this is the sort of thing that adds up to me taking forever to actually finish (or in many cases, start) projects: questions like “what sort of sandals did ancient Egyptians wear?” Since the “eagle” (which should have been a falcon, if it was supposed to be a messenger from or avatar of Horus, surely?) made a point of stealing Rhowhatsername’s sandals, I thought I’d include that image in the quilting. Fish bones, cow bones, hazel trees, kingfisher feathers, an eagle (well, falcon) and maybe eye of Horus and appropriate sandals. Since I’m just quilting rather than painting, I don’t have to decide between the gold or red version. I guess I should include a pumpkin & mouse & glass slipper & all that stuff too, eh. I think I’ll see if I can track down the friendly forum archeologist regarding fancy egyptian slippers rather than trusting that various costume rental shops have it right …
here are some court sandals belonging to King Tut:
and the dude in the background on the left here is holding a pair of sandals:
and despite looking like a shoe to me, this is referred to as a sandal:
This post is pretty much answer to the question somebody asked re what everybody does when procrastinating. I read blogs (like the one where I read the question, which is probably 30 blogs back so don’t ask me who it was [edit] HA, it was Lyric![/edit]). Sometimes I follow links on blogs to stupid quizzes or (more productively, or at least less guiltily) artist sites or resource sites or whatever. Sometimes mum or dad come online & tell/ask me something & I end up “wasting” hours researching the finer points on green bags or looking for driver information on a printer none of us own (it’s not truly wasted cos I don’t begrudge time with my family at all. Well, so long as they’re not annoying me. It is procrastinating though). All this despite me having my very own Round Tuit. Unfinished, of course …
I’ve always intended to do a bit of beading and/or silk embroidery on these pieces, but I got a wild hair today about little diamonte things. These ones are just stick-ons for a trial. I bought some pretty grey glass pearls in 4mm & 6mm yesterday, I’ve got silvergrey seedbeads, and I believe I’ve got even got some smoky swarovskis, and there are also silverlined clears and so on. I suspect I’ll be using some of the “fire opal” swarovskis somewhere along the line, which make my knees go all weak they’re so freakin gorgeous: . I think I’ve got some crackle beads and “popcorn” beads (they look nothing like popcorn, no idea what the name’s about) in similar yellow-orange-red combos too, but they might be a bit overpowering – 4mm fiery bicones amongst the grey pearls should look just fine.
I think I need to take a nap. my feet have been giving me hell all day, and now that the painkillers have finally kicked in they’re making me sleepy.
is it too much? yargh. I think my problem is that I LIKE COLOUR. Restricting myself to grey, even silvery grey, is killing me. I like the “back” …
[edit]
okay. I put rattail on all the pieces I had ready for edging, including cutting off the satin-stitched edge of the first piece. Thought it was a bit overpowering, but then I went around inside the rattail & satinstitched down the join, which makes a tidier join (except where I stuffed it up) and also just leaves a hint of the yellow.
I’m really not sure I like the taffeta. Really not sure. I chose it mostly for the watermark (illusory movement) and very stubborn body (no “give”, stiffness etc – talking construction here not metaphysics), but its failure to give in ways that I want it to is kind of annoying me. And it’s looking kind of artificial. Plastic. Which in a way is I guess not entirely out of keeping with all the yabber in my head on the subject of fairy tale princesses, but it’s reminding me a little too much of the godawful tacky Disney dressups they sell for $20 at Big W. I might get over it. I was also thinking about just using my cotton for the fronts, in a nice mottley ash grey.
Silk would be better than taffeta if the cotton doesn’t work. So I might dye/paint some silk, and I might do a trial with cotton for the front, but meantime I think I’ll finish the taffeta pieces as samples for working out construction issues if nothing else. I have a built-in hyperventilationy thing about Real Silk. I think I must have been a scullery maid in a previous life or something, someone for whom silk was a truly unimaginable luxury. I’m not terrified of it, I love it & love using it, I’m just horrified at the idea of wasting it. The death of all those poor wee grubs shouldn’t be for nothing!
meanwhile, el’s in daycare today and nobody’s expecting me to do anything or be anywhere, AND I went to bed like a normal human being last night and got like 8+ hours sleep for the first time in I dunno how many weeks, so I should take advantage of all this bounty and go sew :)
Wheee … here’s the model for my featured journal holding the copy of DUQ I picked up today. I get ridiculously chuffed about getting a pic in a magazine, even when I’m just one of 17 they pulled out of a hat cos they couldn’t squeeze in all 37 <G> The Aus-NZ artquilt group site is here, if you want to join us in making journals for 2008. Um, guess I better pull my finger out and get cracking on my January one, eh?
