The Temperature Plummets

Here in Victoria the temperature has suddenly dropped. After weeks of beautiful, mild, sunny, autumn days the chill has arrived. Today’s maximum in Melbourne was to be 15C and down here on the coast it is always a couple of degrees cooler. Tonight’s low is to be 7C. Unfortunately there is still not any decent rain and the garden and surrounding paddocks are extremely dry.
Good weather though to light the fire and stay indoors. As we had a long weekend, for ANZAC Day Friday, Claudia and I put in quite a bit of creative time. Claudia has arranged an ATC swap with Doreen’s grand-daughter Ebony. They are of a similar age and interests. Claudia began by selecting a fat quarter of fabric, some hand-dyed thread and some cute buttons from the quilting shop. She then painted a couple of nappy liners as background. We made a few sheets of silk paper and fused some hot fix angelina into a sheet.

While I fused the nappy liner to felt, Claudia cut out lots of shapes and had great fun arranging them on the backgrounds. I ironed them all on and she selected her colours for FME. She took to the sewing machine like a duck to water!!! (It was her first time – amazing).

I won’t show too much detail and spoil the surprise for Ebony. We’ll post the finished photos after she has hand stitched the details and posted it off.
That’s all for now
Cheers

Textiles and Tennis

At our Wednesday Night Ladies Tennis we were presented with the photo taken after last season’s grand final. Kim may not appreciate me putting this photo in here, not one of her best!!!! (I’m the one on the left). Our night tennis is as much social as physical exertion so this photo was taken after a couple of celebratory wines!

On Thursday we had our monthly Textile group fun day. We are trying to find a name for our group. A couple of suggestions were Creative Cats (after the mighty Geelong Cats AFL football champions of course) and Creative T*Arts. T stands for Textile. I like them both but we’re open to further suggestions.
Pam brought along a box of wooden printing blocks, average size 12 inches!!! We did some paper casting with water soluble paper, rubbings onto various fabrics using paintstiks and the ordinary transfer crayons and some stamping with xpandaprint. Pauline brought along a big packet of paper clay so we brought out the baking utensils: pastry sheets and rolling pins, and played around with that. I embedded a little muslin in mine and sprayed some moonshadow mist. I thought afterwards I probably should have waited until it was dry to colour it but it seems fine.

I managed a little hand stitching on my Orange bellied parrots, then found I didn’t have the right colour for the beak and eye (I want a purpley black/brown, preferably silk) I’ll pop down to the local fabric shop this morning to see what they have. Hopefully I’ll have a postcard ready to send off to Susan Lenz soon.

Till next week
Cheers

Textile Group Workshop

On Saturday Pauline, our textile group chief/organizer extraordinaire ran a textile workshop for our local Embroiderer’s Guild group. Needless to say all members of our fledgling textile group attended along with a few other interested members. Our brief was to bring an A4 piece of felt on which we had adhered some painted vliesofix, along with a variety of embellishments and sewing paraphernalia. When I got out my vliesofix I found it was a mess as it had detached itself from the paper and become scrunched up. I didn’t have time to go into town and buy some more so I used the piece of nappy liner I had previously painted here. I began this piece by adhering some newspaper I had brought home from summer school that had protected the table from oversprays. I added some extra paint and cut out various sized rectangles. I also added pieces of various textured papers and lutrador. Once that was all stuck I FME’d, attaching various threads and fibres. I also tried out the flower stitcher foot I had bought from Dale. As the most obvious piece of newsprint features a headline about global warming, I also stamped a few other pertinent words onto the background I’m thinking of calling this ‘News is all around” and adding a few more words here and there. I’m also finding it looks a little unbalanced at the moment with the blues dominating so I’ll keep fiddling with it. Any suggestions most welcome. If it becomes a reasonable piece I may cut it horizontally into 3 and mount it for display in our local guild exhibition later this year. 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