By sion, on August 16th, 2010%
 yesterday Denise came over & we did a bit of playing with various media – neocolour & inktense pencils, india ink, paint & and some exhausted dye. My little pencil landscape jobby is lame proof of how much I hate trying to do landscapes. My desire for realism (or at least truth & meaning) falls into the black hole of my laziness/impatience, hardcore. A teeny tiny fragment of a landscape now – a rock, perhaps, or a bit of bark – that I could get right into (so why didn’t I? Because I’m an idiot who only just thought of that approach to landscape and who only now realises that this is how, in fact, she relates to landscape generally. And maybe life. Little bits of treasure; the big picture is boring). Anyway.
 Playing with ink to get impressions of landscapiness was much more fun – squirting water onto paper to set up paths for ink and then spraying ink over top & seeing what it does; THAT was cool. I got some nifty little bits to draw over/into. Messing around with old dye was cool too.I need to experiment & see if I can get fabric to behave the way the watercolour paper did with the dye – I’m guessing I’ll need to stretch it, but how cool would it be if I can get it to work?
 Then today, Dianne came over and we messed around with clay and then dye. She brought over a few molds for hands & feet & we cast them so I can mod them & make my own molds. Fun, and they look lovely when they come out of the molds (I daresay the ones I make from paperclay won’t be nearly as delicate & pretty heh – which really is the idea anyway, since I’m aiming for spirits of the earth). While they were drying out we started on fabric – Dianne wanted a big tree to stitch up as a wallhanging, so I mixed her up some DR-33 (like alginate; thickener stuff) and gave her a few pointers & let her have at it. Miss E decided she wanted to do one too, and since we were using brushes I let her have at it – and that’s her effort over there on the left. Cool, huh? I couldn’t get up much enthusiasm (I don’t know what’s up, but I’m not well; think I’ll go to the doc tomorrow) but before the weather went stupid did make up a landscape piece. Not sure, having done it, whether I’d want to sell pieces like that. I’m sure I could sell it as fabric, perhaps even as expensive fabric, but I’m more inclined to see it as a painting (one I might stitch on, but still). Quandaries.
By sion, on April 9th, 2009%
Sorry I’m being boring and/or absent lately. I’ve been spending heaps of time at kindy, absolutely fascinated by all those little minds fairly VACUUMING up all the knowledge you can throw at them. Bugger the sponge analogy; these kids are veritable Dysons! Really awesome to watch; seems to be the intellectual equivalent of a the physical development fast track babies are on. I guess there have been a few stages like that, but you don’t usually get to see a whole bunch of them doing it at once and inspiring each other to new heights. Unless you’re a teacher, I guess. Which I’m not interested in being, since I’m absolutely knackered by lunchtime and besides I have a really hard time not saying shit (or worse) in front of the whole class and then there’s all those weird snippy notes the more peculiar parents send in …
anyhow, lest you think there’s no textiley sort of stuff at all going on, I would like to enter these into evidence:
 
These being 1) some very inexpert hand quilting/embroidery I’m doing on a piece of fabric whose colour hasn’t got the zing its pattern does, which E has dibsed for a cushion cover, and 2) some felt in need of fulling, made at the end of a demo by Dianne at the guild last Tuesday. Tres fun. Tres hard work, the fulling part; works a set of muscles in my forearms that I obviously don’t use for anything else. Not sure I’ll do very much of it (apart from anything else, wool makes me crazy itchy), but if it’s fun to stitch on I could be tempted.
Right now it’s just going to sit there waiting for Easter, two birthdays, 3 separate sets of houseguests and one 6 yr old’s birthday party to be over.
By sion, on February 22nd, 2009%
I’ve got the theme song from Kimba stuck in my head. You needed to know that, right? Right.
I had a bit of a splurge yesterday on the Expected Grandson, because two shops that I went into had sales, and well, it’s almost obligatory then, isn’t it? Got these:
 