Re the name, in case anyone’s curious: Eleanor was a very pretty and very dainty wee baby, and as a result was dubbed elfinor by some online friends. I call her elly bella norah a lot (amongst other things), kind of sing it really like the “wo-oh wo-oh oh-oh-oh” bit in the Tom Jones pussycat song. So when I decided to turn the portrait of her into a flower fairy, the name seemed obvious – Elfinora, Bella Flora.
You were just desperate to know all that, weren’t you?
Here’s some artwork my elf has been making while I’ve been sewing the last few days. Photo of said artwork also by missy herself (girl does love a camera; I think she’ll have to be getting one for her birthday in April). That’s Big W (a department store) on the left, one of her favourite places in the world (toys, DVDs, clothes; what’s not to love?). And me with my head tilted, for reasons unexplained. Naked, apparently, cos you know I do the shopping starkers on a regular basis. The one on the right is our house, with cousin CJ off to the left and el in her “beautiful dancing princess dress” running so her “hair goes all long and beautiful”. Muddy Mountain (courtesy of Dora DVDs) and an angry storm cloud above/behind her. Flamingo mamas and flamingo babies (we watched a doco the other night). I think there’s a tree and a peacock (oops my mistake; it’s a reindeer getting all dirty) and a cat and a bird in a cage, too. Oh, and a sun. There’s always a sun – even in the Big W picture, which has both a sun AND a moon.
I spent most of last night stuffing around with a bunch of core sections for the bodice/mask thing. Naturally I’m changing the pattern as I go, since I’ve discovered a few misjudgements in the layout. I got up this morning, got the girl off to school, laid the pieces I did last night out to take pics … and look what I discovered:
Yep. I’d cut, glued & vliesofixed one out backward. Back (and of course it was one of the nicest bits of that fabric!), front, two lots of interfacing, 2 lots of vliesofix, and wadding. Complete and completely backwards. Not happy Jan.
And check what happened while I was quilting them tonight:
Can you tell what it is? Why, it’s the handwheel on the Janome, COMPLETELY WRAPPED IN THREAD. Apparently I left a bit too much thread hanging off the reel I’d wound the bobbins from. That’s a good half a spool of thread wasted there, and it was a big spool dammit, and it is waste. Tight as a miser’s bumhole it was, took ages to get off & no way could I find an end to salvage any. I hope I figure out something cosmic to do with all my thread snips, because otherwise I’m going to be completely pissed. Here’s the blob of thread keeping company with a sketch of a fish skeleton.
Anyway. Here’s the stuff that wasn’t a total disaster:
and here they are taped roughly in place on the pattern form:
mum’s been dyeing up a storm, so I’ll be putting more fabric up on ebay sometime in the next few days. Someone asked me about fat quarters over there, so I knocked up this graphic.
In addition to these standards, SLD has its own “fat” sizes available: fat halves and fat thirds (aka sashing, when sold by the metre). We’ve been selling sashing since the beginning, making it easy to get seamless sashing/borders up to 3m long for 1/3 the cost of metreage. I started dyeing & painting the newer ‘fat’ sizes for myself when I began doing pictorial & landscape work, since in many cases the usual sizes weren’t working for me or my students. Most often for landscape work, skyscape or seascape pieces for instance or texture pieces for treetrunks etc, but also for stable sashings & borders.
There are three reasons for these sizes.
1. proportion. A “fat” half has a depth of ~57cm (up to 70cm) instead of 50cm, and that can make all the difference to the look of a pictorial piece. A fat third will be ~37cm rather than 33 (in reality most people just get 30cm rather than an actual third) and while 4-7cm doesn’t sound like much it can mean a lot visually.
2. stability/stretch. The width of fabric has significantly more “give” than the length, which can create issues with sashings or lengths which you’re using for pictorial/collage style work.
