doodleblog.kaliane.com

So this thing is basically telling me that once upon a time I probably had all the right stuff to be like totally freakin hawt, and that something just went wrong.

Gee, thanks. Stupid memes.

OMG people. Vickie Hallmark, whose work in both textiles and glass/metal I absolutely adore, had a giveaway, and I won this:

Go see anyway just because her stuff is awesome, but also comment – she’s giving another gorgeous bead away, & you never know your luck …

</gobsmacked>

You know, I really disliked that rabbit in Alice in Wonderland (truth be told I disliked everything but the flamingos and the stoned caterpillar, possibly because everything else was apparently on a very bad acid trip, and yes I know hating on Alice makes me a freak. I also think Tolkien was a longwinded bore; sue me) … um, where was I? Oh yeah. But, sometimes I wonder if I disliked him largely because I’m forever running around like a headless chook chanting “I’m late! I’m late!”

Which is to say that not only do I have overdue library books (doh), and not only do I keep forgetting to get a copy of El’s birth certificate to replace the one that’s been put Somewhere Safe: I missed not just the first 2008 oznz journal quilts deadline but also the extension Buffy so generously extended to me & my fellow slackers. I have excuses, but if I wasn’t such a headless chook I’d have got them done early enough that it wouldn’t MATTER when despite my best efforts a whole fortnight wriggles out of my grasp like an armload of kittens. Oh well. I’m still doing the sodding things, because even when they’re total crap you at least learn things NOT to do … besides, there’s a slim chance that if I ring Expertise & ask nicely, some kind person will agree to tuck my journals into the box with the ones Buffy apparently delivered today. I just need to butch up enough to ring while remaining chill enough to sweet-talk a stranger. Have I mentioned how much I hate the phone? I’m happy as larry to answer it, I just hate making calls, and somehow I’m forever getting stuck with doing the phonecalls in our family. I obviously don’t fuss enough about it … then again, there are plenty of things I do fuss about, and I don’t particularly want THE defining thing about me to be that I’m bloody hard to get along with. Shut up.

So here are two more of last year’s journals, one unfinished. Both feature lutrador (actually spunbond or whatever that brand is) in a golden yellow.

This one, I first of all fused a silk hanky between some wadding and a sheet of lutrador, then copied a doodle from my sketchbook onto vliesofix backing paper with transfer crayons & ironed it on. Meh, not particularly marvellous result, but at least a guideline for stitching. Then I just freemotion quilted/threadpainted using various threads, trying to make it look like the stairs head off into a massively bright light (in the sketchbook, I’ve got groovy words like “effulgence” scrawled in the corner). Between the horrible pellon wadding I used and the lutrador, the stitching made it all shrink up more than I’d allowed for, so I trimmed extra from it & then topstitched it to a mount/frame of brown felt. I added a little foil to this one too (it’s a replacement for the disappointing egg in the previous post), and it worked a little better but still isn’t doing it for me as far as bling is concerned. I far prefer my proper Dutch leaf & size, so unless someone informs me of some marvellous foiling product I think that’s what I’ll go back to when I want metallic.

(SIGH. This post has been sitting in draft form for DAYS. Between sodding computers and sodding Firefox 3 being a big fat dog and sodding IBS and sodding med changes and OMG the sodding OMG heatwave, this week has pretty much blown. Wah is me. So I’m just adding the pics and publishing, and I’ll get the other JQ blather into another post ASAP)

JUNE – Wire & Metal Foils, Fire


My keywords: heat, burn, fire, destruction, change, death, life, hurt, rebirth, phoenix, egg.

It started out okay. Except for not being able to find my misty fuse or even my gossamer fuse, despite having at least two open packs of black GS and a bunch more unopened in the shop stock (at mum’s, dammit). So after hunting long enough, found regular vliesofix & ironed it to some sparkly synthetic I hoped would do interesting things under a heat gun (why yes, someone with a brain probably WOULD have tested that theory …). Also found those silk hankies I dyed last year, and decided to make use of one. Bits of silk hanky pulled out & arranged in faintly flamish fashion on background.

