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!

One hydrangea portrait done

This project is looking good. It's not very big, about 10 by 8 inches, but it demonstrates how you can show a white flower by using greys, grey-lilacs, and blue. The photo I had originally had a lot of texture in the petals, and that has come through quite well, by using a pale blue thread for the ribs, and Bottom Line white for the cell structure. Close up, I find the fabric changes a bit disturbing, but from 2 metres it looks good.




I tried a different stitch to attach the chenille cording, and that also worked well. As usual, I tried about 6 different types of bead, before deciding not to use any! There really are so few times that I can feel happy about glitz. Yet, I often admire other people's work with lots of embellishment. Something to work on maybe...

Next job, finish my group slice. It shouldn't take too long if I just knuckle down to it.

Trying out uda

The flower power class has been going on without me, so I need to catch up. There is only one more lesson to come, and then we need to finish (or start) our preferred flower portrait. I want to do a very busy one of hydrangeas in blues, so I am practising the upside down applique technique on a smaller one of two white hydrangea bracts with muticoloured flowers behind. I wasn't sure which sort of stabiliser to use as a foundation, so I used a thin vilene. I think it is too thin, really, as if you have to unpick anything, there is every chance it will tear.

The reason I have missed a couple of lessons is that I have just been to Australia for a 2 week vacation. It's not often that I go away somewhere that doesn't involve seeing my mother at one point, so it was a different experience to just be relaxing and acting like a normal tourist. I flew to Brisbane and picked up a rental car. It was an off-site company, and the car was left with the keys in a coded box. It had a GPS but very few instructions. I couldn't get to hear anything and I tried several menus without success. My first day was on my own, so I planned to go to art galleries and quilt shops so as not to drag reluctant friends round with me. I was fairly stressed on the drive into the town centre, and think a normal map would have been easier. However, I got to the modern art gallery a couple of minutes before it opened. It was an interesting building. There was an exhibition of Aboriginal weaving - baskets, nets, that kind of thing. Brilliantly displayed, but not obvious to me why any particular basket was more worthy than any other. They were fairly simple designs with few obvious patterns. In the centre was a display of about 100 'star' poles, I can't remember the actual name. These were poles about 2 metres long, stuck in the sand, which had bands of grasses and feathers and braids. When you rubbed them between your hands the top part of feathers and braids would spin out and look like stars. Again, I'm not sure which tribes or groups were represented, but they were from Arnhemland.

The rest of the modern art was not for me. There was a huge figure of a woman in bed, about 4 times life size. I usually like a proportion in a modern art museum, but there was little here that would make me return. After that I went to the normal art gallery where there was an exhibition of American Impressionists. It was a good selection and displayed mainly by genre or subject. The landscapes and portraits were my favourites. In the permanent collection there were also some interesting paintings representing most European historical periods, including a few impressionists and pre-raphaelites. Both museums were well displayed, good use of space, and comfortable.

I had a strange spicy bean soup in the cafe there, and then headed by GPS for a couple of quilt shops that had been recommended by 2 people on the AusNz group. They were the Quilt Store, and Sewco. The Quilt Store was very unprepossessing from the outside, looking like a small doorway in a warehouse. But inside there were two large rooms, one with threads, books and embellishments, and one with fabric. It wasn't particularly cheap. Bottom Line thread was $18 Australian, which is about $12 US. I found Margo Duke's book on needlefelting, and another one on ribbon embroidery, that I found irresistible. A few fat quarters and some Colourstreams silk ribbon and I was $150 the poorer (or richer, depending how you look at it!). Sewco was also a good selection of fabrics and the rest.

I got to my apartment in Broadbeach in time to shop for some breakfast and other essentials and a piece of fish and one potato and some frozen spinach for my dinner. I didn't fancy going out. I had got up at 3.30 am to catch the plane, so simple and light was the choice. Apartments in Australia and to a lesser extent in NZ are very spacious. This one had two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a laundry, full kitchen, dining and sitting room and a balcony overlooking the pool. Not a flash place, but quietly on a back street, while still being close to the centre.

That was the total of art and culture for the 2 weeks, but I had a great time walking in the countryside, seeing native animals in the wild, and some really nice beaches. Good to spend time with Noriko, Lynne and Graeme, and we laughed a bit, drank not too much and relaxed a lot.

Flower Power

I started this QU course last weekend. As usual Susan Brittingham gives full notes about all the processes and good illustrations. The homework for week one was to try free cutting for an applique flower. I wanted to do a rose that I had traced over, since I had the right fabric for it, and thought it was reasonably straightforward. I traced the b and w drawing onto freezer paper and numbered and labelled all the small pieces. I had a piece of fabric that was stripes of rust to tan all merging into one another. One end of it was dark reddish brown. The only other fabric I needed was a deep yellow, and a touch of lime yellow. All fabrics were solids, but it didn't matter for this project, which is small - less than journal size.

I spent all afternoon at the ironing board, cutting sticking the pieces for each petal separately first, and then assembling. Pretty well worked out which pieces needed to underlap - only two places I had to adjust. I got back ache, but keept going in the zone, and totally forgot the time. I looked at the clock at 5.55, thinking I was hungry and what would I have to eat, when remembered that I was going to a cooking class and needed to meet my friend at 6!

When I got home from learning how to make slow roasted lamb in pomegranate molasses and spices, with saffron pilaf, and rosewater panna cotta, I fused the whole rose to a piece of purple McKenna Ryan fabric. It looks pretty real.

