdin's cave of a fabric shop to NSWeave aka NSW Spinners and Weavers Guild. I managed to find some delicious organza and some acrylic felt (everything I have here now is wool felt that doesn't melt, darnit!), some silk tops and yarn for later dyeing with Fibrecircle, a weaving book I couldn't live without and these cute little stamps.

Aren't they fun? Just called out to me to take them home. A most satisfactory excursion.

Inspiration

2009-03-08T20:18:00.002+11:00

And while we're talking about exciting stuff, I was so excited by the work of Carolyn Cabena, the speaker at the ATASDA NSW Branch meeting yesterday. Carolyn is a life member of ATASDA, having joined way back when it was the Batik Association, and it was fascinating to see slides of her work over many years. She's worked with batik (of course), screen printing, shibori dyeing and resist discharges, devore, pleating - and her work is just fabulous! You can read about her here (she's also involved in Craft Australia) and see a tiny example of her work here . Unfortunately, she doesn't seem to have a web page or gallery, apart from what is on display through Craft Australia, so you might need to go to the Gallery, 104 George Street
The Rocks Sydney 2000 to see her work in person. It's really inspired me, although I paint fabric rather than dyeing it, to return to my screen printing beginnings.

Sun printing

2009-03-08T20:12:00.003+11:00

Darn, I forgot to mention that the Fibrecircle group finally found some sun for sun printing, fortnight ago. Check out my sun prints here plus the others' immediately afterwards.

I have decided I love sun printing! It has so many possibilities for adding texture and laying. Make sure you look at Prue's pieces, which were done partly under glass, which gives a very interesting effect. And Carol's very tidy samples of different approaches (my samples are never that organised!) give a great idea of what you can achieve right from the start.

Time for an update

2009-03-08T19:46:00.003+11:00

Remember that paint rag I talked about here? And a couple of other times - look under Flowerpot. I've done some more painting on it a few times since it last appeared here, and it's fast approaching the time when I'm ready to add some stitch. You may know I'm a bit obsessive about process, and I record the growth of pretty much anything I make (bigger than an ATC!). So it occurred to me to go back and look at how things started. I got a huge surprise, and I think you might too. Here's the very first, from April 2007, and the most recent (last week) photos.

I'm pretty sure photo 1 might have already had some deliberate painting on it by the time I photographed it. I'd already roughed in the pot shape and added the splodgy background for the brick wall. I'm more rigorous now about photographing likely paint rags at the beginning, but this was the very first one that I ever decided to make into a specific work, instead of just being used when I needed a certain colour fabric. From my notes, the original had the coloured splodges, when I'd wiped my brushes, and a pale apricot background, when I'd used it to clean off a palette.

Where now? I think it needs a lot more greenery, so that will probably happen next time I have the paints out. And I need to add some more shadows to some of the flowers, and maybe add a touch of orange-pink to the yellow roses.

(Sorry to those people who liked the pot left undefined. I let it sit for a long time but I just didn't like it. Guess you'll have to paint your own now! See how easy it is?)

Finished something!

2009-03-03T21:28:00.006+11:00

Oh I love it when that happens!

Today I finished the bag I started back in the middle of 2007. I thought I had mentioned it here but it seems I was slack about that. It's a little bit like this one here because it was made from fabric I quilted. But it's different, because it's a design I drafted myself, incorporating all the things I have loved in those handbags that are now gone to The Great Handbag Shop in the sky. I love having a flat outside pocket you can slip a shopping list or a bill into. I love having an outside and an inside zipper compartment for those things you really must not lose. I love a bag that takes a sketchbook easily, with room for some drawing pencils or even a pack of watercolour pencils. I love bags with cute little pockets for my wallet and my keys and my phone, so I can always find things. I love bags with double zippers, so I can open them either way.I love bags with long enough straps to carry comfortably over my shoulder and under my arm, to deter people who might want to take my beautiful bag home with them. And now I have one with all these things! And another view: I want a whole family of these bags, in every colour of the rainbow, so I can swap handbags without a fuss, and everything I carry will have a place of its own. Stay tuned!

Fimo stamp Part 2

2009-02-15T15:54:00.012+11:00

Finally got to try out my Fimo stamp yesterday. I started out with my luscious Lumiere, which, let's face it, makes pretty much anything look good! First I stamped: Well, that's kinda OK. Bit less clear than I'd hoped.

Then I put the paint on with the roller, laid the stamp down and then the fabric over the top and rubbed gently. Kind of reverse stamping. That's much better! (It usually is).

Then I tried using it like a texture plate and taking a rubbing with my delicious metallic oil pastels. Well, the white background is pretty boring but imagine this shiny metallic on a coloured background or on black! The pastels give a great effect - soft like soft pastels or textile crayons but shiny. OK, so I'm a sucker for a bit of sparkle.

So overall, I declare the technique a success. If you want simple shapes you can reproduce over and over, and you aren't confident of your carving skills, this is the way to go, because it isn't any harder than moulding with plasticine. Of course, you have to wait half an hour for it to bake, so if you're an instant gratification person and you want to stamp with the damn thing NOW, it's maybe not so good.

Since I had them there for no particular purpose, I also decided to try stamping with the faces from the commercial mould. These are done with the reverse method, stamp then fabric, and one of them would be much better if I'd remembered to wipe my fingers between stamps, but they actually look quite good too, better than I'd expected.

I wondered to myself how you could actually use them and started playing around with green Setacolor opaque paints - well, with blue and yellow and black, to be precise. I stamped a few faces onto a piece of cloth, and then overstamped with eucalyptus leaves, by painting the leaves and pressing them down, and then finished off with a commercial leaf stencil I've had for a gazillion years (I think you were meant to use it to stencil cute designs around your bathroom walls, yes, it's that old!). As I went, I added little bits of yellow and black to the original green to vary the colour a little. And it looked like this: A little bit cutesy, but I'm thinking with a background wash to take out the white, and some appliqued leaves and texture and some stitch, maybe it would be more than OK? If not, it could always become ATCs, which might look quite interesting with little bits of faces peering out of leaves.

What I also got from the exercise was this: I like it! It's what you get when you lay your leaves on a piece of fabric to run the paint roller over them, to cover them with paint for stamping. I added some more of those ancient leaf stencils at the end. I also got two face moulds that look like this: Cool, huh? I just wiped off the excess paint instead of washing them.

The sashing looks like this:

2009-02-14T13:34:00.002+11:00

Now, unless I change my mind and do something different, you won't see it again until it's a quilt top!

Playing with Fimo

2009-02-13T17:00:00.007+11:00

Anyone who comes here often will know that I'm always interested in different ways to make marks on fabric. I'm especially interested in stamping. So I wondered to myself, how hard would it be to make original stamps for textile work from Fimo? You know the stuff, like plasticine that you bake in the oven so it goes hard? It's a variety of polymer clay, made by EberhardFaber - the other main brand is Sculpey.

So last Fibrecircle day, in the absence of any sun for sunprinting,I thought I'd have a try. The answer is that it's incredibly easy to make a small stamp. I made this: The stamp is on the left, the ones on the right are from my friend Carol's mould that she happened to have with her and I'll probably paint them for use in some piece of art sometime.

I didn't worry about putting the clay through a pasta machine or anything sophisticated like that. I smooshed it flat with my hands, and marked out the design freehand with one of the plastic clay-working tools from my $2.99 set. Then I just scraped away the parts I didn't want to print and smoothed out the ridges so that they were reasonably level (by eye). Of course, it was really easy to work, much easier than carving, but I'm not sure I could make a large design this way. Then I baked the piece in my friend Prue's polymer clay oven, about a half hour at 130degC, basically until it was fairly hard. I'll show you how it works as a stamp, next time I have the fabric paints out.

My try at sunprinting is over on the Fibrecircle blog.

Quietly quilting

2009-02-13T16:37:00.004+11:00

I've been quietly going on with a project I mentioned here quite a while ago. The members of the very small quilt group I belong to made blocks for each other, one a month for ten months, during 2007. So each of us ended up with thirty 6in blocks. I chose reproduction fabrics because, while I love them and buy them a lot, I generally use them all mixed in with other fabrics, rather than making a quilt in reproduction style.

I decided to sew triangles to the four sides of each block, which has the effect of setting them on point (an interesting layout) and making them bigger. I am not fond of small quilts in traditional style - I really prefer the traditional quilts I make to be big enough to snuggle under. I decided I wanted the quilt to be more blue than anything else, so I found a nice medium value blue fabric in my stash and sewed triangles to half the blocks. I wanted a different fabric for the other half, so I would get that interesting pattern happening where the triangles meet. But none of the fabrics I found worked well with my blue fabric. Even ones I bought specifically looked fine in the shop but just didn't sing when I got them home. So I decided that, instead of keeping on buying fabrics that didn't work, I would go back to my stash of reproduction fabrics and work with value, something that isn't always that important in reproduction quilts. I chose fifteen different dark blue fabrics and an assortment of light medium fabrics. These fabrics needed to be medium, to provide contrast with the blocks that had a light background, but still light enough to contrast with the dark blues. Over the past couple of weeks, I've ripped the original blue triangles and sewn the new triangles in place. Here is how it looked, laid out:
Apologies for the foreshortened look, my design wall is fuill of other stuff just now.

The next task is to add sashing between the blocks. I have this delicious stripe to use for that, but I'm still havering over which fabric to use as cornerstones.

Bushfires

2009-02-13T16:21:00.002+11:00

I really haven't felt like blogging lately. Watching the tragedy in Victoria unfold, I felt that my own concerns about textiles were very small and unimportant. It's hard to imagine the scale of the tragedy - whole communities burnt, so many lives lost, so many people left with just the clothes they were wearing. Balanced against that is the enormous upwelling of generosity - the volunteer and agency firefighters who put their lives on the line every year during fire season, the people I know making quilts and children's gift bags and pet beds and clothing, sharing their fabric and yarn stash with other crafters and above all, with money through the various donation points. If you want to help these families who have been left with nothing, the Red Cross is taking donations, and many banks have set up Bushfire Relief accounts that you can transfer money into. I know St George Bank has one and Bendigo Bank Please help these families get back on their feet.

