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!

Flowers and urban decay

I'm toying with words for my current piece. I am using another texture photo from pixmaniaque, this time a bit larger. I spent all of the last two days painting some fabric with many layers of colours of both paint and textile ink. The ink is much gloopier, and I need to thin it for this project. I've learnt a bit about colour mixing - how potent any touch of red is, and how adding light olive green on top of other colours is not very successful - it just blends into the other colours. Some were transparent and some were metallic as well as opaque ones. The metallic needs to go on last, in future, as it shows through all the others.

Now that I have the piece on the design wall, I can see it has a much spottier effect than the original, which has vertical strokes. I may put some wool roving on to simulate those strokes, but the embellisher makes quite a lot of holes through the fabric, so I will experiment on other samples first.

I bought some embroidery threads for it today - didn't have anything in lilac or butter yellow to make the daisy-like encrustrations on the wall or ship or whatever the photo is of. Would also like to add beads, but only have one packet that would tone in - can't believe that, after all the beads I bought last month, I still don't have the colours I want!

Here it is, as it was this morning. I have added more blue ink to the top since.

On/off weather

The last few days have been alternately gorgeous and dismal. The days are starting to get the autumn feel, from cold nights and fresher air. The light when it's sunny is so clear and makes everything look in focus, even several kilometres away. I love it! It's always a struggle to adjust to the haziness of light in Europe, and the distant views are all in a blue-grey mist. Not just pollution, but the humidity as well. I'm a person who needs lots of light. Not for me the candle glow or the dimmer switch. Often in the daytime I have the lights on over my machine. That reminds me, one of the spotlights has gone and I have to get a huge ladder so I can reach the 3 metre high ceiling to replace the bulb.

Judy in Edmonton has been sending me more poppy pictures, so I spent a while yesterday trying to reduce one poppy flower to a line drawing. It is kind of frustrating how slowly I find my way round Photoshop Elements. I tried to watch a few YouTube videos of various functions, but couldn't get any sound. Then I got distracted trying to find sound switches on my computer, only to discover later in the day that it was a YouTube problem and my computer was fine! They were helpful up to a point, but often the one step I needed in close-up whizzed by and the speaker swallowed their words and I couldn't find which menu the drop-down option was linked to. Eventually I discovered the Magic Extractor option, but couldn't easily drag the poppy into a blank document. 3 hours later, I finally got where I wanted to get, but not sure if I could remember all the steps for another time. I would love to do a proper Elements Course. I did a weekend at the university last year, which was good as an introduction, but I want MORE!

Lyn called round with some more organza scraps for my poppies. I must try both fabric medium and dissolved solvy as methods for stiffening the organza. Also various finishing methods - stitching, burning, double layer bonded with Misty Fuse. Maybe later today when I get back from work.

Class work

It's been a few days since I have been able to do much in the way of stitching. Very busy time at work, and then had friends for the long weekend. Then it was 35 degrees, and today it is 15, but that's Canterbury weather for you!

On Wednesday I was able to collect my sewing machine from the dealer, where it was having a service. I also got the guy to wind back the top tension so that I wasn't always trying to FMQ on 1 or less. I have never had the tension over its normal place, which is 4, so it seemed a waste of adjustment.

On the way back from town I stopped at a cheap stationery warehouse to look for some washable glue gel, so I could try the technique outlined by Cynthia St Charles in QA magazine. The store was having a 2 days 25% off sale, so I got a whole bunch of stuff. Some, like printer ink and recordable CDs and DVDs, were utilitarian. I also bought some textile ink suitable for screen printing, which I want to try. Some oil pastels, some foam board (for printing onto), a sketchpad and some paintbushes. All in all it came to $247 but at least I got the glue gel I went for! I tried the resist technique, and think it would work fine with a bit of practice to get the lines even.

Yesterday two quilt artist friends came for a playdate. Shirley Goodwin wanted to play with a burning tool and organza. Lyn Winter had brought a big stash of organza bits and acrylic felt for us to raid. Both of them are tutors at Wellington this Easter. Lyn is working on a fabulous quilt for a NANZ competition. It uses illuminated letters and an aged paper look. Shirley is working on a political quilt. I am still gestating my current two ideas, but meanwhile I am doing classwork.