3. price. Of course we like selling our fabric, but we also like customers to feel like they get the absolute most out of every inch. If I can sell you one multicoloured piece that will work for your project rather than pushing you to buy half a dozen colours, that’s what I’ll do. Since I know that long strips cut from the length of the fabric are better for sashings & borders, if something suitable is available I’d rather sell you a fat third, fat half, or sashing length than either nudging you to buy more than you truly need or selling you a regular width-of-the-roll cut. Of course if you want to buy more than you “need” just because, well, I’ll step right on out of your way … *G*
I have to admit I’d find it easier to laugh if I wasn’t reeling a bit about Heath Ledger. Damn, that was unexpected. Poor wee Matilda, and ai, his parents.
Watermarked silvergrey taffeta on the front, yellow-red hand-dye on the back. The quilting that you can’t really see properly is mostly the magic fish & the magic tree from a couple of cinders variants. I like it subtle, it was intended to be subtle, but I hadn’t really thought about how difficult it’ll be to get a photo that looks like anything heh.
so, you know I’ve been working out ideas for a series of works about fairy tales, and I keep going off in directions or coming up with ideas that present challenges I have no idea how to tackle. I’ve gone from a series of regular wallhangings (which may still happen) that are pretty much illustrations even if slightly subversive, to more 3-d forms that are sort of a cross between art quilt & costume & sculpture. In trying to think of ways to express what I want to with the 3D forms – mostly that the central character is almost invisible, it’s all about the externals (that in most cases she just passively endures), who does what to her and most importantly what she’s wearing (think about it, there are always far more descriptions of her clothes than of her) – the idea keeps growing.
I was just thinking about one construction method for the Cinderella bodice (on the loo, of course, as you do), and randomly thought that method would be easier if the pieces were bigger, and suddenly I’m imagining these giant, larger-than-life constructions that in some ways would convey a lot of what I’m thinking. Big enough that it would throw you back to a child’s perspective to be looking up at it, like being 5 and staring in absolute wonder at a fully-kitted-out bride (who are basically the same creature as the princesses in the stories, let’s face it). Anyway so kind of a thing about larger-than-life, awe and desire, and at the heart of it never being able to truly inhabit that magical dress, be that princess, because no human can. The reality of any dream is always less sparkly and more mundane, and you have to be quite grown-up (or healthy) to recognise the realer kinds of magic instead of getting depressed about the death of belief in fairy tales.
Anyway, so THEN I caught myself creating a wee imaginary animation involving a small girl looking at a bride/ball gown and being sort of blown around and throwing her arms out and growing as she spins up until she does indeed inhabit the dress … something about maybe you CAN inhabit the dress of your dreams so long as it is your dream and you embrace the changes that help you grow into it, I think.
And so then I’m thinking of those larger-than-life pseudo-dresses that nobody could fit into, the ones that the invisible fairytale princess is wearing, and thought wow, it would be so freaking cool to have them be part of an installation that captured faces from viewers, applied effects to and projected them into the empty princess from behind … no clue how to do it. And probably out of my financial league. But I’ma keep it in mind just in case I figure out some nifty way … and maybe meantime I need to work on the regular pictorial wallhangings so by the time I get to making the 3D forms, supersized or not, I’ve honed my ideas a bit. And meanwhile I’ve just “wasted” an hour or more thinking about the things I can’t do instead of doing the things I can … <G>
DUQ is showcasing a bunch of the 2006 journal quilts, including one of mine, Bella Flora. Making of is back here if anyone’s interested.
Note that while it’s shown elsewhere (including the DUQ site and probably the magazine) portraitwise, and works fine that way, it was designed landscapewise, because I was very late to the journal quilts party and had no idea they were all supposed to be portrait orientation. Duh me. Poor Buffy, organisatrix of the group exhibition, ended up resewing several hanging sleeves for me at the last minute, since I had of course gone right to deadline for getting them in …
I swear I’m going to get down to some PROPER sewing soon, before I go nuts. I’ve been working hard trying to get the ebay store going smoothly and to turn all our patterns into pdfs so mum can print them herself. I’m not sure if she just wants to be all independent or if she thinks it’s a burden on me to do the printing – it’s not, I love that sort of work. Well, so long as the stupid printer isn’t having another hissy fit at me. Not the laser, the laser’s lovely; the 2500 is a real shit at times. Anyhow, tidying up the pattern files is tedious work, esp when I have to compensate for Corel’s weird insistence on doubling the top & left margins when saving to pdf, but mostly just time consuming rather than difficult. Some parts of it are kinda fun – I manually traced all mum’s drawings for Blue Days in Corel, so it has MUCH smaller and easier to manipulate files now. It was a long job, but they’re such lovely shapes; she did really well. I kept thinking I’d like to do something with the drawings myself, but I think I’ll wait until I’ve got a few other things off my plate first heh. I think I’ve got her half convinced to do another pattern along similar lines – it’s a consistently good seller, so why not eh?