And now some quilting

2009-01-27T17:55:00.007+11:00

It just hit me that I haven't mentioned quilting here for quite a while. (Mostly because not much has been happening in that department lately!) But today I pinned one quarter section of the quilt for my son and daughter-in-law. I mentioned this project back here This has been a project long in the making. I began planning it when Ben & Lee were engaged, but it was set aside because I was making another quilt for a friend's birthday, which was committed to before the engagement happened. I had decided to quilt that project in sections (Quilt As You Go), because I find handling really big bed quilts difficult these days, so it was a trial run for this quilt. (Why does everyone have such big beds nowadays? The mattress on our new bed is four inches thicker than the old one, because it has a layer of memory foam on it. I had to rethink the quilt I'm making for it.)

I made my friend's quilt in sections, and quilted them to about 2in away from the edges of the sections. Then I sewed the top layers together, trimmed the batting level with the seam so it butted together and then hand stitched one layer of the backing over the other. The problem was, I really hated that method. It was so hard to get everything lined up neatly on the back, because those sections weren't quilted and I still had to quilt over the areas where the sections joined. So each time I joined sections together, I had to quilt this little area, so it matched up with the existing quilting. Lots of stop starts. Who invented this dumb method?

All this put me off finishing this quilt for Ben and Lee. How was I going to quilt it? I love hand quilting with a passion, but not if it involves quilting through all those seams you get in a Log Cabin quilt. I am a happy machine quilter, especially with free motion quilting, but this is a very big quilt. Then last year, I discovered another method of quilting in sections. I'm sorry I can't credit it, because I don't remember now where I read about it. I suspect it isn't just one person's method anyway. But it's so much simpler than what I did before. You quilt each section right up to the seam line. Then you sew the sections together, right sides together, adding a sashing strip on the back. So you have section 1 face down, section 2 face up, then a narrow folded strip with the raw edges lined up with the other raw edges. After you have sewn them all together, you trim the batting on both sections back as close to the stitching as possible. (This is why you only quilt up to the seam line.) Then you lay the sections face down, and fold the folded strip over the raw edges on the back and slip stitch it down. This should be a lot easier than folding backing over itself, because everything is quilted and can't shift around. And I won't have to go back and quilt anywhere. I'm so hoping this is going work out! (Every large quilt I make from now on is going to be hand quilted. Period.)

Shopping bag

2009-01-26T18:37:00.002+11:00

Today I sewed together my shopping bag. Now, it just needs straps and the top hem sewing down, and a solid base. I'm thinking I might make the straps in tablet weaving, which I've never done before. More to come...

Recycling like a crazy woman

2009-01-25T15:14:00.011+11:00

One of the bees that fly around in my large and capacious hat is the need to reuse and recycle. I've been recycling and composting and generally making everything work twice as hard since before it became a fashionable thing (hey, that puts me ahead of the world in Something!). One issue on which I have Opinions is the whole free plastic bag thing (and my opinions are not necessarily what you may think). I wanted to consider some of the many other plastics that we are inundated with every day and which are still beyond the capacity of formal recycling. I decided to see whether I liked weaving with plastic strips but I didn't want to use those shopping bags. So I collected some of the other plastics that came through my house and cut them into strips to weave into a shopping bag.(Hey, it's no crazier than cutting up fabric to make a quilt, is it?)

I was really motivated by the idea of making something 100% recycled, so I warped up the loom with my leftover 8-ply knitting wool in every imaginable colour, from forty years of knitting projects. It may come as no great surprise to you to discover that, at some time in the past forty years, moths have come to visit this little treasure trove of past knitting memories. I soon found out which ones were affected, usually when I was halfway through putting it in a warp. It was a slow business.

Next, I had to cut the plastic strips. I've been hoarding plastic bags for some time in anticipation of this project, so I had a session cutting several into long spirals. I found, for weaving purposes, plastics ain't plastics. The ones I'd most wanted to use, those ones with luscious colours and deep blacks from boutiques and department stores are really not nice for weaving. The cut edges are sharp and they give you paper cuts (plastic cuts?) while you're cutting them, and then while you're winding them onto the shuttle and then while you're weaving. The gorgeous, must-use-again bags are the heavy soft plastic ones you get from stores when you buy lots of things that need a big bag. They are from the same sort of material as a supermarket plastic shopping bag but made from a heavier thicker plastic. I also had a lovely green plastic bag that the Christmas cherries came in (inside their box). Building supplies frequently come in heavy plastic, and you can often harvest it from the fields around new housing estates! (Thanks Kaite.)

I had planned to weave a separate gusset for the bag, because I thought the plastic fabric might be difficult to sew but once I began, I saw that the fabric I was making could easily be sewn on the machine, so I didn't bother. I wove a narrow band with black wool yarn, to form a hem at the top, and then wove stripes with the different colours of plastic bag, ending with another band of black wool. I've stitched the knotted eds to make sure they're secure, and sewn it into a simple bag shape, that looks like this: I will make a gusset by sewing the corners, turn down the top hem, and add a lining from old dressmaking fabric and straps. Stay tuned.

Because of not making the bag sections separately, to add the gusset between them, I had some warp left. I used some leftover red wool yarn to weave the remainder of the warp which gave me this:
My plan is to fold it over like this (a bit hard to see, I know) into a clutch, stiffen it, line it and hey, I have a free purse. I have yet to decide whether to leave the fringe on the outside or sew it on the inside. I'm currently thinking inside... I might also embellish it a bit, add a bit of stitching perhaps, maybe I'll felt it, who knows? Time will tell.

And all this from rubbish lying around the house!

Birthday card

2009-01-25T14:30:00.006+11:00

I just had my birthday week. My birthday is always a long, drawn-out affair, unlike other people who just get the one day. When I was younger, it always fell in the long summer school holidays, and while my family weren't big on birthday parties, as I got older my friends would celebrate once school was in again. Now, I celebrate on my birthday but usually I also celebrate on the closest weekend, with my grandson, who shares my birthday, my son, who is two days later, and my daughter-in-law, who is just over a week later. (This family alone keeps the newsagents in business in January, buying birthday cards for each other!) This year, my daughter-in-law decorated a joint cake for us all - one side in pink with toy cooking utensils for us girls, the other in blue-green with a toy digger for the boys! (Wish I'd taken a photo!)

And then I received this beautiful card from my friend Kaite.
Isn't it lovely? The image is a tiny folded kimono. I am always amazed by people's skill with paper. I find paper to be a very difficult medium, steadfastly opposed to what I want to do with it. It wants to crease where I do not want creases, and fights any attempt to crease it where I do. Its friend glue is just as recalcitrant, going where I don't want it to be rather than where I do. We are just not friends. So I am always amazed and impressed when my friends produce incredible things like this, apparent with effortless ease!

Sorry, Kaite, I has too busy partying to put anything special up on the blog on my birthday. Hope I've made up for that today?

Mags, I'm intrigued about weaving on the knitting machine! Or do you mean it's the closest you ever got to weaving? I have an elderly knitting machine under the spare bed. It's lived under one or other of the beds since about 1978, when I was given it by my mother. She'd been given it by someone who knew she liked to knit, but Mum discovered she preferred knitting with needles in the time-honoured way and gave it to me. Like mother, like daughter! But somehow I just hate to get rid of it in case someone wants it sometime! Perhaps I should hand it on to my daughter in the time-honoured fashion, and she can keep it under her spare bed for thirty years. Only, she doesn't have a spare bed yet. I reckon she needs a bigger place, don't you?

Dimensional paint rubbing plates

2009-01-25T14:28:00.005+11:00

I haven't been entirely idle during the heatwave. I saw this neat tutorial by Terri Stegmiller on making your own rubbing plates using dimensional paint over at FibreandStitch and thought I'd have a play. After several attempts I made these plates: Let me tell you, it was not an easy task making something worth keeping! I'm very happy I was using really cheap dimensional paint, because I wiped away a whole lot of attempts before I made something I might actually want to print on fabric! It's really hard to maintain a steady pressure on the dimensional paint bottle and draw with a steady hand as well.

Then I left them to dry. My friends will tell you that I have a short attention span and I really like stuff that happens right now. By now, I was already over the whole business but then I found them in the back bathroom a few days later, all nice and dry, and I was ready to try them out. I generally use my rubbing plates as stamps, by rolling on paint with a brayer, so that's what I did.

I have to say I am pretty disappointed with the results, given the amount of effort I put into it! These are the best of my prints: I deliberately chose a brown colour because I had a kind of Kente cloth in my mind from the designs. But I found it was really hard to get paint to stick to the dimensional paint, it really wanted to slide off into the hollows in between. I had not imagined this happening! I can see they might work out quite well as rubbing plates, especially if you are using them with paper, or soft media like fabric crayons, and I promise I will play around with them that way one of these hot days. But compared to the string stamps I made, which are messy but in a fun way, the process just doesn't thrill me and the reults just didn't justify the effort. There probably is an easier way...

Two new things to share

2009-01-04T22:37:00.007+11:00

Christmas is not a time when I generally make a lot of progress on things. Time is usually spent with family and friends, and making necessary recovery afterwards. It's also a time when I tend to tidy my workroom, clear my pin boards and generally make ready for the coming year.

But in between, I have done these two things.
This one has been shown here before. It actually dates from 2005, when I was making journal quilts. At A3, they were a little larger than other journal quilts, because I found A4 size too small, and I wanted to experiment with different techniques. This journal quilt was for a challenge I set several friends, called Weather Report. The idea was to choose a month of the year and express that month in an A3-sized work. I chose August, the end of winter and a month that is often wet here in Sydney. I envisaged leaves floating in a puddle, overlaying a map of the Sydney coastline showing Sydney Harbour and Botany Bay. I painted the background fabric, stitched the coastline and made lacy dead leaves by stitching onto Romeo. Once they were stitched on, I quilted water ripples. But it was so hard to get the balance right and I really wasn't happy with it. The coastline didn't show up clearly. So I accentuated it with paint, but then the ripples got lost.

