Walk to Nikau Palm Gully

On Monday a friend and I drove to Akaroa for a walk. Akaroa is what remains of a French settlement attempt in 1840ish, and it situated towards the end of an inlet. The inlet was formed in the crater of an extinct volcano, and there is another at Lyttelton harbour, the other end of the Banks Peninsula. I have been over to Akaroa several times over the years, and almost always gone out on the boat trip to see the Hector Dolphins that play around the boat. They are the world's smallest dolphin and very cute.

The weather was stunningly good. Warm, sunny, not much wind, and the sea was the most fabulous turquoise colour.

From Akaroa we drove a few km to a farm hostel, where you park and have to get permission to cross their land. It is a slightly hippy style hostel, with outdoor bath fed from a small tank, which you would probably have to share with a heap of sandflies! The walk goes through 4 paddocks with sheep and cattle. The sheep were lazily lying in the shade and only opened one eye as we passed by. After the farm land, the track follows along the headland, with some gentle ups and downs, for about an hour before becoming a narrower path with leads round two gullies to the nikau palm one. That is the southernmost habitat for nikaus in NZ, because of its microclimate. There is a staircase that goes into the gully, but I found the path too unstable and waited by the first nikau that I saw until my friend had done a recce. We decided to turn round, have lunch and head back. While we were having lunch we could see the Canterbury Cat stopped, and could just make out the splashes of the dolphins. The return trip was uneventful, and some cloud was coming up.

Challenge 40 complete

Once I had chosen my fabrics from my scrap bag, and fused on the steam a seam, this took only about 5 hours to complete. I haven't faced it, as I think I will mat and frame it.

I am quite happy with it, and love the greys and beiges which I normally hate. I also learnt a lot about mixing in unlikely colours, like orange on the green leaves, or bright pink on the red, which I don't normally do. From a distance you can't see them, but they must be adding depth.

What the colours were meant to convey in the ad, I cannot be sure. The black and red might be mobster violence, and of course they were Italian so would need to eat pasta!

Some progress

I have not had time to get down to my FFFC piece this month, but I had a breakthrough as I was taking down my Christmas cards. I select 3 or 4 which are arty or interesting or handpainted by my friends. As it happened, one, which was a reproduction of a painting by Donald Hamilton Fraser called Poinsettia, was exactly the right colours and a still life for the challenge.

I had previously found an ad for Frescarini pasta and wasn't sure how to interpret it.

This will be perfect, but I am not sure whether to do it realistically or semi-abstract. I am leaning towards the semi-abstract. To be honest, I don't want to spend a lot of time on it, but perhaps I need to spend more than I'm willing to at least today.

It was stiflingly hot this morning. I did some gorse spraying, using the newly extended hose and found I could reach a nasty patch of gorse regenerating (not just one plant, but maybe 20), that obviously got missed last year. I had a swim, then I settled indoors for the rest of the day. I cleaned the windows earlier this morning, so I could put up the insect screens and open some windows once the air cooled down. Luckily, now at 5 pm it is cloudy and cooler, and I will go and deadhead roses for a little while.

The other thing I did was make some cream of watercress soup, which I can eat cold. I love that irony taste - it always makes me feel it must be so full of vitamins.

Another New Year

Although New Year is traditionally a time for reflection and goal-setting, I decided on a drive back from Hanmer Springs this morning that I would enjoy the present day and keep my eyes open, and that would be sufficient to accomplish most things.

It was one of those drives that I love in NZ. Fantastic light - this was 9 am to 10.30am on a summer morning. The mountains and rivers were as sharp as the best photograph. The colours were saturated, not bleached out like they get at midday. The weather was calm and so the rivers and irrigation channels were that milky turquoise that I've only ever seen here. The little splashes over rocks were white and sparkling. There was not much bird life in evidence, just a few finches flitting from one side of the road to another. On either side the pastures were green, the grass high enough to hide all but the lying cattle's ears. The sheep newly shorn were radiating reflected light. In the scrubby areas were swathes of 'blue borage' which is not a borage, but a nasty pricky-seeded weed called vipers bugloss. Bees like it, and there is a specific honey collected from it. Pretty enough from a galloping horse, though.

