Bits and pieces

Now that my cosmos piece is out of the way, I have been dabbling. A few more screen prints and a couple of attempts at sunprinting. Last weekend was our last of daylight saving, and it was a beauty. I used oak leaves as a resist, and made several samples using 3 different fabrics. I found the wicking problem only happened on the poplin, so won't use that again with inks. The best results were from printing the actual leaves after screening. A nice texture, with a bit of colour variation.

Yesterday I was playing with FMQ one of the poppy prints. Although I used 4 different reds, from a distance you almost can't detect any difference and the centre one was actually a dark maroon. Quite a good lesson, that values really need spicing up for impact. I did a narrow zigzag, which gave better coverage that straight stitching, but didn't really help make the texture look realistic. I can carry on with the leaves today and then the background, all just practice and harmless!

Unusually for me, my first job even before breakfast was to clean my hob and bench. That was because I had just got my new miracle Enjo cloths, which you use with just cold water, and no chemicals. I would say 95% effective, but had to resort to Jif for a few tacky old grease spots. It said you could use it on your glass fire door, so I tried that as well and it was good. The only drawbacks I have found so far, is that the cloths need somewhere to hang to dry. And putting on a mitt soaked in cold water is not an erotic experience. Could be downright nasty in winter.

I've spent a deal of time the last few days trawling the internet for info about slice quilts and then suitable photos for dividing. When we did a poll last week the consensus was for landscape and vertical slices. Now people are backtracking and going off on tangents and we need to keep refocusing. I also keep thinking about the feasibility of the blocks and the look of the finished
quilt. Some people want to do their own thing, and others want to follow a design, some even more literally want to recreate something.

Once we get going I am sure it will be OK, even allowing that one or two people might not make it through to the finished product.

Moving on at last

I finished quilting the steel colony piece yesterday, and trimmed it ready for framing. Very hard to photograph with the beads and the metallic border fabric. I am thinking of changing the name to microcosmos, because it is a magnification of the steel, but also has a stars in space feel.



Read a couple of interesting blogs yesterday about changing linguistic habits, like eliminating 'but' and putting 'and instead. Could easily have done that in the sentence above.

I haven't done anything creative today, but struggled to get on with more Japanese writing homework. I CAN find the relevant information in the previous workbooks, but it would be so much better if I could remember any of it without checking. It's getting to the end of the month, and time for my clear-out day and my goal-setting day. The clearing out is going OK but I usually find a heap of things I need to do to prevent me doing the goal setting! Learning some vocab would be good, even if only 5 words a day.

I've suggested a slice quilt to the group and we are starting to think about what kind we want to do. There seem to be about 8 or 9 people interested, which is a good number. We could do it with 4 or 5, and anything above 9 is getting unwieldy.

Plan is to do the poppy piece next up. I like the leaf stencil I have, and am thinking about expanding the line drawings I have to separate the elements.

Steel colony

the original photo

I'm trying out a few titles for the flowers and decay piece. Personally I find naming a piece means it is out of my system and I can move on. Although I often have a few general ideas, it is not until the piece is nearing completion that its personality is revealed. There are not many things I have made for a challenge or class where the subject was prescribed.

I am working on the borders now. Rather irritatingly the borders have grown and want to be as wide as the fabric I have cut, and that is actually a little bit wider than the batting. That means I have to graft on some more batting. I went to the picture framers this week to talk about framing it, and it's going to cost around $100 for something fairly simple, no mat, just glued to acid free card. I think I will try the people who do Jane's framing.

Some friends came to lunch today and were talking about the kind of money I should be asking for it, and that was about 3 times what I thought. No idea what people will pay, but it's not something I want to give away cheaply.

The other thing I started this weekend was my screen printing projects for the class I am doing at QU. I did a newspaper stencil yesterday - which didn't excite me. Then today I cut a stencil of a poppy leaf and stem out of freezer paper and that was reasonably successful. The only problem is that a weak colour oozes out of the inked print while it is drying. For a lot of things that won't matter greatly, but it could be an issue. I am using the Fasttex inks, which seem very thick and gloopy. I am lucky that I bought a remaindered book of flowers and stems stencils when the fashion for stencilling every wall and cupboard door went out of the window, so to speak!

Slow progress

I am still working on the flowers and decay piece every day, but embroidery is such a slow process. I try to do about 6 or 7 lengths of thread in a session, and that takes about an hour or longer. Yesterday I was getting close to finishing the lower 4 inches. Where the blue part joins the rusty part there are hundreds of French knots and I also added some random small seed stitches and some seed beads. I may add more later, but I will move on to some more of the lazy daisy flowers over felted circles. I am pleased with the painted background. As I work on it, I see all the many layers of paint that I built up, and that is very gratifying.

I spent several hours at the weekend trying to manipulate photos for the online study group on colour and composition. We were supposed to isolate a small area of a photo and enlarge it for a focal point and abstraction. I never even got close to what I wanted. I did print more poppies, one in b and w. I went to the LQS and bought 4 pieces of b & w fabric, one of which would make good poppy petals, but would need gathering at the centre. That could be a future project, but need to finish the current ideas first.

It is only about 8 weeks till I go to the UK and in the middle is the quilt symposium, so I am beginning to panic slightly about the amount of things to do before then. Work, garden, house maintenance, social life(!). I borrowed a water blaster, to clean the house, but it took a lot of paint off, so I am now touching up all the bare wood. Not too hard on the white weatherboards, but the dark green on the front window frames (sash windows) never adheres well. Probably it absorbs too much heat and blisters. I am gradually replacing it with a dark green oil stain for fences instead. That soaks into the wood.

Gorgeous autumn weather - clear vibrant air, long shadows, plants relaxing with moisture again after their stressful summer.

Must go do stuff!

A week without art is a looong week!

Had the week from hell, workwise. Not only heaps of work, deputising for my boss, and dealing with the Ministry of Education gestapo, but I woke up two mornings at 4.30 and 3.30, thinking about work and fretting, and of course shattered at the end of the day.

Anyway, that is in the past, and this weekend I have been able to spend a few hours on my flowers and decay project. It is interesting how a photo from the pixmaniaque free textures in a smallish size, say 6 by 8, seems to have lots of detail and colour, but when I blow it up to life size it loses both. I did do a lifesize collage so that I could more easily work out the placement of the encrustations, but I am using the smaller one for colour and texture. The fabric I painted on was the Cindy Walter fabric backed with paper that I bought at LB. It is very stable and easy to paint on. However, it is a pig to hand stitch as the weave is so close. I wouldn't use it for a hand stitch project in future. It is fine for machine work. It is challenging me to use surface stitches when I want to use a thicker thread.

I decided not to over quilt (originally I was going to quilt every quarter inch), as there is so much surface work to go on. It is amazing how many French knots you need to even look like you have put 5! (About 3 times as many as you think you need).

I have used a thin pellon and thin open-weave cotton backing. Now I am thinking the pellon won't have enough rigidity to keep the piece from sagging when applied to canvas or framed. So I might have to bond it to some felt. Will worry about that later.

I am enjoying keeping to the original but changing the texture in some places to look more like flowers. I prefelted a few pieces of roving. I will embellish them in place, but then hand stitch.

Because this is a reproduce-the-texture piece, it doesn't have a strong composition. I would like to build on this in a second or third piece to develop the compositional side more. Maybe one entirely machine felted and the other more abstract shapes.

But first...finish this one!