A while back I wandered into the Salvos, as is my wont, and they had this old sewing machine table for $4. No machine, of course. one of the ones you open the lid to form a work surface & then haul the machine (on a hinged dropdown) up & lock it into place. Quite an unglamorous bit of gear really, but I kept looking at it thinking it would be really useful for something if I could only trap that little thought buzzing around my head … a lightbox, I eventually decided.
Then the salvos had a sale, and it was down to $2. Well really, how could I not grab it just on the offchance? Even if I just slotted a piece of the perspex boards we use for fabric into the top & put a lamp underneath it would be great. Asked dad what he thought, and he got all enthusiastic …
… and (eventually) I ended up with a MASSIVELY bright light table (32 watt circular fluoro inside) with a switch at the end that automatically turns it on when you open the lid & off when you close it (the auto-off being the important thing, since with the lid closed there’s no hint of light escaping). Like a fridge light in reverse. It’s awesome. Not the prettiest thing ever (I may do something about that if I get exercised) but awesome nonetheless – and total cost was under $50! Would have been even cheaper if dad had gone for the smaller light fitting, which would have been fine (seriously, this thing is like operating theatre lights).
How cool are these? I scored them at the Thursday markets in the Clyde St Mall, from this lady who goes to SEA fairly regularly & collects the sort of crap I do heh. Couldn’t believe that amongst the cool musical instruments and little turtles and ganeshsa and stuff there were these combs, though – how perfect are they for Sleeping Beauty stuff? I’ve been collecting other things too, tiny little tools (no idea what for), massively discounted xmas sequinny sprays that remind me of honesty (snow queen headpiece most likely; meanwhile they can just look pretty on my desk), a plastic sword I’ll probably take a cast of or something, tiny little decks of cards from the posh crackers I scored in last year’s sales (now I can’t wait til next xmas to see what’s in the ones I got this year …), teeny little locks & keys (same source), um. Stuff that I totally can’t remember now because it’s late and I’m braindead. Thinking a lot, thinking and thinking (damn, I said I was going to do less of that, didn’t I? Crap) and figuring out how to approach this or that issue in one of the works I want to get cracking on. I was going to work on Cinders, but a journal quilt of some description based on the sand & crabs & mangroves and my memories of childhood summers up this way is lurking around at the edges of my consciousness. We’ll see. I’ve been trying to figure out how I want to handle the sand & water, because I have an inherent distrust/dislike of the often-gimmicky love affair so many people seem to have with angelina etc. I definitely like a little sparkle sometimes, but …
I’m having one of those horrible periods where I keep thinking of all these things I need to do, and then when I go to do one of them get distracted and don’t do it or anything else I should be, and then it’s suddenly 3 am and I’m suddenly thinking shit, I STILL haven’t emailed momil/dug up the list of sites on which to advertise the guild show in August/found that doohickey/rang joe bloggs/fixed the whatsit/taken anything for my headache. Writing myself a to-do list would help, but I have to remember to do it … about the only thing I’ve managed to keep mostly on top of so far is the stuff we’re selling on ebay. Which is a pretty important thing to keep on top of if I want more sales & to keep my good feedback :)
I think I’m partly just migrainey (I don’t get crippling pain with them, just mad “visual disturbances” with accompanying nausea sometimes, and a really bloody annoying thought-smushing headache that drugs only somewhat work on so I mostly just try to ignore it until it really is a bit too much) and overtired from pulling a bunch of all-nighters trying to sort out the last 3 years of the co-op records because there’d been a mixup with floats and in trying to sort it out it was discovered what a bloody great dog’s breakfast it all was. Still needs doublechecking etc by C, too. Could be remnants of whatever the hell weird lurgy we all came down with after Christmas, dizzy and faintly nauseous and sleeping all day & achey in the joints and so on. “We all” = except the girlchild of course, who has been HAPPY! BUBBLY! CHEERFUL! NOISY! PERKY! fungirl since xmas, from the moment she cracks her eyes open in the morning until she sleep sneaks up behind her and whacks her over the head with a two-by. She was soooo very very happy that preschool started again this week so she wasn’t stuck with grumpy old sick grownups 24/7.