It was good to be home, and it was still enough for spraying, but far too hot. Instead I caught up with some new year emails, phone calls, and had a swim.

Maybe I should have plans, but I am happy with things as they are, right now, and will revel in that.

Playtime

Last week I went to one of the city's craft emporia (I use that word advisedly - it is crammed and hard to find your way out alive!) and bought among other things a piece of silk georgette for making nuno. It was a lovely tomato red, with a few blemishes, which would not show up in a felt piece anyway. Before I allowed myself to play with it, I made myself finish the peacock piece, which was coming together at last.

As usual, I intended to put heaps of beading on it, but ended up undoing some, and having only a few sequins on the larger feather eyes. I realise now, a little late, that I am not a glitzy person and am very unlikely to use the beads I have accumulated! Maybe ebay? I actually like the piece to speak by itself without dress-up clothes. This is a shame, as I love, for example, Larkin Van Horn's beaded pieces. But I read today that the art we admire is not necessarily the art that we are meant to make - an aha moment!

Back to the nuno. I re-read the chapters in my Sheila Smith and Christine White books, and laid out my bubble wrap ready to start. It turned out that I had exactly the right shade of merino roving. I started out intending to have the fibres on only one side. I laid out the edging tufts of roving, and then added some semi-random silk tops, and some corn fibre, and three strands of a toning rayon yarn I had also purchased. I tacked the yarn and the silk and corn down with wisps of merino and got rolling. I had purchased a pool noodle for this. After I had done the requisite 400 rollings in each direction (phew! and had lunch!), it seemed that, though the fibres were migrating through the silk, there was not enough to give a pull and ruching effect. So I laid it out again upside down, and added some 'clouding' of merino only. Then did the next 400 rollings. By this time my bubble wrap had pretty well popped its bubbles, so I went up in the garage roof to get the remnants of my pool cover, much tougher bubbles.

That worked, and I then started fulling. It did take quite a long time, longer than I remembered, to get the wool to start shrinking. That was with a mixture of rubbing against the bubbles, and soaking in hot water and throwing it in the sink. I was pleased with the final result. It could have done with a few more fibres to give more ruching, but had a nice drape, and the silk fibres look especially yummy. I will have to stitch the yarn down, as it will catch where it isn't felted, but then I think it will make a good shrug - just the right length and width.

Fast Friday piece completed.

I still haven't done challenge 38, though I know what I am going to do. I finished challenge 39 at lunchtime today. I had seen the photo on the leech's central nerve cord in a photography magazine over a year ago, and cut it out. Just by chance I found it on one of the sites that FFFC linked to for the challenge "under the microscope". I couldn't do it the weekend of the challenge, as too busy with work and choir commitments, but I got it done in time for this weekend.

I had some scrunched-up florist's woven raffia canvas stuff that had come round a bouquet at some time. Horrible prickly stuff that was impossible to store tidily. I ironed it and then painted it with setacolour cherry red. I used colour catchers underneath, which now have a red blobby grid on them (for some future....). When you rubbed the paint it came off, even after heat setting with the iron, so I knew I wouldn't be able to stitch it much without losing colour.

I tried purple polka dots as in the photo, but they didn't work. Decided to simplify the design. I didn't have any green fabric the right shade, but went with the citrus parfait dyed one I made a few months ago. I used Romeo, stitched on the green fabric, then couched some yellow thread. I made a cut up the fabric, since on the photo you could see the red grid in its centre. I made some very thin angelina sheet with opal colour, then stitched some needle lace fibres with a 30 wt Valdani thread. Then put it all to soak while I went to the movies to see The Time Traveller's Wife.

This morning I ironed the threads, being careful not to touch the angelina. I felt the regular grid was a bit too regular, so I added some corners to the grid with the angles changed, and cut small notches and holes in it, to add some chaos. I attached it to some purple batik with black Mistyfuse. Finally I couched some more threads over the fabric strip and free motioned the thread lace to the grid. Trimmed and glued to a prepared black canvas square.