I am not sure if I want to finish it, by stitching and quilting etc. No hurry, as I must finish my flower shop first.

Movies, opera and sketching

Art quilt-wise, at the moment I am working on my house for the slice quilt our online group is doing. It is harder to keep going than I imagined. That might be partly because we let the timescale drift a bit. I did numerous samples for the windows, and I wanted to include something you could see through the glass, like a cat, a blind, or a vase. But the scale is so small, that I abandoned that idea. Next I tried several methods, upside-down applique, piecing and fusing. I preferred the fusing, because the UDA distorted the corners the most, and the piecing gave too much bulk. Would probably be fine on a larger item.

At the moment I am doing the decorative relief plaster that is on my sample photo of a large building on the waterfront in Willemstad, Curacao. I will do the flower shop part separately and attach it at the end, in case of disasters. I have some great fabrics with flowers on, which I hope I can fussy cut. When I get my embellisher back tomorrow I will also try attaching some using that. Oh my god - MORE samples!

Despite my best intentions of starting stitching at 8.30 this morning, I have passed a couple of hours looking at a DVD I rented of Fitzcarraldo. I saw this Werner Herzog movie years ago, and it had a huge impression on me. Since my boss is going to Manaus in a few weeks, I looked for it to check out my memory. Instead of watching the movie, I watched the interview with Herzog et al on the making of the movie. Honestly you get to see all the pivotal parts of the story, plus his tales of the making of it are actually more amazing than the original story. If you don't know the story, a manic Irish guy in Peru decides to build an opera house in the jungle, and that involves dragging a steamboat over a mountain to a different tributary of the Amazon. To make the movie, it took them 3 years to build two identical boats, one to drag and the other to sail about. Their camp, which took a year to build, was razed to the ground by hostile natives. Money was a constant worry and only came in dribs and drabs. Everyone though Herzog was crazy and it would never happen. There was only radio contact from the filming site to Iquito, and all supplies had to be brought from there. They used native Indians from logging areas to act and actually drag the boat (using winches and stone age wooden cranks). They used dynamite to try to improve the gradient from 60 degrees to 40 (plus a caterpillar machine that they shipped in). Half the time there was a drought and no water in the rivers, and the rest of the time there was too much. In the final scenes where the boat goes through rapids and gets damaged, they actually sent the boat through twice, once with a few people on, and once with none. They had to carry with them a few ladies of the night, to avoid problems with the crew and cast having to spend 8 months in the jungle. They had tense relations with the native Indians as it was, without incursions into their villages looking for women. There were lots of near accidents, and a few actual ones. One Indian got bitten by a very poisonous snake, and not having time to get to the antiserum, and knowing his heart would fail in less than 3 minutes, he cut off his own foot with a chainsaw! He survived. Kinski, the lead actor, was almost impossible to work with, having serious tantrums every day. He was certainly mentally unstable, which made him perfect for the part of Fitzcarraldo.

The interview was one of the most interesting I have ever listened to.

A lot of it was shot as in nighttime, with low level light, which had amazing effects. The native Indians have very prominent bone structure and I tried to sketch one man, who was wearing a headband with a few blue and orange bird feathers incorporated into it. Their faces would be great for a portrait quilt.

Now, it really is time to stitch!

Stitching to dye

I bought June Barnes' book when I was in the UK (well it was my birthday present from my Mum, but I ordered it!). I have read it from cover to cover at least 3 times already, and I was excited to get to start playing with her ideas.

Her initial colour and dyeing exercises are based on blocks like logcabin or stars, since the focus is on the effects of different fabrics' take-up of colour. I couldn't think of a project where I wanted to do that, but I was experimenting with bark effects on trees, so I thought I could base my first attempt round that idea. I played with rectangular and random wavy blotches, and went for the semi-abstract rectangles and triangles, with a selection of natural coloured and printed fabrics. I bought several new FQs and some white on white ones, at Spotlight on Monday. I was very diligent and washed them all first. I also had some velvet for dyeing that I bought from marjie McWilliams, but I can't remember the composition of it now.

I did straight stitch round each scrap, though maybe I could leave out that step if I used glue or fusible web. Actually it took quite a long time. I was using the walking foot and swivelling at corners. I tried FMQ, but I didn't like the effect. Next I tried her granite stitch to secure the raw edges. I don't think I did them anywhere near small enough, but will play some more. I filled in the gaps with more circles and a few wavy lines. My impression is that the stitching and especially the garnet stitching makes too much of the gaps and detracts from the fabric patches.

I was supposed to be using cotton thread, but I only had cheapo white, with no writing on it, so couldn't tell. The blob test was inconclusive. Transpires now that most of it was cottonish, but when that ran out, I used polyester, which didn't take up the dye.

I mixed what I thought would be a yellow-green, but it turned out apple green. Looks OK. the velvet took the brightest dye, the linen the most yellow, and the attached calico the darkest bluest green. The neutral printed fabrics all turned out much the same colour.

I thought about colouring the threads with paint or crayons. Tried out 3 inktense colours on the back, but they migrated right through to the top overnight. I think the batting was the cotton and bamboo one. Nothin remarkable there, except the price.

I might use it to try low immersion dyeing and overdye with a turquoise, or I might start a new one with the white on whites. I had fun, and it didn't matter what happened, which was a good outcome.