Progress on WIP

Firstly some beautiful post received, from Britt in Perth

Claudia was mega excited when she opened the envelope and saw all the cute extras Britt had included. Britt offered a huge range of ATC’s on her blog for swap, each featuring her beautiful, fine tatting lace.

Also received were these amazing ATC embroideries from Anne in France and Emmy in Netherlands. I do not have the patience for such fine embroidery so I’m in awe of both of these super talented ladies. If you want to get a surprise for the return ATC’s don’t look any further girls!

 

It is a great feeling to actually finish something. I have had a number of projects on the go at the same time which sometimes makes it difficult to feel you are progressing. Having a long weekend this weekend and staying home instead of gadding about has made a huge difference. I have managed to finish or make obvious progress on a number of fronts. The biggest task was finishing off the ethics application for my research project. Emailing that away on Sunday was a huge lift off the shoulders. It meant that on Monday I could relax and enjoy some arting with Claudia. Firstly here are the ATC’s we finished for our swaps.

Claudia decided she would like to draw some pictures to stitch on to hers, so they have been scanned and printed onto ready to print cotton sheet. For the base fabric she layered some silk fibres under the green chiffon fabric (left over from my Mum’s cardi) and FME. I gave her my sample from a machine embroidery workshop and she chose to do a star pattern. The hearts are the ones Britt sent to Claudia.

My ATC’s were made as a strip of seven and are based on one of my favourite paintings by Grace Cossington Smith called Landscape at Pentecost . I used some techniques from Angie Hughes new book Stitch, Cloth, Paper and Paint. Bits of curtain fabric, scrunched tissue paper, silk threads and muslin were adhered to pelmet vilene with vlieofix. Then all the bits were secured with FME zigzag with white polyester cotton thread. The details were added with some cable stitch using no. 8 perle cotton in the bobbin. A coat of gesso was added all over and left to dry overnight. This morning I painted over using koh-i-noor watercolours mixed with white pearl lumiere. A tiny bit of handstitching finished them off.

Claudia also wanted to paint so she painted some cotton sheeting with nice, bright stripes to use as the backing for her ATC’s. The Stitch Explorer stitch for February is the Trellis Stitch, a great stitch for 3D effects. I have tried out a couple of motifs on my sampler based on the links Sharon gave us. The circular motif is in perle 8 and includes a few beads threaded on by hand. The diamond is stitched on a base of reverse chain stitch and I worked each side separately decreasing to form a triangle shape on each.

This weekend progress has also been made on trying out a few techniques for the ‘sea angels’. While painting fabric I tried out a few different colours and paints on some dupion silk and will use this as a sampler to try out stitches for the sea angels gowns. It scanned really badly so I won’t bother loading that picture.

This week is the new stitches and craft show at Melbourne Showgrounds. As I have to go up to uni on Thursday I might try to pop in for a few hours and check it out. If you’re free check out the web-site, it looks like a mega show with something for everyone.

Cheers