Busy busy

Who'd have thought I'd get busy in December? Can't imagine why...

However, I'm glad to say that I have managed to make a few things in the midst of the crazy.  First the things I'm most proud of...

I recently became a great aunt, twice over. My only nephews and their respective partners produced offspring within a few days of one another. That was pretty clever of them and the boys are called Caleb and Callum, as befits their almost-twin status. (Of course, that's also going to be a nightmare for the old and confused at family gatherings, but they are already demonstrating their individual personalities, so I guess we'll cope.)

In honour of this splendid news, I made the sprogs a toy each. Yes, I could have made them quilts, but at least one grandma is a quilter, and I am 100% sure she's got that covered! So, despite my general aversion to making small fiddly things, as a result of making far too many Cheltenham Girls High pink signature elephants as fundraisers for The Shack back in the day.... tada!

 ...or if you prefer...

Yes, I admit it - the overalls are reversible. I didn't have to do that, but I thought it might be fun. The face is embroidered - no buttons to be chewed off and choked on.

I didn't make up the pattern or anything - it's from Hop Skip Jump by Fiona Dalton. I made mine brown-faced monkeys, as the wool fabric I used for the bodies was fairly light. The original also had a pompom on the tail, but I pondered on what a pompom is going to look like once it's been chewed and sucked a few times and decided against it!

And now for Idea No 2. As I scrabbled about to find in what sketchbook I'd written an interesting idea I came across, I had an epiphany. What if I had a special book for writing down all these Very Useful and Clever Ideas? Enter My Little Book of Clever Ideas. It's just an A6 sketchbook but it already has several Clever Ideas in it. I made it a pretty cover from my breakdown printing.

I liked this idea so much that I made each of the Fibrecircle girls a Little Book of Clever Ideas too.

I also made a little pincushion for the ATASDA display at Epping Creative Centre this month. I loved the brilliantly coloured birds in Africa and I figured they needed brightly-coloured nests.

I do plan to put up more Africa images and stories over the coming weeks - it all got a bit derailed by ATASDA admin and Christmas presents.

Speaking of which, hope you all have a great Christmas!

Printing, dyeing, painting...

... 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!

Treasures

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!

Two steps forward..

...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.

Finished!

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!

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.