This week, I used my new Prismacolor pencils to accentualte the water ripples a little with yellow shading. I'm much happier with it now and I think it might actually be finished now! Maybe.

My second thing is brand new. Last winter, I saw a jacket in a shop that I really liked. It was made from fabric that had black and bright blue alternating warps and a blue-grey weft. (In retrospect, this might have been a black and grey warp and a blue weft...) I wondered how these colours would look in a scarf. I warped it up this week and thought it looked quite boring! So I added a little ladder yarn in blue with silver bits, and a strand of two-ply bright purple (magenta, maybe?) yarn in some of the blue warps. I actually like how it's turned out, quite classy I think!

I do like scarves - they are so quick to whip up on the loom! My last three projects have been larger, the full width of the loom, and in fine yarn, so it was really good to use something a bit chunkier!

Stitched yarn

2008-12-24T21:35:00.007+11:00

Last Fibrecircle day, my friend Helen brought over some samples of stitched yarn. She made them by laying down yarns next to one another and zigzag stitching over the top.

I love the gorgeous texture of these pieces, so I just had to have a go with some of my ten thousand yarns.
This was my first attempt. My, is this process slow! After a while, I got so bored that I added in some strips of bright pink paper ribbon, to make it grow a little faster. The ribbon is not especially robust but there is enough yarn over it to hold it all together. I really like the way the ladder yarn gives an airy effect.

Then I thought, "there has to be a faster way!". So I tried with a bundle of yarns of different thickness, about six or seven strands. Of course, this is way wider than just two strands, so instead of the zigzag stitch, I used that machine mending stitch that's a zigzag shape but each zig is made of three straight stitches. I found that the outer strands still tended to get missed. So I tried twisting the yarns together as I went, and that worked better, though I still had some loops along the edge. Then I tried loosely plaiting the strands and that worked really well. I was using multiple strands so I switched them around as I plaited. This is how the whole lot looked once I had stitched the sections together: I like this so much, I've started another one! I like the way the strands twist in and out of one another. It looks very organic, like rock strata or sand patterns. And yes, it is faster than sewing them two by two!

Aw gee!

2008-12-16T20:19:00.004+11:00

I just saw that Carol has presented me with this award! Thanks, Carol, that's high praise from you! Carol's blog is full of wonderful and inspiring things, so I really urge you go and have a look - just click on her name.

It's difficult to choose the five blogs that I find most inspiring and creative.
1. Creative Dabbling: I love to visit Erica's blog because she's always busy and she writes about so many interesting things. She always gives me a new way to look at the world.
2. threadsandthoughts because Rhonda's embroideries are just exquisite, and her photographs too.
3. Dyed and Gone to Heaven - Lisa is having such fun with the City and Guilds work and she does way brilliant work!
4. Digital Gran Fabulous work from Margaret as well as incredible photos of Wales
5. Magstitch The marvellous site of Maggie Grey, because her work always inspires me to try something new.

There are lots of others I could have chosen - maybe next time!

God is telling me not to felt

2008-12-09T15:12:00.004+11:00

Well, perhaps not. But I have this very elderly UFO. It's my oldest UFO, in fact, because I began it when I first learnt to knit squares at about the age of seven. In fact, some squares have been cast off by knitting two together, before I learnt the proper way. (It makes quite a pretty edge.)
I stopped knitting squares when I got to 100 (I was probably about 16 by this stage).
I was going to sew them together into a rug (see, even then bright colours and patchwork fascinated me!) but then I hit a snag. I hate sewing knitting together. With A Passion. I sew my jumpers together because if I don't, well, I don't actually have a jumper. And that seems a bit pointless. But I have to grit my teeth and make myself do it, so I have the jumper to wear.

OK, I thought, I'll crochet them together. But by this stage, I was a penniless young mother, and buying a whole lot of yarn just to crochet these squares together really couldn't be justified on our budget. I tried cheap yarn - oh, yuck! I tried scraps of leftover yarn from my knitting projects on the principle of the brighter the better, but no, it just wasn't right. I have dragged this bag of knitted, half-crocheted-together squares around with me through fifteen house moves.

Then I had a brilliant thought. All these squares were knitted with 100% wool yarn and hey, I could felt them! Then I'll have a whole lot of brightly coloured felt shapes to use in my textile work. Or I could sew them together on the machine and embellish them a bit. I decided to do a test felt on a couple of squares by beating them around in a little bit of hot water in a bucket until I lost interest, and then washing them with other stuff and tumble-drying them. Result, two rather startled, slightly fluffy squares, not looking anything like felt. Hmm.

OK, do it properly. All the squares into the washing machine, add hot water at the lowest level and wash. Halfway through the filling process, the washing machine died.
It's hard not to conclude that this is a Message.

Wedding wrap

2008-12-07T16:26:00.008+11:00

Here are some more photos of the wedding wrap:

You might guess that I am pretty chuffed at how this turned out! But I am even more thrilled to have received a commission to make one in black as an evening wrap! It's on the loom at this very minute, so stay tuned for a photo once it's finished.

Some generous friends...

2008-12-07T16:11:00.009+11:00

... sent me these lovely postcards before I went overseas. They knew I was way too busy to make any myself, but they sent me some anyway. How nice is that! The theme was Share a Cuppa, because we are nearly all a long way apart and a virtual cuppa is all we get to share. Thank you all!

This one is from Kaite, who initiated the swap: Isn't it brilliant? Thanks Kaite.

This one is from Prue, whose great love is her garden: It really makes me feel like I am sitting in her garden, sharing a lovely afternoon tea!

This one is from Rory: This one has a very garden-y feel too, doesn't it? Love those colours.

This one is from Pamela: We must all be mad gardeners, mustn't we? Pamela has even added some embroidered flowers.

Finally, this one is from Di: Isn't it elegant? And so very English - I love it!

I've finally found a moment to make some postcards in reply.
These will be wending their way to their new owners early next week.

Printing

2008-11-12T22:16:00.004+11:00

I missed the Fibrecircle meeting this week, due to my annoying cold, but I thought I would play a little with the materials I had packed to take. The result are over on the Fibrecircle blog, if you'd like to have a look. Basically, I was printing onto fabric using a rolling pin, a brayer, some straw placemats and Fiskar's Texture Plates. My favourites, though, are the monoprints I took from the glass board I was inking from!

Now for the aaah moment...

2008-11-08T22:14:00.006+11:00

What a fabulous day!

Kas and Jon listening to the celebrant..

Jon saying his vows...

Kas putting the ring on Jon's finger

and a happy moment during the signing of the register.

And Tim, the bridesman (left of the last shot), caught the bouquet.

"Now", he mused, "I'll just have to get a date..."

Thank you to everyone who sent good wishes for the day. They seem to have worked, the rain held off until ten minutes after the ceremony finished.

And while we're talking about the wedding..

2008-11-02T14:52:00.005+11:00

...here's a shot of the wrap I'm weaving for Kas to wear. I'm about halfway through and it's looking great. The warp is fine baby wool, the weft is silk/mohair, so it has a little fluffiness. Very soft, very pretty...

Nest-building

2008-11-02T14:00:00.003+11:00

Do mothers of the bride nest-build? Today I was overcome with the need to tidy out the wardrobe in the spare room. I found five bags of clothes that Vinnies will just love, including one bag that belonged to an aunt who died four years ago. OK, to be fair, under orders from the nursing home, we used to mind most of her off-season clothes, because she had no room to store them. But, yes, they could have gone to charity long since. Why this week?

I guess I feel like to should be Doing Something, but most somethings have been done and the rest have to happen this coming week. Perhaps it's a little unsettling when one's only daughter, and last child to marry, finally walks down that red carpet?

Well, psychology aside, I do have a nice clean cupboard and another little task for my ToDo list.

Textile Travels Part 2: Mulhouse textiles

2008-09-22T02:44:00.004+10:00

While I was in France, I went to the Museum of Fabric at Mulhouse. I have wanted to go there for a long time, since my friend Gerard sent me posters of their exhibitions, which have decorated my workroom. It's quite a small museum, but very detailed. Mulhouse, in Alsace, became a textile printing area when Louis XVI banned the importation of the fashionable Indian chintzes into France, after a cholera outbreak in Marseilles. At this time, Mulhouse was ain independent principality, and the town fathers saw an opportunity. Many Europeans had travelled to India to try to discover the secrets of Indian printing and part of the exhibition at Mulhouse mentions these people and their contibution to European fabric printing. Once the secrets were discovered, chintz printing became the major industry in this area. The exhibition (all in French) describes the technical processes, including the original design books of some fabric designers and three full-sized looms from different periods, and provides lots of examples of fabrics printed in Mulhouse. There are also some examples of garments made from chintz, and several "boutis", French wholecloth quilts, made from Mulhouse chintz fabrics.

When I was there, there was also a special exhibition called Black and White, of fabrics designed and printed in Mulhouse. Fabrics are still printed there today, but mostly as special runs for couture designers, and for IKEA. There were examples of couture outfits made from Mulhouse fabrics, plus IKEA fabrics and other design works. I'll add photos and more information once I'm home again.

Textile travels Part 1: Tapestries and Sewing Machines

2008-09-21T06:36:00.006+10:00

The blog has been quieter that usual because I'm not at home, creating things, but off travelling. I've managed to include quite a number of textile-related things in our travels, which my husband seems to find quite surprising, though I can't think why, since I arranged our itinerary!

First was a flying visit to the Louvre in Paris, as soon as we got off the plane. This visit, I went to see the tapestry collection, and very impressive it is. These were just the first of many tapestries I've seen in France, but I love them and can't get enough! I don't have clear photos of them, as they are kept in low light conditions, but they are wonderful pieces of work.