anyhow, I’m going to bed. It’s only 4 am … you watch, I’ll be up at 8.30 again and then useless all day again. Stupid head/body/lurgy/whatever.
this is the sort of thing that adds up to me taking forever to actually finish (or in many cases, start) projects: questions like “what sort of sandals did ancient Egyptians wear?” Since the “eagle” (which should have been a falcon, if it was supposed to be a messenger from or avatar of Horus, surely?) made a point of stealing Rhowhatsername’s sandals, I thought I’d include that image in the quilting. Fish bones, cow bones, hazel trees, kingfisher feathers, an eagle (well, falcon) and maybe eye of Horus and appropriate sandals. Since I’m just quilting rather than painting, I don’t have to decide between the gold or red version. I guess I should include a pumpkin & mouse & glass slipper & all that stuff too, eh. I think I’ll see if I can track down the friendly forum archeologist regarding fancy egyptian slippers rather than trusting that various costume rental shops have it right …
This post is pretty much answer to the question somebody asked re what everybody does when procrastinating. I read blogs (like the one where I read the question, which is probably 30 blogs back so don’t ask me who it was [edit] HA, it was 
. I think I’ve got some crackle beads and “popcorn” beads (they look nothing like popcorn, no idea what the name’s about) in similar yellow-orange-red combos too, but they might be a bit overpowering – 4mm fiery bicones amongst the grey pearls should look just fine.
… and (eventually) I ended up with a MASSIVELY bright light table (32 watt circular fluoro inside) with a switch at the end that automatically turns it on when you open the lid & off when you close it (the auto-off being the important thing, since with the lid closed there’s no hint of light escaping). Like a fridge light in reverse. It’s awesome. Not the prettiest thing ever (I may do something about that if I get exercised) but awesome nonetheless – and total cost was under $50! Would have been even cheaper if dad had gone for the smaller light fitting, which would have been fine (seriously, this thing is like operating theatre lights). 
How cool are these? I scored them at the Thursday markets in the Clyde St Mall, from this lady who goes to SEA fairly regularly & collects the sort of crap I do heh. Couldn’t believe that amongst the cool musical instruments and little turtles and ganeshsa and stuff there were these combs, though – how perfect are they for Sleeping Beauty stuff? I’ve been collecting other things too, tiny little tools (no idea what for), massively discounted xmas sequinny sprays that remind me of honesty (snow queen headpiece most likely; meanwhile they can just look pretty on my desk), a plastic sword I’ll probably take a cast of or something, tiny little decks of cards from the posh crackers I scored in last year’s sales (now I can’t wait til next xmas to see what’s in the ones I got this year …), teeny little locks & keys (same source), um. Stuff that I totally can’t remember now because it’s late and I’m braindead. Thinking a lot, thinking and thinking (damn, I said I was going to do less of that, didn’t I? Crap) and figuring out how to approach this or that issue in one of the works I want to get cracking on. I was going to work on Cinders, but a journal quilt of some description based on the sand & crabs & mangroves and my memories of childhood summers up this way is lurking around at the edges of my consciousness. We’ll see. I’ve been trying to figure out how I want to handle the sand & water, because I have an inherent distrust/dislike of the often-gimmicky love affair so many people seem to have with angelina etc. I definitely like a little sparkle sometimes, but … 
I think I’m partly just migrainey (I don’t get crippling pain with them, just mad “visual disturbances” with accompanying nausea sometimes, and a really bloody annoying thought-smushing headache that drugs only somewhat work on so I mostly just try to ignore it until it really is a bit too much) and overtired from pulling a bunch of all-nighters trying to sort out the last 3 years of the co-op records because there’d been a mixup with floats and in trying to sort it out it was discovered what a bloody great dog’s breakfast it all was. Still needs doublechecking etc by C, too. Could be remnants of whatever the hell weird lurgy we all came down with after Christmas, dizzy and faintly nauseous and sleeping all day & achey in the joints and so on. “We all” = except the girlchild of course, who has been HAPPY! BUBBLY! CHEERFUL! NOISY! PERKY! fungirl since xmas, from the moment she cracks her eyes open in the morning until she sleep sneaks up behind her and whacks her over the head with a two-by. She was soooo very very happy that preschool started again this week so she wasn’t stuck with grumpy old sick grownups 24/7. 
CHITCHAT