and an FP bath I’m not at all sure they’ll like. It’s got a support sling for newborns which I thought looked very useful for two people who have sod all experience with babies, given that even the fairly experienced worry about dropping the slippery wriggly buggers sometimes, but it is most emphatically not earthy-toned. We’ll see. Anyway, I was trying ever so hard to go for the neutrals and beiges she expressed a preference for, but I ask you, who could resist those zebra & giraffe suits? Or that deliciously – you have no idea how deliciously, I think I want one myself – soft zebra blanket, or those funky toys? I got a range of sizes, and hopefully I’ll get a few pics to share when the time comes.
still working on the quilt, but there’s not a lot to show for it when you’re tracing off bits for applique. Just lots of bits of baking paper, since I’m using gossamer fuse instead of vliesofix. I did get started putting some zebras together, tonight:
I decided to use a piece of very pale white-beige hand-dye for them because I think white would be way too stark. And because I like being able to get some shadows & lights from the fabric itself. After cutting a few strips of black to make stripes with and imagining how irritatingly frayish they’d be when I start sewing, I also decided that I’d be far better off drawing the stripes. So that’s what I’m doing, with my trusty Fabrico pens. I got about this far when I had to give up & admit that I really don’t remember how zebra stripes go:
and, since I get really irritated when things are glaringly wrong, I came to google zebras. In case you need to know, it turns out their stripes go like this:
So now I’ll do some more before I go to bed.
By sion, on August 14th, 2008%
I had to go to mum’s to do some printing for the quilt show and so Dad & I could go deliver flyers & posters while ma looked after bratzilla. I won’t even tell you how exhausted I was after trudging around all afternoon; suffice to say that I REALLY need to start getting some regular exercise. Anyway, I took the challenge WIP over to show mum, and just on the offchance I went ferreting around in her stash, and I found not one but two exactly the right sort of thing fabrics.
I wasn’t sure about the floral, but those hints of teal really grabbed me (because IMO that sleeve was looking a bit lonely, even with her reflected). I bought some chiffon to knock down the contrast & dull the colours a little, but it’s too dark (right hand side of pic). The organza is better, but not quite dark enough. The little swatch at the bottom was painted with a thin wash of black & pthalo blue, & is much more what I want, so I went ahead & painted the big piece:
With the organza overlay on the left (how I’ll be using it, I think), without on the right. You can see the other piece of fabric I liked there at the bottom – it’s a pretty silvery grey with a white pattern that hints at lace and knotwork and damask. Here are a couple of shots of the two fabrics (with & without the organza overlay) with the hand:
 
Much happier now. Much richer. Anyone want a piece of grey hand-dye with a lace rubbing on it? lol
By sion, on August 20th, 2007%
did some sewing the other day, which I just realised I forgot to get pics of. My first practise feather (not COMPLETELY horrible, but definitely amateurish & probably very obvious that I’ve no clue at all where you’re supposed to even start), a ferny feather (laughably bad. No really, HAHAHA OMG so tragically malformed), the self portrait jobby I never finished for the SCQuilters retreat, and Woodwife. Woodwife is going to need some lift – probably a bit of zingy extra quilting, and it may end up being the first piece I get around to actually sewing beads on. The feather practising was done in some new variegated threads I received on Thursday along with my quilting gloves & a few other goodies; I’m far more impressed by the thread than my sewing heh.
We’re up at Repton at the moment, bit of a getaway while mum’s housesitting. Somebody had a lovely time in the monster bathtub last night, as you can see (well, I hope you can – apologies if the pics suck; I’m using sis’s mac notebook & the colourspace is alien, so if they’re horrible I’ll edit & re-up when I’m at home. Yes, this is why I need a laptop of my very own! That and email and stuff like forgetting not only my password but my login for my own blog …). Anyhow, so I’m fiddling with a few pieces. Butched up & made a start on that bushfire fabric mum dyed up while the Newcastle girls were in town:
Again, no idea what these pics look like on a PC (and my apologies to mac people to whom my pictures always look like crap). On top of that, I only have a guest account and the only imaging program on this is bloody iPhoto, which (sorry mac afficionados) SUCKS DONKEY DINGDONGS.
And in case anyone’s been wondering: yes, sometimes my posts are titled by snippets of spam.
By sion, on July 25th, 2007%
these are the sort of fabrics I buy for use in the pictorial applique. I use my hand-dyes etc for leaves etc in the foreground, obviously, but some of these are great fussycut in backgrounds or as elements for building your own flora. The grasses in particular are very useful, as are various stone/pebble prints. There’s one more image of wood/stone etc textures to come. If you’re trying to choose fabric to bring along to a landscape & critters workshop, use these pics as a guideline – you won’t want anything too stylised, and you’ll want to try and have all fabrics with a similar style for one project. For eg, some of my commercial prints have a drawn outline and/or look a little like botanical drawings, some are more painterly & have obvious brushstrokes while still looking acceptably realistic, some are almost photographic. I wouldn’t mix all those together in the same piece, as a rule, or not without thinking about what sort of pen & threadwork I can do to make them play nice.
     
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yesterday Denise came over & we did a bit of playing with various media – neocolour & inktense pencils, india ink, paint & and some exhausted dye. My little pencil landscape jobby is lame proof of how much I hate trying to do landscapes. My desire for realism (or at least truth & meaning) falls into the black hole of my laziness/impatience, hardcore. A teeny tiny fragment of a landscape now – a rock, perhaps, or a bit of bark – that I could get right into (so why didn’t I? Because I’m an idiot who only just thought of that approach to landscape and who only now realises that this is how, in fact, she relates to landscape generally. And maybe life. Little bits of treasure; the big picture is boring). Anyway. 
Playing with ink to get impressions of landscapiness was much more fun – squirting water onto paper to set up paths for ink and then spraying ink over top & seeing what it does; THAT was cool. I got some nifty little bits to draw over/into. Messing around with old dye was cool too.I need to experiment & see if I can get fabric to behave the way the watercolour paper did with the dye – I’m guessing I’ll need to stretch it, but how cool would it be if I can get it to work?
CHITCHAT