I did another piece for the embellisher class with coiled roving on Kunin felt. This was then zapped with a heat gun. I did a bit of knitting in a variegated mohair and felted that under the first piece onto a second piece of felt. I don't like the melted plastic feel of the zapped kunin, but I like the other two techniques.

In the evening I did a bit of work for the Colour and Composition study group that I am part of, through Studio Quilts. Got a bit confused about left brain/right brain and which should be the one to start. Of the 4 pieces I quickly fused, there is one I really like and the other 3 are OK.

This was a week for parcels arriving - wool roving, silk noil and copper knitting from Texere yarns, and my beads from Craft4me that was going out of beads. Now I really must start using some this new stuff while I can remember what I got and where I put it!

Embellisher piece for class

The sari ribbon is about an inch wide, and mostly comes in those
cerise and emerald colours with a few dull or bright reds. Some has
metallic stripes. That is what I punched onto the black batting in
stripes, then I cut it and rotated to form a kind of 4 patch. After that I
added the wool roving in a diagonal grid, using the chiffon to hold it
down, which is when I burnt back the chiffon. At that point I hated it.
I started with some fine green wool yarn doing detached fly stitch, then
some feather stitch in a variegated perle cotton. Then the ladder
stitch (which is just a kind of chain stitch). It needed some pizzazz,
so I added the coiled pink chenille for flowers. Then I crocheted the
green chenille just with my fingers and made it into stems, which
looked like snakes to go with the ladders. Oh, and there was some
royal blue foil added under the sari ribbon. The painted wonder under
wasn't really visible in the end, though I painted with dynaflow. It
did hold the sari ribbon in place for embellishing, but black misty
fuse would have been better, especially now we know that fragment-for-tacking technique from Judy and Esterita.

In retrospect the batting has got quite lumpy with distortion from the
stitches. It doesn't bother me here, but black felt would be a better
backing.

February and trying to think

My goals were to spend at least 2 hours clearing rubbish from my office or the garage on the last day of the month. Well, I managed 1 and a half hours, and 2 bins of rubbish. Still masses to go, but it felt good. The next goal was to spend 2 hours on reflection on the first day of the month. Total failure, but I still have it in my sights. I do understand that you need to be steering a course to get anywhere, but I don't enjoy meditation in any way.

But at least I can reflect on how January went. Artistically there were some positives, negatives and some learning, all of which are good for development. I tried the shaving foam painting with feezer paper stencils, and that is a technique I could use again. The embellisher has been mostly unsatifying. Despite the fact that I love looking at textured pieces, like Sandra Meech, Maggie Grey etc., and even Jane vk's, I do not feel it is my medium. It may be that my fear or negativity holds me back, but I don't think so. There is definitely a left brain/right brain fight going on with it, though. It seems a jumbly way to work and the result looks like a jumble. I have downloaded a couple of the texture photos from flickr. One is a machine stitching sample, but the other could be embellisher plus hand stitching, or painted lutradur or transfer. That excites me in a way the burning of chiffon layers does not (in fact it annoys me because the chiffon is quite expensive and then you throw it away in effect).

Once I have experimented with some of the things I bought at Hands last week, I will make a plan to dye or paint my own stuff for bigger projects. I still haven't got to grips fully with colour mixing, especially for muted browns and khakis. The embellisher class has 2 more weeks, and after that I will stop work on the experiments and get back to something more focused.

My work life has been getting busier, working up to the climax of this week, when all the new kids start and need a lot of attention. While it is not a career job, it does have the benefit of a small income and a small contact with a bunch of mainly nice people.

Socially, there have been some fun times at the beach with both Kevin and also Tarnya and the girls. A lot of movies, some time with Fei, also fun. I have some friends from England coming next weekend, so that will have the effect of making me tidy the house at least once in the month. It doesn't bother me most of the time, until it does - a bit like when your fingernails suddenly need cutting.

The goal setting will wait till later.