The Louvre is an amazing museum and I really enjoy going back, because I see new things every time. It's an incredible resource for the textile artist - since it contains so many different examples of material culture, from just about every corner of the earth. I find myself photographing and sketching things I never knew I was interested in, because the shape or line or pattern captures my attenti0n. See this ancient potsherd. Doesn't it have a fantastic design?

And this mosaic.... made up of incredible details like this...

The next stage of my textile travels took me to the Peugeot Museum, in Haute Saone. Yes, strange that you should ask, the man I love *is* interested in cars, but I found to my surprise that the Peugeot company began life as a tool-making concern, and their tools included sewing machines, which they continued to make until the 1930's. Of course their museum wasn't very interested in providing the large amount of detail I wanted about their machines, but it was fascinating to see these old European machines, dating from only shortly after the more familiar US machines. Here is an 1867 hand crank machine:

And a pedal machine with an alternating foot action:
This one is one of their last machines, in 1936-37.

I love the way that utilitarian items were made to look so beautiful.

Next, textiles in Mulhouse....

Big update!

2008-08-13T22:23:00.013+10:00

I haven't been idle lately, though nothing has reached the blog!

First of all, I made some more pants. I'm really on a roll with pants lately! The first pair was made from a navy blue wool-polyester blend, lined with polyester lining. They feel lovely to wear and very warm! The second pair was from grey polyester, lighter weight but very comfortable. These ones have dark grey contrast topstitching. I've since made a third pair from charcoal-coloured polyester, with a long half-belt waistband.

I also finished the jumper I've been knitting this winter. It was based on a jumper I once saw in a magazine from the eighties. I started with a basic jumper pattern, as I mostly do, and worked out the variation. I'm very happy with it! I also finished weaving a second scarf, which I haven't photographed yet. It taught me that, if you make a mistake in the warp, it really is better to start again, rather than try to fudge it! The scarf itself is nice, but it's a little too short because the warp problems were so annoying and I spent a lot of time unweaving to correct errors. Lesson learned! I've just finished a third project, a wrap, which I made from leftover baby wool. I wanted to try weaving with fine yarn, and I wanted to practise getting my selvedges nice and even. I also wanted to try out using a pattern stick, which was very interesting and worth exploring further. It's turned out very well, and I really like it. The colours are the ones I wear often.

I've also been preparing patchwork blocks to take on my travels. I did a test block, which looks like this: The fabrics are pretty florals, in pinks, yellows and blues, from a range called Amelia's Garden. I'm combining them with toning plains in a positive-negative layout. So one block will have flower baskets on a plain background, and the next plain baskets and a floral background. I'm not used to using plain fabrics - tone-on-tones are much more usual these days - but it's what seemed to work best with the soft florals. It will make a lovely quilt for my favourite little girl. It was going to be a pink and yellow quilt, but somehow those blues just sneaked in!

Scarf finished!

2008-07-14T20:50:00.005+10:00

I've fallen behind with blogging these past few weeks - just too much happening out there in the real world. But I did finish my first scarf on my beautiful new loom! I just love it, even though I can see all the things I need to learn how to do better! I couldn't think how to photograph it so here it is hanging on my bedroom door.
I deliberately have kept to firm yarns, not the fluffy or feathery ones that are more forgiving for the beginning weaver. I really want to learn how to weave neatly, making nice firm selvedges, so I need to be able to see every time I don't get it right.

Making silk paper

2008-07-14T20:37:00.004+10:00

Another fun day playing! Today, Fibrecircle made silk paper, which I find is a Very Useful Thing to have in one's stash. The process is really easy; the hard part is choosing fibre colours that work well together.

I made one multicoloured one in blues, reds and golds

and one in red and gold with sparkly Angelina fibres embedded in it. This one is hard to photograph, like all shiny things, even without using flash.

I always seem to be a bit stingy when I lay down the fibres so the result is always quite thin and lacy. I quite like that but I need to learn to apply the fibres with a more liberal hand!

Silk paper is really easy to make. I used tussah silk and added Angelina fibres.
I laid down a piece of tulle (netting) and laid silk fibres onto the tulle until it was covered, making sure the fibres crossed one another and were not all lying in the same direction. On the second piece, I laid the fibres at a 45-degree angle to the sides of the piece and at right angles to each other, to avoid the obvious vertical stripes of the first piece. I placed another layer of tulle over the topand brushed over a detergent solution on both sides, to open up the fibres and make them receptive to the adhesive. Then I brushed over textile medium on both sides. We tried drying the samples flat but they are very wet, so we eventually hung them to dry, which was naturally much faster. When they were dry, I peeled off the layers of tulle.

A little catching up

2008-06-29T20:52:00.010+10:00

I've been meaning to share these lovely things that friends have given me lately.

First, Erica gave me these gorgeous dyed cheesecloth pieces a few weeks ago. I don't know what they will turn into but aren't they beautiful? I just love these rich colours.

Then my friend Prue brought me this gorgeous little owl bead from Timbuktu To Kathmandu in Noosa, because she knows I collect owls. Sorry about the picture quality but it's so hard to photograph such tiny things. Isn't it cute? I'll have to think of something very special for this one!

Then my friend Kaite sent me a little piece of MailArt to brighten my day.
I'm sure my postman will be very intrigued!

My new toy!

2008-06-28T21:31:00.005+10:00

I haven't been blogging much lately, mostly because I have been busy with Real Life Stuff (RLS). RLS is usually considered boring but, as part of it has been making my only daughter a wedding dress, I can't really say that, can I! Nor can I really show you a picture of the toile version, in case the Man Of Her Dreams happens to visit (hi Jon!).

But it hasn't been all RLS, because on Friday I took delivery of my New Toy. Here it is: Yes, it's a little travelling loom. I love it! I love the possibilities of it, I love the way the scarf I'm weaving from cheap Spotlight wool is coming out,I love the way weaving has the same Zen feel of hand quilting. You just sit there and your hands do stuff and your mind goes away into some far, far place, and returns refreshed, and gee, did I do all that while I was gone? (Reminds me how I've missed hand quilting. I really must sew some backings for the pile of quilt tops awaiting attention... once the RLS is over and done with!) I'll show you the scarf once it's off the loom. It's nothing very complicated, because I decided, for once, to start easy and work up to the trickier things. But the colour is that hard-to-capture deep turquoise, alternating with purple in the warp and with a couple of other yarns in the weft. I'm learning a lot and I already have yarn for the next scarf, which will be a houndstooth, I think.

Playing with Foils

2008-06-16T16:17:00.016+10:00

Today I played with foiling onto fabric with the Fibrecircle group. I'd played with this before, using fusible web and foiling glue, but this time I also used the hot glue gun and bonding powder. We used foiling packs from The Thread Studio and Jones Tones foils from Spotlight. The Jones Tones foils say they do not need heat to transfer, just pressure & glue, but we found they were not very successful cold-foiled, and transferred much better with heat as well as pressure. I haven't distinguished significantly between the two types of foil, since we used the same method with both.

First we played around with glues. We used a grey glue sold by Diane Groenewegen in her classes and a white foiling glue, just called Glue for Foiling. We tried painting the glue directly onto fabric, stencilling it through paper stencils cut with scrapbooking punches, stamping it with wooden stamps and drawing freehand using the applicator nozzle on the white glue. We also made patterns with the hot glue gun. We set these aside to dry and moved onto fusible web.

This one was done with a piece of fusible web, with straight strips of a type of hemming tape, marketed to quilters to adhere 1/4in seams, ironed onto the fabric. I always find fusible web gives a very strong transfer, which is fine for big patches of colour, or when the foil sheet is almost exhausted, but otherwise is a bit strong. I also stamped some leaf shapes with a wooden stamp on the lower part but they are not very clear.

By this time, the glued fabrics were dry. I began with the sample brushed with glue. This was acrylic fabric I had melted over a candle, and I just brushed the top with the glue. The low heat of the iron did not affect the fabric at all. I used a copper-coloured foil.

Next, I tranferred foil onto the stencilled glue images. This was a scrap piece that had previously been painted and stamped. I made glue stencils of tiny leaves to foil. The stencils were not always very successful, perhaps because the stencils were so small, but they do look somewhat leaf-like.

I began to play around with the different glues. The grey glue gave very clear stencils, though the second stencil was also from a punch, measuring about 1in square and with a lot of detail(second left bottom). The white foiling glue was not as clear when stencilled (first and third left bottom). I also tried drawing with the white glue applicator (centre) but that was not very successful, though others had better success with this technique. Using very fine bonding powder gave quite coarse results through the stencil (upper right) and some of the bonding powder adhered to the baking paper and retransferred when the foil was moved. The bonding powder was very hard to control for this kind of use.

Howeevr it's fine for general sparkle effects.

I had used the hot glue gun to draw a combination of thicker and spidery lines onto red velveteen. I foiled it with a gold iridescent foil. I found that the hot glue gun took the foils extremely well but the glue didn't adhere to the red velveteen at all well. It would be possible to peel off at least part of the design. But it looks great, doesn't it? This is my favourite of what I did. I'd quite like to try the hot glue gun on baking paper and then foiling it - you'd end up with free-standing elements that could be stitched to other work.

The hot glue gun glue took the foil so cleanly that I had a lovely negative shape left on the foil. I used fusible web to attach that to a deep blue, possibly silk fabric. It also looks great! Much more exciting than it looks in the photo.

It's always hard to tell from samples just how foiling can add to a finished piece, since foiling is usually the last step. That's partly why I used samples that had already been painted and stamped but weren't very successful. Adding some glitz in the form of foils certainly improved them. I'm not sure this is something I will do often but it's an easy way to add a bit of shine.