More bits of silk hanky, plus snips of thread from the waste thread container (where I put – at least theoretically – all the starts & ends of thread I snip off projects as I sew).

whee, now there’s angelina fibres too. That was worth an extra photo, wasn’t it? Yeah.

now there’s an overlay of rainbowy/oilslickish chiffon, with a hole left in the middle. There’s a layer of black crystal organza on top of that, and it’s all ironed down.

And here’s some stitching. External, invasive, threatening, wounding, jagged, black, careless and malicious.

Here it is turned the right way up, with flamey stitching, and look! There’s an eggish sort of shape in the centre. It was actually shockingly yaya-ish in person, which thankfully doesn’t seem to translate to the web photo. I guess that would sort of be okay, but for once I really wasn’t being all ra-ra womyn power on purpose, well not in any twat/womb kind of way anyway.

And lookit, here’s our heroine, trying to be reborn from that fire.

Shortly after this point is where I started wishing real life had a key combo for “undo”.

Foiling failure. Foil does not adhere with heat from iron, and while it does transfer readily to hot fabrics, utterly fails to be visible. Also, heatgun disaster. Fabrics did not behave as desired, and didn’t do something interestingly novel either. Horrible synthetic batting, chosen for its assumed meltiness, also did not behave as desired. This is why it’s called experimentation, and this is also why I usually do a little test bit just in case. Because I hate having wasted all that time & thread. So, I cut the centre out, & let’s see if I can salvage something from this mess.

And the answer (at least thus far) is NEGATORY.

May – Recycling, Curves/Circles/Going Around

My keywords: um. Yeah, um, er, um. *scritchscratchscritch* Um.
Anyhow.
The CDs is really what I started with, what with them being circles and (at least in my house) common candidates for some form of recycling/repurposing. I WAS going to get all tricksy and do this terribly elaborate etching about the cycle of life etc, and maybe even print it as well as use it as embellishment, but I (ahem) discovered that I kind of suck at the non-dremmel so I just played. I kept pressing too hard etc so bits of the CD kept melting or deforming, which after a while I started doing on purpose because it’s sort of funky. The 1st CD looked vaguely underwatery, mostly in the colours & fluted edges, so 2nd CD was intended to be a brain coral or something. After covering it all with those wiggly lines I decided instead to cut it up & arrange it so it looked a bit like one of those fan-shaped sponge(?) critters. All other decisions followed from the “going with the flow” thing that happened with the CDs.

base fabric. Chosen after I messed with the CDs, when as I was ratting around looking for something else it came to hand. It’s an offcut from something, which sort of counts as recycling, dunnit?

Other bits. CDs mangled with pseudo-dremmel, which was gritty and smelly fun.

Seaweedy bits of plastic bag & foamy bubbliness.

Flowery (sea anemone-esque) bits stitched on. Quiltlet trimmed, bagged & turned out, ready for embellishment.

CD bits glued on. Some additional stitching & beading to come, tonight while L&O is on.

most of the time I don’t pay a lot of attention to the search terms people use to get here (with the exception of terms which make me think if I had my druthers those freaks wouldn’t escape with their nads intact), but I have to admit that “mutant pigeons” intrigues me. That’s a funny old thing to search for anyway, and I have no idea why my blog would show up when someone googles “mutant pigeons”, but it’s almost cool that it does.

My apologies for the break in transmission, btw; not only has it been kind of weird and not conducive to peaceful blogging while coffeedrinking round these parts lately, but WordPress made some major changes to how things work/look in the latest update and I got a little intimidated. I must be getting old or something …

ONNYHOO. I have actually been sewing etc, catching up on overdue 2008 journal quilts amongst other things. Trying to figure out where the blazes I hid stuff during the pre-xmas cleanup, cussing and grumbling about things that hide when I’m trying to DO something. I’m hoping to do better at keeping up with the journal quilts this year, since I won’t be running around like a headless chook sorting out crap to do with our quilt show, and since the PLAN is to be spending a lot more time in the workroom anyway. It’s a lot easier to be creative when you’re in the space all the time rather than having to get up & go to it … or is that only true if you’re Captain Inertia like me?

I have been taking pics. I’ll upload as soon as I know whether they count as FAILS or WINS.