Knitting and other pleasant pastimes

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

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!

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

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

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...

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?

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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:

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

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.