More quick sketches

2008-06-10T22:17:00.003+10:00

Textile progress has been slow here lately, but I have managed a few more sketches, of things I see in my travels.
Lunch at a friend's house
Puddles outside the library

Quick sketches

2008-05-31T20:36:00.008+10:00

I decided I'd experiment with some quick line drawings and water colour wash, since these are the media I'll be taking with me when I travel overseas later in the year. So I'm just doing quick sketches from memory of things I have been doing each day. Some have captions, some don't yet. It's really more about mood that representational drawing. ATASDA people covering the library books.
Drafting my daughter's wedding dress on a grey day
Shopping with my darling mother-in-law - I often think we must loook like Fatty and Skinny! Not sure why this one came out so grey, though it was a grey day. I really enjoy her company.
Erica and I went to the Hunter's Hill Quilt Show yesterday and they had these beautiful little quilts hanging up in the sunshine. It's an an old sandstone building with these beautiful semicircular steps, made just for the pleasure of the shape.

More Melting stuff

2008-05-27T16:14:00.014+10:00

Yesterday, I went on playing with melting Tyvek, and playing with the beads I made before. This time, I was using the soldering iron, because Kaite in Bathurst had quite different effects using that on her beads instead of the heat gun.

First, I melted some strips of plain Tyvek, similar to the ones I used last time. This time I only used neat pre-rolled strips, rolling them on and adding a dab of UHU glue to hold them. This is what they looked like when melted: As always, it's hard to take clear close-up photos, but you can see that the medium didn't puff up and shrivel the way it did when heated with the heat gun. You have much more control of where the heat goes, using the soldering iron, so it's easy to make marks but, as the tip is small, it's harder to get big effects. I tried a sort of colouring-in approach with the tip of the soldering iron, to melt large areas of the Tyvek and that gave a interesting, rough surface. I painted one of these beads afterwards with red acrylic paint, dry-brushed on.

Then I wrapped some of the wristband Tyvek strips and melted them with the heat gun. Again, it was easy to make marks and melt the wrapped ends, but the layers didn't melt away and distort as they did with the heat gun. The colouring-in approach worked well here too, but it was also fun to make holes and lines.

We found that the wristband beads tended to be tacky afterwards, whether heated with the heat gun or the soldering iron. After some epxerimentation, we decided that it was the residue of the glue that is on the end of the wristband strip to adhere it around the wrist. If this glued end was removed, and the end of the strip adhered with UHU glue, the bead did not end up being tacky.

One of the thing that interested me was how the Tyvek beads would take colour after they had been melted. I took some red acrylic paint and dry-brushed it onto some of the plain Tyvek beads from last time. The paint adhered really well and gave a nice thick coating. Dry-brushing seemed to emphasise the roughness of the bead surface.

Then I painted the acrylic onto the free-formed plain Tyvek beads from the last time - the strips that were allowed to flap about under the heat gun as they were rolled. The left side bead was dry-brushed, while the right side one was painted with a wet brush. The paint adhered much less well when applied with a wet brush, the paint colour was much lighter and there were visible brush strokes in the paint surface. This looked fine on the asymmetrical shapes of these beads but might not on the rolled beads. I also used the wet-brushed red paint on one of the small gift ribbon beads, and it adhered OK but I'm not sure how permanent it will be once it's dry. It looks as if it might rub off over time. This isn't a big deal since wrapping ribbon comes in so many colours anyway.

Finally, as I had the paint handy, I painted over the white patches on some of the wristband tyvek beads that I had melted with the soldering iron. The colour on these beads was from the surface of the wristband and, as they melted, a lot of this colour disappeared, showing the base white Tyvek colour. I painted just the white areas with the red paint. I really liked the way these turned out. It's hard to see the contrast on the orange beads, but the red has added shadows in an interesting way.

I still have a lot of questions to ask about melting Tyvek, and of course I've hardly tried melting acrylic fabric into beads! But I now know that, by myself, I can make interesting beads in certain shapes to use in my work, so that's a start!

Burning stuff

2008-05-12T18:24:00.010+10:00

This post is in honour of Beverley's husband who wanted to know when she was going to start "burning stuff". Well, today she did and so did I, at our Fibrecircle playday.

First, I wound some strips of Tyvek around a bamboo skewer, added a dab of PVA to hold it and zapped it with the heat gun. Then I took the coloured Tyvek wristbands, found for us by Kaite, and did the same. Finally, I used more plain Tyvek strips but let them twist onto the skewer as they wanted to.
The top image shows the Tyvek (originally in the form of disposable overalls) and the wristbands. The second shows the bugle-bead-shaped plain beads on the left and the free-formed ones on the right. The middle one was made with non-melting thread wrapped around it, which acted as a resist to the heat, so it has deep ridges around it where it melted less and hollows where the heat could reach unobstructed. The tendency of the Tyvek to puff and distort seemed more noticeable on this one. I plan to try painting some of these to see how the Tyvek takes various media. (Sorry the photo is so poor, but I tried all different ways to photograph them with no better success!) The wristbands melted and distorted in really interesting ways, as the layers melted individually allowing the heat to reach the inner layers. I suspect it's because the printed colour affected the way the medium melted. They would be quite spiky and uncomfortable used in jewellery against the skin, but they have very organic shapes, like coral.

Next, I melted cheap chiffon ribbon. Like the Tyvek, this was much more interesting if the ribbon was wound on with folds and twists. Others in the group experimented with using two colours of ribbon and allowing them to twist as they were wrapped onto the skewer. They looked really good!

Then I played with melting yarn. Like most craft people, I have a huge collection of the new fancy acrylic/polyester yarns, including eyelash yarns. We wondered if these would melt into interesting beads. I used four different yarns - the variegated one which I can't identify, a thick orange and red one called Showoff, the pale wispy one called Sparkle and Paton's Feathers in purple and navy (not photographed). In each case, the yarn was tied to the skewer with a slip knot and then the yarn was twisted onto the skewer as it melted. All of them melted most satisfactorily. The fronds of the variegated one melted very well but the braid didn't so, although the beads are quite stiff, they look like threads wrapped around each other into tiny balls. Showoff was very thick and quite slow to melt but it created lovely textured beads that are quite soft to the touch, although they are well adhered. The pale Sparkle was a surprise. It melted into a very stiff plastic bead, with much more intense colours than the original yarn. Feathers behaved rather like the original variegated yarn, as the wisps melted and tied the braid together. I really think this is something worth exploring, as each yarn seems to yield different results.

Prue had been playing with melting gift ribbon so I tried that too. Her ribbon was pink and gave small, firm, very solid beads. I tried pearlescent ribbon but mine were not as tidy as hers - more "organic", as we artists like to say when we mean kinda weird looking. Again, the pale beads were very hard to photograph clearly - probably needing a black background for contrast. This is really fun and easy, and if you rolled them first and glued the ends, you'd get very neat spacer beads, the ultimate in recycling.

One area I wanted to explore was melting man-made fibres. In the end, I only made one textile bead. It was from a fairly loosely woven fabric in shades of red with a streak of gold thread through it. Some fibres, especially the gold, did not melt as fast as other ones, so the result was a very fibrous bead, with lots of glitz. The other bead in the photo is made from a short section of 1in chiffon ribbon on which I had stamped a flower in acrylic paint for another project, but not used. It really looks great, and I think this is worth further experimenting too.

Carol tried a medium called UTEE, Ultra Thick Embossing Enamel, over some of her beads. It worked best with beads that had some texture to begin with, so the medium could get a grip. It was best used as a couple of layers, rolled on rather than dipped, as too many layers tended to become cloudy and crack when the bead was moved on the skewer. It could also adhere the bead permantly to the skewer, if allowed to get under the edge. However, it gave the beads a really interesting glassy finish, which might look particularly good on the painted chiffon ribbon, and adhered tiny beads really well. Something else to try out! We would also like to see if it gives a different finish to painting beads with clear nail polish (no, not heating it, just painting and drying naturally!).

Not everything worked, of course. The foil from chocolate wrappers melted but could not be removed from the skewer. We hypothesised that using a short section of drinking straw underneath it might solve this problem, but we didn't have any to experiment with. Similarly, some heavier fabrics melted but could not be removed. Some things just didn't melt at all, at the temperatures we were producing, and one fabric turned gray-black at the same time as it reached melting point. Usually there is a small gap between melting and burning point, which is what we were exploiting.

So I had a fun day and have a small pile of interesting beads to play with. And, as usual, a lot more questions.

Painting fusible web (Vliesofix)

2008-04-28T16:38:00.013+10:00

Today, my Fibrecircle group played with painting fusible web. I've used this technique before in my work, using acrylic paint, so I was interested in finding out whether the fluidity of the medium affected the results, and whether other media than paint could be used effectively. I also wanted to know if the glue base could be melted with a heat gun instead of an iron and how this might affect the outcome, and what the effect was if the web was torn apart before fusing.

First, I painted a section of fusible web with acrylics straight out of the tube, with a fairly dry sponge brush. The paint seemed to emphasise the webbing pattern, which was very visible once it was ironed onto cream quilters muslin. Dimensions 13in x 9in. The brown touches are from a little printing pigment ink pad, smeared over the surface immediately after painting.

Next, I used the same paint, thinned with just enough water that it flowed onto the web easily. Dimensions 10 1/2 x 11 1/2in. The backing paper buckled due to the wetness of the medium, as it had when I used it previously, giving some nice rippled effects. I added some embossing powder to the paint, but this was lost when the web was transferred, so I added more while the surface was still tacky and zapped it with the heat gun. It really looks like water, doesn't it?

Still working with slightly wetter acrylic paint, I painted the web with three colours, mixing the colours both on the palette and on the web. The texture on this one reminds me of brickwork, and I'm waiting for the graffiti artist with a spraycan to arrive! Dimensions 10 1/2in x 10in.

Last, still using acrylic paint, I created a very watery paint and roughly sloshed it onto the web. The background paper was very wet and buckled. When ironed onto the fabric, it looked rather like rusted fabric, with clear watermarks. Dimensions 13in x 2in.

Clearly, the wetness of the medium makes a big difference to the outcome. In the past, the watery texture hasn't always been what I wanted, so using a stiffer medium gives a rougher, more variable surface finish with more of an imprint from the webbing surface.

