North West Tassie

Our last holiday saw us travel south once again to our beautiful island state, Tasmania. This time we were planning to travel in some of the more remote areas of North West Tasmania, so decided to take the car across on the ferry. The day sail on a balmy Sunday was very relaxing until we berthed at Devonport. Unfortunately the very poor disembarkation process meant we could not drive the 5 minutes to our accommodation for 2 hours (6-8pm), a truly dreadful case of disorganisation and chaos. Luckily there was a late night supermarket still open to buy breakfast provisions and also a late night bakery for dinner.

The next morning I had planned an early drive to see the sunrise at Narawntapu National Park and hopefully see the wombats. Unfortunately the Park website had not been updated with the news that all the wombats had succumbed to mange several weeks previously (we found this out several days later). However we did have an amazing early morning walk around the spectacular Springlawn lagoon (2 hours) where we saw lots of wildlife at close quarters including kangaroos, wallabies, and pademelon. The bird hide, accessed by a boardwalk through the mangroves was a great experience.

Narawntapu Park

Our itinerary for the first day was to drive the coastal north coast west to Stanley for a 2 night stay. This was a fantastic drive with wonderful towns all the way along including lunch and arts at Burnie, car museum at  Wynyard and magnificent scenery such as the ‘three sisters’ and the view along the coast from Table Cape.

From Stanley we explored the North west corner of Tasmania, enjoyed the amazingly well preserved historical buildings, tackled the steep climb up the Nut and saw one penguin come ashore at the harbour.

Stanley

Our next stop was the much anticipated, world renowned Cradle Mountain. We limited ourselves to the 2.5 hour walk around Dove Lake and a few shorter walks from the visitors centre. The Park is very well serviced with a range of accommodation options (we chose a cabin at the caravan park) and a great shuttle bus service. We were informed that September is the wettest month at Cradle Mountain, usually only five days of the month that it doesn’t rain and luckily we scored a beautiful clear day.

Cradle Mountain

The drive south from Cradle Mountain to Strahan was a beautiful forest route to one of the most beautiful little towns in Tassie. We drove straight through to the ocean side of the town for our accommodation in a very rustic, but charming  fisherman’s hut on an inlet. We will definitely return to this lovely town with its proximity to the Gordon River, history and working sawmill. We bought a few small offcuts of the distinctive, salvaged huon pine to make shelves on our return home. Unfortunately we couldn’t fit in the piece I wanted for my kitchen bench-we will have to get that freighted over (or maybe go back again).

Strahan

From Strahan we travelled the long way to Mole Creek- lots of winding roads which degenerated into a long spell of dirt road, but it was well worth the drive for the amazing scenery and the opportunity to be driving in the clouds at the highest point. The trip to Trowunna Wildlife Park fulfilled the promise of being able to cuddle a wombat (lots of wombats here) and also to pat a Tassie devil.

Our journey finished with 2 nights in the amazing town of Launceston, staying in a sensational Airbnb right next to Cataract Gorge

Launceston

. The weather closed in on our final full day at the end of our tour around the Tamar Valley wineries.

ATC & surface design swaps update

Time flies when you are having fun and writing student reports.

For our September ATC swap the theme was ‘green man’. My slant was to go profile, as all the google images of the green man seemed to be face on and to create a green woman to help the gender imbalance on this topic.

Green (wo)man

Detail – Green (wo)man

For this one I used reverse appliqué and then drew and coloured the face with intense pencils. FME was used to define details. The leaves were made from free motion stitching on two colours of organza which had been fused together with vliesofix. They were hand stitched around the face.

October’s ATC theme was mosaics. The dictionary definition of ‘mosaic’ is of something made with a variety of components, a medley, a mixture, an assortment. This was the inspiration for this month’s ATC, using a medley of colours and techniques. The process began with a rubbing using gold and black oilsticks over the metal base of an ironing board to give a diamond pattern. The cloth was then coloured using paints and inktense colour sticks. The oilsticks acted as a resist to the colouring. The fabric was then machine stitched in a grid using gold metallic thread. Finally an assortment of sequins and beads were sewn in a free pattern over the grid, with one focal point. Unfortunately I forgot to take pictures before sending off!

The fabric swap for September was a theme of text on fabric. A recent TED talk I watched was by the author of Eat, Pray, Love and it was on creativity. She was saying we should swap the word creativity for the word ‘curiosity’. “…curiosity is this faithful, steadfast, friendly and accessible energy that is never far out of reach”. I used this as inspiration for the letters scattered over the fabric. The printing was a two step process- mixing 4 or 5 acrylic colours with textile medium and removing some paint using a stencil, I firstly gelli printed. The second layer was darker and was made using a soft roller over the same stencil. The wood grain finish is based on a wall in one of my favourite coffee shops.

Text on fabric

October was free choice so as I needed some new hand dyed fabric I decided to try out the ‘cram jar’ technique. The October fabric is from a jar dyeing process and using 4 different dyes, which are added one by one with the chemical water as each piece of fabric is crammed into the jar. I really like this process, as it is easy to keep contained in a small space and great for getting variation in the dyeing. The colours I used were Power Berry, Caribbean blue, Bronze and Amber waves. Kraftkolour has a great sheet on different ways to dye using Procion MX (look under instructions).