Great weather for frogs

Unfortunately, not so great weather for building ponds. I had arranged a working bee at my school to create a frog pond for our environmental studies unit on water. However it has been bucketing down rain all night and all this morning so far, so we have had to postpone. However I am not complaining. After 4-5 weeks of no rain it is very welcome. As a completely amazing contrast, today Sydney is to have 41C . Let’s hope there are no raging bushfires up there.

In the first week of November I was lucky enough to participate in our Guild Branch’s Phyllis Brown Scholarship workshop, held annually. This year the workshop was two days with the embroiderer extraordinaire, Annie Huntley, making a beautiful felted bag. It was supposed to be an ‘embroidered garden’ bag, but once again I went off on a tangent, changing the basic shape  so that mine became more of a ‘turkish’ bag. More stitching and beading is to be done on this:

It was a great class in great company where we felted the bag on the first day and embroidered on the second. Everyone’s bags were slightly different but all were gorgeous. I will post some pics of the other bags on the Creative T’Arts blog when they come through.

Claudia had fun at her last Junior embroidery meeting for the year, where they stitched xmas brooches. It was a great atmosphere as all the girls sat around stitching and chatting, they are a lovely group. This is Claudia’s, not quite finished.

Our November meeting of the Creative T’Arts was last Saturday and we began with a tyvek/paper/tissue/PVA exercise. It was great fun sharing around all the bits people had brought along. Once again the pics will be on the group blog when I get them, but this was my result.

Pauline gave us each one of her lovely teacup paper napkins, Pauleen gave us some lovely glitzy leaf wrapping paper and I added some shiva rubbings on tissue paper and coloured tissue paper. For the final layer I coloured the PVA with some yellow and red acrylic paint. As the base is Tyvek it can be easily stitched into so I may cut it up to try a few different stitch possibilities.

I didn’t get onto the metal part of this workshop so that will have to wait until ‘after thesis writing’. (Probably after xmas).

Cheers

Workshop fun and games

Firstly here are some exquisite embroidered ATC’s Claudia and I received from Anne in France. Anne must have extremely good eyes as the stitches are tiny!! Our return ATC’s have been posted to France but I won’t put them on the blog until they arrive.

This week began with Claudia off the to National Wool Museum for a workshop called Raggety rugs, where she enjoyed weaving strips of fabric onto a loom. All the kids had great fun using all sorts of colour combinations. We might make a loom at home for Claudia, just some strips of wood screwed together with screws at each end to hold the warp. It would be a great winter activity she could come and go at and use up some of my fabric scraps.

The next day I had a ring to say there was a vacancy for the ‘Buttons’ workshop. I was booked in for the one on the 18th July, but I’m off to Sydney for a conference that weekend. This workshop was based on Margaret Beal’s technique (which is probably in her book) but is also in the Dec08/Jan09 issue of Stitch magazine.

This workshop was great fun and doesn’t require much in the way of equipment. Just a 30 w soldering iron with a fine tip and various bits of synthetic materials. We began with a piece of synthetic felt and polyester fabric and traced around a 20 cent piece with the soldering iron to make our first button. Everything from then on was a variation of this: different layers, different metal shapes to trace around, adding acetate sheet, trapping sequins and beads. The soldering iron can also be used to make marks and different shaped holes in the buttons for variety, which I have yet to experiment with.

The last workshop for me this week was felting.

Leah came down from Euroa to teach a series of workshops (there is a felted jacket one on today and tomorrow) but the one I did was a cobweb scarf.

We began by making a felted square. As I was the last one there I ended up with the boring black wool, but I managed to find some little bits of colour to add. This was two layers of a wool silk mix layed on bubblewrap. We then put netting on top and wetted down and added soap. It was then rolled up in the bubblewrap and a towel and rolled 100 rolls in each direction until felted.

And then using just one layer of wool, we layed out a scarf on bubblewrap: 30cm x 220cm. Once again I was using the black wool. I very rarely wear black near my face as it doesn’t suit my fair skin but Leah let me have some lime green to add, and then I swapped some of my black for the purpley blend. This one was just sprayed with tepid water with a bit of liquid soap added as it was layed out and rolled up. I gave this one 1000 rolls just rolling in the lengthwise direction, changing ends each 100 rolls.

I’d like to try this again so I bought some nicer wool/silk from leah to make another one. Hopefully my technique and results will improve!!

Finally, this week I have been entertaining myself reading the Yahoo discussions of the Holey Moley clubbers. This group has been set up by Dale Rollerson as a workshop group, and if early indications are anything to go by it should be a fun conduit, riddled  and punctured with a honeycomb of burrowing fenestrations. (How’s that for getting as many puns as possible into one sentence?). The real fun begins this weekend so if you want to join in head to Dale’s blog (link above) for the info.

Cheers

Until next week.

Slow and Steady

…..wins the race.

I love the idea of slow cloth, takes the pressure off completely and makes the whole process so much more enjoyable (as long as it doesn’t degenerate into procrastination). It’s all in the mindset, I find. If you look at the process of mulling over the possibilities in a positive way it becomes a constructive thing to do. Of course there is still an important place for the frenetic when inspiration comes pouring out, because work that is totally spontaneous can have fantastic results.

Most of my current projects are of the ’slow’ variety.

I am still working on my ’sea angels’ and finding many possibilities opening up as ideas are sparked from viewing lots of creative blogs.

I am also still working on my ‘killed catalogues’, a new idea for which was sparked off by Heather’s fantastic chessmen.