I didn't really play with too many different media. I did try fabric crayons, which went onto the web very well, as they are quite soft, like pastels. Dimensions 8in x 6in. The result was very textural, like a rubbing, as the crayons, like the drier acrylic, picked up the web texture. A friend tried Shiva Paintstiks but the effect was no different to drawing with them directly onto cloth, so it was considered not especially useful. Jo Sonja's Opalescent paints looked very ordinary until the web was ironed onto black fabric, when they achieved real star quality.

I also experimented with tearing the web apart before fusing. I've seen the web cut apart into shapes after painting (see especially Linda and Laura Kemshall's book, The Painted Quilt) but I wondered about using painted web as a collage medium, roughly torn apart. This one was painted with the same acrylic paint and, once dry, the web was torn apart and layered, then fused with the iron with a scrap of backing paper as an overlay. Dimensions 6 1/2in x 2in. I also painted one with Setacolour paint, and tore it apart in the same way.
Dimensions 3 1/2 x 2in I think this technique offers a lot of possibilities, as it gives the lovely textured effects but also makes a feature of the sheerness of the fusible web.

We experimented with using the heat gun instead of the iron to fuse the web to the background fabric. It won't show up in photographs but the heat gun results were noticeably more textured than the ironed ones. However, the tackiness of the web vanished, which might not be desirable if you're planning to add other layers, such as organza or foils, before the web dries thoroughly, but is useful to know if you want to stitch immediately without waiting for the web to dry throughly. Now I am wondering what would happen if you painted fusible web with dimensional paint, using the heat gun to transfer the glue to the fabric.

New bag

2008-04-23T20:04:00.009+10:00

I haven't posted much lately because the Real World, in the form of Mum's new kitchen, Karen's wedding plans and the urgent need to book accommodation in London and Paris, has been impinging on my virtual life. Enough, I say! I managed to get into the workroom long enough to be a little creative.
I bought these fabrics a few months ago, with a bag in mind.

First I quilted some of the fabric:
You can't really see the quilting here but it's a free-motion design of leaves and the odd flower (some of them very odd!). It shows up a little better on the back:

Then I cut out and assembled the bag: It's from a pattern, McCalls 4118. It's the first time I've ever made a bag from a commercial pattern and, while I really like the way it looks, I really wasn't happy with the design. I found the final seams, across the side bottom of the bag, were too thick (six layers of fabric, three of batting) to be sewn by machine and were a challenge sewn by hand with stab stitching. It would have been easy to design it in a way that ensured this didn't happen, so I'll be making some adaptations of this design when I make the next one. But I do like the way it looks! Here's a closer up view:

Just too damn busy!

2008-04-13T17:15:00.005+10:00

Sorry, no Scatterdays this week, though I did have some ideas. The K thing I like the smell of is my kitchen, especially on Friday when I made tomato sauce, pumpkin soup and chicken and vegetable soup. Mmm! My K hobby is, of course, knitting, and you could have seen my lovely rose red jumper, which just needs assembling and a collar. I expect it will appear here when I have some sitting-down time that's not at the computer to finish it. And while office things were a challenge, since I don't go to an office, I did think of keys, which I used to have when I did, and, in desperation, klebestift, which is the German word on my gluestick.

But I can share some drawings. I always want to draw much more than I actually do, so I'm trying to use those in-between times to draw. Today's in-between time was waiting for the virus scan to confirm that the sneaky little virus I picked up online (not via email) had been soundly dealt with by my sharp-toothed anti-virus software. This one interested me because of the difficult angles that weren't sharp but rounded:
I'm not very happy with it but that's the point of drawing - to get better at it.

I called this one Xray heron. The bird is backlit by strong sunlight relfecting off water and you can see the pinions overlapping and even some of the bones in the wing. I didn't expect to capture that translucence (and I didn't) but it was fun to try to draw it. I imagine angel's wings having this kind of relationship to light.

Scatterdays

2008-04-06T13:04:00.005+10:00

Scatterday again! I'm sure those Time Monks have been pinching time off me this week. Stop it!

This week's letter was A again and the categories were Restaurants, Things you find in the dark and Turquoise. I ate at the Austrian Schnitzelhaus with our Swiss friends last weekend but of course, I didn't take the damn camera, did I? I haven't been back since to take the photo I should have taken. The food was good and our friend appreciated the opportunity to drink a few authentic Austrian beers.

However, I did better with the other categories. The Things you find in the dark around here are Arachnids. We had an accumulation of leaf curl spiders early in the summer, followed belatedly by the more usual St Andrew's Cross spiders. The leaf curlers are annoying because they insist on their particular abode, despite the annoyance of always rebuilding their webs. The St Andrew's Cross spiders are smarter - if their webs are annihilated, they build them higher, above head height. I am accustomed to gardening under an umbrella of arachnid accommodation!

I had trouble finding turquoise at first. My acrylic paints don't include any turquoise just at present. But then I realised we have many turquoise Artefacts - a turquoise hippo, copy of an Egyptian artfact in the British Museum, a turquoise owl (of course), also a copy of an Egyptian artefact, and a modern pitcher bought from an artisan's atelier. I also own a cute Album, full of photos of my god-daughter and her sister, an attractive and appreciated annual event.

So please overlook the absence of the Austrian Schnitzelhaus. Clearly I need to take my camera with me *everywhere*!

Stamps

2008-04-03T16:02:00.008+11:00

Thanks to Margaret's blog, I was reminded about string stamps last week. I haven't made them for years, since my kids were young! We're talking about twenty-five years here! So I decided to have a play.

I made these three stamps in about ten minutes.

I found that the easiest method was to rub a blob of PVA glue between finger and thumb and then run the string through it. The string is nice and sticky, but you can use an awl or tweezers or your relatively clean other hand to manipulate it into place on the card.

I made some prints with leftover red paint.

Then I was overwhelmed by the impulse to colour in.
These ones will get a lot more colour than this, over time. I envisage them as iridescent with colour, eventually.

Helpdesk

2008-04-03T15:57:00.002+11:00

This was too good not to share.

Original taken from the show "Øystein og jeg" on Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK)in 2001. With Øystein Backe (helper)and Rune Gokstad (desperate monk). Written by Knut Nærum.

Some more experiments

2008-04-02T21:14:00.013+11:00

This week, I've been experimenting with transparency transfers. It's a technique I've used quite a bit in the past, but it's fun to play around with friends and see what new things can be done. In this method, you print an image from your computer into transparency, with a bubblejet (inkjet) printer. Then you use a polymer (acrylic) medium to transfer the image from the transparency onto fabric, by painting the medium onto the fabric and burnishing the image with the bowl of a spoon. Once dry, you heat-set the image by ironing it thoroughly.

First of all, we tried Golden gel medium, bought especially for this purpose. It's the medium that everyone raves about, in magazines and books, for this technique but it's been hard to buy in Australia until recently. This is what happened to my samples:
As you can see, the logo transferred, but with some blurring. It was unaffected by washing. So far so good.

Then I used a colour image:
This is a bit deceptive because I forgot to take a photo of the transferred image. The middle image here has been covered with a brown paint wash to disguise the many areas of white that showed through. The gel medium really didn't transfer the coloured image at all clearly, and the result was more like a watercolour painting than a photographic image. After all the sources saying this is *The* medium for transfers, I was quite disappointed. Some people had trouble getting any sort of print from the medium, and certainly none of them were clear. Some transparency sheets and some printers simply did not like the Golden medium at all. Mine were probably the best transfers, using Nobo transparencies and an Epson printer.

Here's another reason for my disappointment:
I've done a lot of PVA transfers in the past and, as you can see, you can get really clear images. I deliberately scrunched and roughed up the print when I washed it, because, for this particular project, I didn't want it to be too clear! Usually, there's not much loss of colour or clarity at all. After all, if I want clear photographic images, I'll print directly onto fabric from the printer. But if I'd used the Golden gel medium with this image, the faces wouldn't have been recognisable.

Another reason for my disappointment is that I had previously bought Chromacryl ordinary gel medium to try, and found that it made the ink run. It's a much runnier medium than the Golden gel medium, so I wasn't surprised that the image blurred. I did a print for contrast:
This medium really makes the ink run (there's a wash of ink around the outside of the image which was cropped from the photos), and, when washed, it turns a milky colour. I expected the Golden gel medium to be much better, and while it is better, it wasn't worth the outlay of more than twice the price of the Chromacryl. I'm sure it would be possible to thicken the Chromacryl medium, which might help prevent the ink running.

One of my favourite methods of transfer is metallic paints. I did a couple of samples, so the group could see what it looks like and experiment a bit. My first one was greyscale, transferred with silver paint, which in retrospect was pretty dumb. I'd already had a play with this image in Corel Photopaint, to blur the edges and that encouraged the grey print to fade even more into the silver paint. It looks a bit moody and interesting, just not quite what I wanted for my project! The transfer medium is Setacolor Shimmer Ash. I think the blueness of the middle image is a weird photographic thing - it basically didn't change when washed.

This one was a greyscale image, similarly blurred around the edges in Photopaint, but transferred with Setacolor Shimmer Gold. These paints transfer the image really well and I've used them lots of times before.

Of course you can transfer images with plain acrylic or fabric paints. This series shows the image transferred with red acrylic paints, and then overpainted with green textile paint. It's for one of my secret projects...

The fun part about playing like this is the unexpected. One member of the group had tried at home, with whatever she had on hand. She had found that mat spray, the fixative you spray over drawings in charcoal or other soft media, also gave a transfer. I laughed and said, "Oh I'm a cheapskate, I buy cheap hairspray to do that!" There was a stunned silence and I rushed for the hairspray can. Yes, you can make a very clear transfer with ordinary hairspray. This image was printed from a transparency that had previously been used for a not-very-successful Golden gel medium print, so it was just the remainder of the ink on the transparency. The ink just came straight off onto the fabric, without requiring much burnishing.

Sadly, it's evident that the print is not wash-fast. I plan to do some test samples onto fabric previously prepared with BubbleJet Set for straightforward printer printing, and I'm hopeful that a dyer friend will try using fabric pre-prepared with soda ash. There must be a way to make these very easy and cheap transfers wash-fast! Meanwhile, it seems like a very useful method for paper transfer, or for when you want your image to wash out afterwards, such as a guide for stitching.

