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.