Here are a couple of great ATC’s we have swapped.

On the left is Gillian’s first try at ATC’s, very interesting textures, and on the right the amazingly talented Ebony’s sent to Claudia.

Claudia’s return ATC to Ebony, which should have arrived by now (which I can’t find a photo of, whoops) was part of this random felting she did at our March textile group. Claudia used her ATC window to choose the sections she wanted to cut out. She chose some colours of machine embroidery rayon and had fun FME’ing the circles and outlines. I always make sure Claudia puts on the safety glasses for this stage in case she breaks a needle. She also chose one to finish and send off to Val (forgot to scan that one too!!)

Here are a few more of Claudia’s in production.

I have been also slowly continuing with the Stitch Explorer for April and May. April was Casalguido embroidery and May was needleweaving. These two are complementary styles of stitching so I decided to combine them for this sampler.

The first stage, casalguido or padded raised stem band stitch, shows stranded cotton laid down, couched with sewing thread and then satin stitched with more stranded cotton. The perpendicular stitches are then placed in the second photo and I will try some cotton a broder to cover this with the final layer, stem stitch.

The base is four sided stitch using two strands of DMC. I will be doing some needlewoven autumn leaves in a hand dyed variegated pearl  bought from Sharon to finish off.

I found Effie Mitrofanis’ book a wonderful guide to this stitch, with clear directions and some inspiring contemporary embroidery.

I have also ordered Effie’s needleweaving book from the library as well, so I’m sure that will also contain some more great ideas and instructions.

Time to get off the computer and finish the housework, so I can sit and stitch!!

Cheers

Fabricate 09

Today Pauleen and I made the trek up the Melbourne/Geelong Rd to the opening of the Fabricate 09 exhibition by the TAG (Textile Art @ the Guild) group.

There was a wonderfully diverse range of textile art by invited artists from Australia and internationally, including art dolls, indigo dyeing, felting, weaving, free machine embroidery and printing. The exhibition is beautifully hung, with the ‘luminous’ indigo dyed panels of Rowland Ricketts 111 dividing the space.

The photos below are taken from the catalogue, designed to allow them to be used as postcards, with funds from the sale supporting the TAG group activities (there are more photos on the TAG site).

All art pieces at the exhibition are for sale as well as the patterns for Jennifer Gould’s exquisite dolls. Well worth a visit.

Cheers

one down, one to go

What a relief!! I spent all day yesterday at the computer and books and finished the first draft of my 4000 word research project submission. It has been emailed to my uni supervisors for comment after which I will polish it for final submission next Thursday. I have a non compulsory assignment (only 1000 words) due this Saturday. I have about 400 words down, so I’m taking a break before finishing it off.

Firstly I’d like to thank the very generous Sharon for sending me the following book. I have been reading about the Bayeux tapestry and she had this one spare.

As I told Sharon, I’m hanging out for the xmas break to get back to some fun stitching. Luckily in Oz it’s 5 weeks and also summer so it’ll be stitching in between visits to the beach. We are very lucky to be only a five minute drive from a beautiful beach and the boys love to get out for a spot of surfing.

The first thing I’ll be doing is starting on Maggie Grey’s workshop. I have bought her latest book “Textile Translations” via the publishers. When you buy the book you can log in on-line for extra fun activities and there is also a yahoo group to show and tell.

Last week I managed to get to our textile group afternoon get together for the first time in several months. A few of the girls had attended the Fibreforum in September at Geelong Grammar. They had stocked up on felt and felting supplies so we played around with hand needle felting. The blue piece with the flower was my first effort. It was an eyes closed lucky dip for the base felt and the flower. I also used some of Dale’s funky felted yarn.

I then decided to try out some felting onto an op shop scarf, needs a little more work but has possibilities. The top piece was onto a very lightweight felt, also has possibilities.

No 2 son loves to pick up old BMX bikes at the op shop. He pulls bits off and puts together new combinations, great fun for him and great learning about mechanical processes (takes after his father who rebuilt his first car engine at 12!)

So he dragged me to the op shops last Saturday. Unfortunately no bikes at all (it was a long weekend for the Melbourne Cup and all the tourists were out op shopping too) however I did find a few good mags and a couple of silk ties. There have been a few good ideas on-line using these. The three hard cover books (circa 1975) are for a future Maggie Grey workshop.

Cheers

School Holiday Fun

We have come to the end of Term 1 holidays here in Victoria, the children are back at school and I’m hoping to get back to some textile art. I always think I’ll have time to achieve so much in the holidays and end up doing so much, none of it from my list!!! After reading about Doreen’s granddaughter and her postcard swapping I decided I should do more to encourage youngest daughter’s creativity, not hard as she loves to do arty stuff. We went to a holiday art class using felt and she is very proud of her Coco bear:

We followed this up with some felting, inspired by the felt beads made by Mary MacVoy.

As the youngest with two older brothers, Claudia gets a fairly hard time so we had some girl time out.
We went to the Melbourne International Flower and Garden show, where they had some great children’s activities with easels for drawing with a variety of media, face painting, some very funny interactive creatures and a free plant potting activity. She had a great time and bought some painted toadstools to put in ‘her’ garden with the free bulbs she was given along with the native plant Aussie garden guru Don Burke gave her. Then we went to our hotel for the night where she again received lots of special attention. The next day we went shopping in Bridge Rd, Richmond, famous for it’s designer outlets and then to the Melbourne Zoo. Got home pooped but happy!! (No pictures, I forgot the camera!)
Cheers