Scatterdays

2008-03-29T17:37:00.003+11:00

After a little break when the Real World impinged, I'm back to playing Scatterdays. Of course, this week the letter is X, but we were mercifully excused from categories.

I know everyone will have the obvious Xylophone, but there are not enough X words in the world to be exclusive. So here is an extremely elderly xylophone, which has excited many children over the past thirty years.

Of course I could have shared my x-rays, but instead I extol the xylosma. This beautiful plant exists happily in a difficult spot in my garden that is both shady, and hot and dry, depending on the season and time of day. It provides shelter for more exotic examples, without expecting exceptional treatment, and expands exponentially until it is abruptly excised. which is accepts with equanimity. It has tiny white spring flowers but is exalted for its pretty new growth, pink on lime green. Isn't it exquisite?

Finally, in extremis, we have Xenocide, part three in the Ender Saga, which begins with Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card. He is among my favourite fantasy/sci-fi authors adnd his books often raise interesting ethical questions.

Evening bag

2008-03-29T16:54:00.008+11:00

Tidying up the workroom generally means I "find" all these little tasks that will only take me a minute to fix. One little job was to repair the strap of an evening bag I made back in 2005. It's from black Duchesse satin, and I designed simple red machine embroidery for the flap. The design is loosely based on a Very Useful Bag I have owned for years, but that one is in patent leather. I had to work out how I could make another one with the useful features of that bag.

Generally, I was happy with how it turned out, except that I couldn't get the heavy chain I wanted for the strap. All my clutch bags have straps, because there are always times when you need your hands free (for example, to eat the nice food and hold a glass at the same time!). I optimistically used the chain I did find, and of course, it broke the first time I used the bag.

I don't want the strap to be too bulky, because when I don't need it, it sits in a little pocket inside the bag. I decided to try sewing together two lengths of the lighter chain, to make a flat band. This is the strap being sewn together: The finished strap looks like this on one side: and like this on the other: I like the first side best, with just a hint of the red stitching showing.

Now it just needs me to attach the strap firmly to the bag and I'm done! I wonder how long that process will take?

Those expandable paint samples

2008-03-16T22:32:00.003+11:00

I finally found a moment to share the results of the expandable paint experiments. My main interest was not to see them puff (though that's fun too!), but to see how the medium I'm using takes various colouring media. So I stamped and blobbed the expandable paint without colouring onto various fabrics, and added the colour afterwards.

These samples show the expandable paint as it was printed and after it was coloured with acrylic paint. The first sample was stamped with a square of plastic grid, rather like the plastic used to stop leaves falling into your gutters. Since the plastic strips all run the same way on one side, single stamping just gives you stripes, but turned at right angles, it give you a criss cross pattern. Once it was dry and puffed with a heat gun, I painted the whole sample with blue acrylic paint, wet on wet; I wet the fabric with water first and brushed on quite wet paint. I added a touch of Treasure Gold afterwards, once it had dried.

The second sample was stamped using a kitchen sink strainer, and dry brushed with the same paint once it had been puffed; I touched a dry brush in the paint and brushed it lightly across the surface. The paint just sits on the high points, a bit like taking a rubbing. The strainer is a fun stamping object but one of the group also found she got a very clear, sharp result from stencilling the expandable paint through the holes in the strainer.

The third sample was wet on dry - quite sloppy paint laid down just on part of the puffed areas with a brush.

I also coloured plain puffed samples with gouache, fabric paints, calligraphy ink, Dye-na-flow, marker pen, Treasure Gold, Rub 'n Buff, Shiva Paintstiks and fabric crayons...

Weather Report

2008-03-10T20:45:00.003+11:00

While I was flinging paint around today, I decided to add some paint to Weather Report. I talked about this one back in September, when it was on my design wall. It was one of my journal quilts from 2006, that wasn't quite as successful as I'd have liked. It looked a bit too much the same, so I decided ages ago to add paint to emphasise the coastline. I did that today, and it looks much better: I like it better now, but I think the overlay of a rainy puddle is getting a little lost now, so the leaves look like they are hanging in space. I thought this might happen, but now I need to find a way to balance it back the other way. Maybe some beading?

Playday!

2008-03-10T19:43:00.010+11:00

Today I had a fun playday with the Fibrecircle group. We were experimenting with puff paint additive (expandable paint) and some bought puff and dimensional paints. I've played with them before but some of the others in the group hadn't. I wanted to see what happens when you print, dry, puff and then colour over the top; basically how well they take acrylic paints, Treasure Gold and other rub-ons, crayons and so on. I also wanted to play with my new heat gun!

This one has stamped images in commercial puff paint, dimensional paint, expandable paint medium coloured with acrylic paints and some expandable paint alone. The base fabric is a medium weight polyester. When I puffed the motifs with the heat gun, the thicker ones at the right hadn't dried thoroughly, so they deformed the fabric in an interesting way. (This was another part of my experiment - what happens if you puff them before they are completely dry?) Another group member had painted onto velvet very thickly and puffed after only a couple of hours drying time, and the result was this gorgeous bubbly effect that looked like lichen on rocks. More playing in this area, I think!

These were puff paints and expandable paint coloured with acrylic paints, printed onto crystal organza. I was interested to know what puffed paint might look like on very lightweight fabric, and whether the heating process for puffing would melt the organza. I found that, by working carefully, I could puff the paint without the organza melting, but it was a near thing and the organza melted in a couple of places. It also deformed quite easily from not very thick expandable paint.

This one has stamped images in the basic media, on a fairly coarsely woven cotton fabric. The expandable paint is from an old bottle, which tends to puff unevenly. It's the one I used for the Where You Live postcard. I plan to paint, rub and generally play with adding colour on these uncoloured ones.

This one was an extra. One of the group brought rubbing plates and soluble wax crayons. I wondered whether the crayons would act as a resist, if I did a rubbing before adding expandable paint. The red is the rubbing with the wax crayon, the gold is puff paints, puffed up. I found the wax crayon did act as a resist, so I got some nice layering effects. The fabric is a remnant of one I painted for the book pages, a pale green with some faint red highlights.

I've already cut apart the individual images and overpainted some of them with acrylic paint. I want to see how the medium takes paint after puffing and how this compares to adding paint initially. I know that sometimes you want to unify a piece by painting over the top of everything after the medium is puffed, but I also want to see what individual motifs are like if you paint just the motif.

More to follow!

Finished!

2008-03-04T22:06:00.003+11:00

Actually I finished the journal cover last Friday, just haven't had a minute to put up a photo. I'm really happy with it.

The front under the flap looks like this:
The butterfly hides the bead and elastic fastening. I think, next time I get out fabric paints, I might paint strokes of colour around the bead to make it into a flower. I did try adding straight stitches but they get in the way of the elastic, so I took them out again.

I've started adding pages to do with Fibrecircle, the new textile explorations group I belong to. I may share some pages later, as we go along.

Hooray!

2008-02-24T15:22:00.008+11:00

I've finally started being creative again! It's been a very long summer break this year. I've been busy making a cover for an A6 journal, an ATASDA NSW Branch challenge.

I began with a piece of textured and slightly stripey gold furnishing fabric, which was serendiptiously donated to the group on the day of the challenge. Originally, I was going to make my cover with simple fold-back pockets to hold the book covers but that looked pretty boring. I quickly decided my journal should have a decorative front flap, like the one that Kirry . was demonstrating at ATASDA this month, to get us excited about the challenge.

First, I pulled out some silk paper that I made with Erica ages ago, and I loved the way the raggy edges looked on the gold background. So instantly I imagined my flap with raggy edges, vaguely leaf-shaped. But it looked a bit funny folded over the plain gold front, so I added a bit more of the silk paper to the section that will become the front cover. Now the flap and the front cover look like they belong together. They will need something to distinguish them apart, though. I ratted through my collection of butterflies, the ones that flutter around my design wall. I had a big kick on fabric butterflies several years ago, and ever since then, these butterflies have perched in odd places, as brooches, sitting on bags... wherever they want to go. One of the pink butterflies flew onto my journal.

The front cover looked a bit odd when the flap was open, with just the silk paper. I wanted some open space and I didn't want to add much bulk under the flap, but I remembered buying some gorgeous organza ribbon with dragonflies on it. I stitched the ribbon in place before I laid down the silk paper, as a little surprise hidden under the flap when it's closed, but a bit more interesting once the flap is open.

The silk paper isn't robust enough to cope with the rough handling the flap will get, so it needed the support of the background fabric. I also wanted the inside of the flap to look good, as this will be visible when the flap is open. I found a gorgeous red fabric in my miscellaneous fabric stash, something that was also a free giveaway, leftover from someone's dressmaking.

I wanted a slide-in pocket for the back cover, so I extended this heavy dressmaking fabric for the pocket. I added fusible webbing just to the end that will be stitched. I figured that the back pocket should be quite strong, as I'll probably end up tucking Important Bits of Paper inside it, so I reinforced the inner edge with twill tape.

I didn't want to extend the silk paper much past the flap, so I knew I needed something to go over the edge of it, to be an end point, but also to mark the front edge of the book and ensure the cover doesn't impinge on the stitched area. I scrabbled around in my ribbon box and found some green paper ribbon, from a birthday present wrapping. I ironed it carefully and cut it into strips. I always Like to use elements in more than one place, so I also used this ribbon to mark and reinforce the spine of the book and I used it as an edge to the back pocket, to help stiffen it.

Now I could do some of the structural stuff. I stitched the back pocket to the back of the cover, right sides together, with a very narrow seam and turned it right side out.

I wasn't happy with the length of the flap from the front pocket, so I decided to add a double band of the lining fabric as an edge. The seam is thicker than I'd really like, but it's a fairly robust edge for the front pocket. I can't sew the front pocket yet, because I need to stitch the silk paper first.

Here's what it looks like so far:

and the inside: The inside is still unfinished, because I want to do the stitching before I put the lining on.