Although I initially thought it rather lacking in detail, looking at it on the wall, I find it quite successful and striking.

Hydrangea thoughts

After working nearly 6 hours a day on the construction (it took roughly 3 hours to do one floweret on average), I have now got to the stage of choosing a background. I asked my online group. One of the good things about asking other people is that if they give you the 'wrong' answer, you by default know what the 'right' answer is. I am going with a pink blotchy look, which is very close to the colour of the top floweret, but gives a kind of glow. I am going to add maybe 3 leaves near the bottom, to weight it, and also stop it looking quite so much like a floating space station!

I struggled for a while with not wanting it to be rectangular, but I think I will have to admit it is the best option. If I was going for a freeform look, I would have had to design that into the original. I am all for logic, so am always asking myself if the look is believable. Not the most playful approach, perhaps.

Zoo visit

Last week I went to Orana Park, our local ranch style zoo, on a photography course. I was the only one of twelve who didn't have a telephoto lens, which was a real disadvantage. I did get a few nice shots of the tiger, and some birds. Then I borrowed a lens from someone with the same camera as me, and took a peacock that was displaying and carrying on. I had the opposite problem there which was I couldn't get far enough back to take the whole tail. Later, when I edited them in PSE, I did a crop of a full on face shot and have printed it on fabric for the FFF challenge which is the animal kingdom.


What I had really wanted to do was make a black and white chenille to represent zebra stripes, but three people have already done zebras, so I went off that idea. I did look at vultures, but it's amazing when you trawl through 500 photos, and only 3 of them have a clearly identified individual. I thought most of the photos were pretty crappy.

I am still fired up with my hydrangea piece. I'm on the last floweret, but I know I have to redo at least two of the earlier ones. I have found that tinting the fabrics in the light range gives me the colours I can't find in my stash. I think I will end up using about 2 metres of steam a seam light, but it is so much easier than turning the edges, and looks much neater than raw edge.

I have so much fabric left from the purples lilacs and blues that I might do a slightly more abstract version.

Hope to get something to publish here soon.

Slice in the mail

I have finished my flower shop for the group quilt. It seemed to take forever to add fiddley vases of flowers and try to get enough references to the colours in the canopy and look natural as well. I used some fabric markers to try to give some curved dimension to the vases. Had lots of ideas for machine lace, but opted for the usual fused pieces and FMQ in blending colours to stitch them down.

I am much more excited about my larger hydrangea project. The first flower I did with glue to hold the pieces together, but I don't like the effect, as you can see the glue on the surface. Probably be OK once stitched, but I won't use that for the others. Can't decide between fusing or stitching only. I think I can do a mixture and see how I feel. Some of the flowerets are behind others, which gives me the chance to hide any that I decide are not the way to go.

If I am still interested when I have done this one, I might try an alternative of painting the flowers to get a more natural blending. This is a project that will get me up in the morning!

Spring is really burgeoning, and a lot of irises will be out in the next 2 weeks. That means more flower photos. Is that good????

Fast Friday Challenge No 37

This is the first time I have done a challenge for this group. The remit was outer space and use a new technique.

I printed a photo of M42 in the Orion Nebula (NASA and Hubble) onto lutradur. That was a first for me. The colours were a lot more muted than the 'real' thing, but I decided to run with that. Next I added a thin layer of angelina underneath the fibres of the lutradur. That added a nice gleam, but to be honest, a pearlised paint would have done the same. Because of the muted colours I spent an age trying out borders and more contrast within, either beads or sheers, but in the end I felt they would all detract from the springlike colours. I glued on some stars from a piece of sheer I had painted ages ago. Added a few sequins. The dark purple star border is actually very shiny and sparkly. I was lucky to have a small piece of batik that looked like it continued the pinks and lights, and some hand dye that continued the grey lower area. I faced it, and it's done.

Now I look at the original again, I can almost "see" a section of Michelangelo's god pointing down from heaven in the Sistine Chapel. I have had a couple of glasses of wine, though!