Next, I satin stitched around the edges of the silk paper on the front cover and flap. My satin stitching is not very good, but I keep persisting, since I don't imagine it will get better by wishing. I used two threads, pink and green embroidery threads, in the top and just the pink in the bobbin. First I did a narrow satin stitch around the edges, then I carefully trimmed the whiskers and went around again, with a slightly wider and longer stitch. This gives a nice fat, firm edge and covers up my inevitable disasters in the first pass.

Then I dropped the feed dogs and, using my free motion foot, free-motion zigzagged shapes like leaves, following the fibre lines in the paper. Then, using a darker shade of pink alone, I free-motion straight-stitched some round shapes like fruit or flowers, in the areas of the paper that were pink. In the remaining sections, I free-motion stitched divisions, vaguely like leaf veins. This was just to give the paper some definition and help it withstand handling.

Now the piece looks like this:

I'm so happy with how it looks! Tomorrow, I will do some beading and work out the fastening, which will be hidden by the butterfly. My butterfly doesn't have any antennae at present, so I will need to do a bit of wire work to make those too.

Apology

2008-02-13T15:32:00.003+11:00

In 1912, this country passed a Federal law allowing Aboriginal children to be taken from their families against their parents' consent and raised outside their culture. The government of the day believed that the Aboriginal culture was doomed, in the face of their inability to adapt to white culture and technology, and the best way to ensure a white Australia was to raise aboriginal children, especially those of part-white parentage, outside that culture. Two full generations of Aboriginal children were taken away in this way. The fairer-skinned children were adopted by white families and raised white; the darker skinned children were largely raised in orphanages and treated as servants.
The only reason for doing this was race.
This is a shameful part of the history of this country, which has never been publicly acknowledged by any Federal government.

These words were spoken in Parliament today by Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister of Australia, on behalf of all Australians, to the "stolen generations":
Today we honour the Indigenous peoples of this land, the oldest continuing cultures in human history.

We reflect on their past mistreatment.

We reflect in particular on the mistreatment of those who were Stolen Generations – this blemished chapter in our nation’s history.

The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia’s history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future.

We apologise for the laws and policies of successive Parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians.

We apologise especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country.

For the pain, suffering and hurt of these Stolen Generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry.

To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry.

And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry.

We the Parliament of Australia respectfully request that this apology be received in the spirit in which it is offered as part of the healing of the nation.

For the future we take heart; resolving that this new page in the history of our great continent can now be written.

We today take this first step by acknowledging the past and laying claim to a future that embraces all Australians.

A future where this Parliament resolves that the injustices of the past must never, never happen again.

A future where we harness the determination of all Australians, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to close the gap that lies between us in life expectancy, educational achievement and economic opportunity.

A future where we embrace the possibility of new solutions to enduring problems where old approaches have failed.

A future based on mutual respect, mutual resolve and mutual responsibility.

A future where all Australians, whatever their origins, are truly equal partners, with equal opportunities and with an equal stake in shaping the next chapter in the history of this great country, Australia.

More Fabric Book Pages

2008-02-12T23:14:00.009+11:00

Linda chose the lilac as her flower. She used extravaganza as a transfer, printed an image of lilacs and added shades of purple and lilac, green dyed gauze, lace and a flower held on with beads. She added some machine embroidery stitches in variegated thread. I love the colour combinations of this piece, and the way she's combined the elements together in a collage but without losing the fineness and delicacy of the flower.

Jenny in Ohio made a pansy page. She used a pansy fabric as the background, and trapped fabric snippets, lace and sparkly bits under tulle. She also trapped pansy petals under plastic, so it's a real pansy page!

Maz from Sydney, Australia made a tulip page, from calico and vylene, painted fusible webbing, coloured sheers, collaged tulips and free machine embroidery, with Treasure Gold. Aren't the colours delicious? It has a real Australian feel to it.

Terri made this beautiful daisy collage, including a photo of her granddaughter, Aubrey Jewel, just six weeks old. She layered orange jaquard fabric, tulle, polka dot and white tone on tone cottons, and the photo, which she manipulated in Abobe PES4 and printed onto pretreated PhotoFabric. She added words printed on twill tape, including the line from Elton John's "Your Song". The centre of the flower is finely beaded, and she added some cute black and white flower beads, and iridescent beads along the edge of the image. Just beautiful!

Last of all, Marlene from California made a poppy page. She also gave really detailed instructions on her process, which I just love. She collaged various fabrics and transfer images of poppies onto a painted background, and stitched them with variegated threads. She overlaid a gorgeous silk poppy,painted and beaded, and added poppy words. I really love it!

Aren't they lovely? And Dianne sent me this card with the pages:

In case you can't read it, it says, "Anyone who says sunshine brings happiness has never danced in the rain."

Fabric book pages

2008-02-12T22:07:00.000+11:00

Something else from last year trickled in last week and I've been trying to find time to share it. Towards the middle of last year, the Like Minded Artist group organised a swap of fabric book pages on the theme of flowers. Each person chose a flower, and made a series of pages on that flower, 6in square with an additional inch at the left for binding. They were sent to Dianne in Canada and she swapped them and sent them back in September.

Alas, the Canadian postal system seemed to be unable to find Australia on its map! The pages came (I'm guessing) on a very slow donkey via Anatolia, Angola and Austria before they finally arrived at my door, four months later. But they were worth the wait.

This is my page, which I made for everyone else. It's a Marguerite Daisy, a flower of which I'm very fond. It thrives in my garden with little attention, always looks green and lush and flowers robustly so that my grandson always has flowers to pick for Grandma. It's not a flashy plant, but it brightens up my life.

Candace's page. Her flower was Tragopogon dubius, Yellow Goatsbeard. She says,"The green bracts were applied with fusible web and the petals were stamped with Lumiere in gold. The centre of the flower is a yarn wrapped pipe cleaner and the stem was done with a glue gun (on parchment paper) painted with Lumiere in metallic olive green and sealed with a matte finish spray. Thread used for the grasses are by Rainbow Gallery." Wow.

Carole's Foxglove page. Carole fused scraps of purple fabric under tulle, embroidered by hand and machine over the top, and I think she may have painted too? She's really captured the fierce uprightness of foxgloves, hasn't she?

Theresa's flower. Theresa sent me a complete mini workshop on how she made her flower, tucked into a pocket in the back. The background has tissue lame fused over the rayon background, with multicoloured ribbon stitched over it. More ribbon was gathered and stitched in place, along with the velvet leaves. The flower petals were fused to organza, hand stitched in place and beaded. Isn't it amazing?

Diana's flower was the tulip. She applied pale organza to the background, and tulip appliques, free-motion stitched in variegated thread. She added a label and ribbon, attached with a pink brad. I love the delicacy of this one.

Carol in Scotland chose a Scottish flower, Fritilaria Imperialis. Her flower was based on an image manipulated in Paint Shop Pro, printed onto fabric prepared with BubbleJet Set and intensively machine stitched. I so love this page! I'm not sure if you can see in the photo but the background stitching follows the lines of the manipulated image, suggesting a whole rich background of foliage.

Dianne's flower was, I think, a variety of lilium. She used some of her rusted fabric as the background and painted the image with water colour pencils, gel pens, copper and metallic paints. Isn't it great? She added some vintage tatting as a border. Dianne said she felt bad that she hadn't stitched much, but I don't think she has anything at all to feel bad about!

I'm not sure what Margot's flower is (sorry, Margot! My flower recognition is deserting me!)but I think it's an iris of some kind. The background is a luscious shiny embroidered silk, and the flower image is surrounded by pleated silk ribbon, held in place by beads and pearls. It's so deliciously rich.
More to come...

And also...

2008-01-30T19:41:00.000+11:00

Here is one of the secret projects from last year. My quilt group decided we would make 6in blocks for each other last year, one for each person, every month from February to November. That wasn't too onerous as there are only four of us in the group! I forgot to take photos of the blocks I made (how silly!)but here are the ones made for me:
Aren't they lovely? I asked for my blocks to be in reproduction fabrics because I like those quilts but never end up making myself one. I laid them out on point on my design wall because I think I may use that layout, but with strip sashing, or a streak of lightning sashing. I haven't decided yet.

What else have I been doing with my summer?

2008-01-29T21:21:00.000+11:00

Since there clearly hasn't been much textile art happening, what have I been doing?

My garden has been rampant this summer, because of all the rain. The back garden has survived on washing machine water for several years, and was reasonably lush, but everything has gone mad in the mild wet conditions. Here is one day's harvest from my tiny vegetable garden: The dark coloured things are Purple King beans.
I'm about to start planting seeds of cool season crops. I'm especially looking forward to the peas!

Textiles, anything textiles!

2008-01-12T18:45:00.001+11:00

All I've blogged about lately is Scatterdays, mostly because my usually slow progress has slowed to a crawl for some weeks. This is one reason why:

Yes, I'm tidying and reorganising my workroom, in preparation for a new year of creative effort. Of course, tidying involves the equivalent of fitting a size 22 body into a size 12 ballgown! I'm gradually making progress, which will be aided by the arrival (soon, I'm promised!) of my second workroom table, with lots of lovely storage underneath it. It will be for cutting and painting and similar standing-up/ sitting on a stool activities.

In between bouts of tidying (it hasn't always looked quite this bad!), I have been making quite a lot of pants. I have trouble buying pants that fit me nicely and I was getting tired of jeans, so I've invested a lot of energy lately in drafting a pattern and making some pants that suit the shape I actually am, not the one some marketing guru thinks I should be. Here are the results:

Not bad, eh? I'm not done yet, the next pair are red.

When I get a moment, I'll show you the results of the Secret Block Swap from last year. I (foolishly) didn't take any photos of the blocks I made so they may take a little while to see, but I will put up the ones from the other members, Lorinda, Karen and Sharon, as soon as I can get to the design wall to lay them out.

I haven't made any art at all lately, but I have a cunning plan to make some ATCs once I get my workroom to rights. Stay tuned!