Challenge Piece

I was given a champagne bottle wire closure along with the gold foil and set the challenge to do something with it so I can up with…

"Wines I have Known"

Its based on  whole drinking experience! The figures in the middle come from my favourite wine label. I stitched a couple in bold because at the start things are in sharp relief while later things become a bit more shaky as in the second of the two figures. Then things start to get a little off centre – hence the champagne items slightly off and then by the end of it all, we’re usually a bit ragged and burnt out around the edges…. and off course – out of focus!  The background was transfer printed so it was all a bit of fun!

A few weeks back I went to 2QAQ, a Queensland based art quilting group and we did a little live art project. We all brought black and white items and red hearts. Then each table of members were invited to come up and do a little creation in a bout 5 minutes.  Here is what my table did:

Black and White with a lot of heART

It was a great afternoon with much creative action!

And lastly the cute award goes to my friend Sue’s new dog Bailey…

Another new Textile Art Assistant...

Flat out after a hard day helping Sue with all her creative activity…and lots of digging large holes!!!

Transfer Painting

Had a bit of fun transfer painting the other day. I had painted all these pieces of paper back when I couldn’t find all the equipment for some dyeing that I wanted to do. So I changed to transfer (disperse dyes) painting instead. Here’s a few:

Painted paper

I used ordinary A4 paper that I had lying around. I tried a few things like the old butterfly splat (fold paper in half), wetting the paper with a spray bottle then applying paint, applying paint then spraying water and just painting it on with a paint brush.

After a few days I got back to it to try the ironing part as I got distracted bya few other activities in the mean time. First of all I had to get ut of “ironing” headspace as I put the iron on synthetic instead of linen!! Without a hot iron not much transferring takes place .

Transferred to fabric!

What a difference some of the colours were. The only thing I would say is beware the yellow – it transfers very brightly! I love the way browns come out blue or blacks come out green.

I had a piece of pale green sation from my friend Donna so gave that a bit of a makeover and ended up with a piece that looks very sea inspired.

Sea Foam

 I love the way you can just keep on printing with the sheets to get lots of lovely overlays and playfulness in the patterning. Did a few papers with flicking paint onto the sheet and using a resist of thread and paper – very interesting space! Now I’m off to burn the edges of one of my pieces…have to make sure I have the bucket of water ready just in case!

What doesn’t work!

Or rather when good ideas go splat! Often when looking around at people’s blogs you would thnk that the world was always rosy when creating artwork BUT I have to say its not. So just to show that some days things just don’t go where you would like them too, here are a few recent ideas that fell over!

Stalled Idea 1: Inkjet printing and felting
I printed out an image I had created on silk chiffon and then had a go at a bit of nuno felting to see if I could incorporate it into a larger piece. Thus:

Nuno Felted Print

The actual felting part went fine but I chose the wrong colour (red bit) for part of it. I had wanted to create a long tail to the piece that would be curved around a wire form but the colour was wrong and the felt didn’t want to curl! May be able to do something with this if I cut off the tail. I was also a little heavy handed on the amount of wool – could have used at least 1/3 less.

Stalled Idea 2: Bookcover or not
I needlefelted a piece to create a fabric I was going to use for a cover to a diary. The needlefelting went well, hand felt first to place then machined over to really make sure it was felted. I machine embroidered some organza to it – still going on track. Then I added a machine lace border to the edges…starting to stray, edge ended up a bit tighter than I wanted. Moved to making the background fabric which I was going to stitch it too, that went well. Put the two pieces together and… they didn’t FIT. ARRRAGH!!! Then thought the needlefelted cover was really a bit soft for book cover and Mrs Doubt really moved in and canned the whole idea. So I am left with…

Needlefelted piece

Its pretty but its going nowhere at the moment. I think I’ll just shiva stik the background fabric and use that for the cover.

Stalled Idea 3: What was I thinking here?
I think the problem with this one is that I wasn’t thinking!!! Just sort of plodding along and doing without really considering direction which means I have this….

Mixed Mystery

Paint, thread, plastic dollies etc all thrown together. To make matters worse as I was stitching the thread on the machine went nuts and ended up in big clumps behind the dollies (maybe it didn’t like the plastic). So its another piece that one way will be either chopped or chucked.

All this could make you end up seeing red…

"RED" postcard

But then you get up the next morning, toss the less than desired textile to the side, smile and start again!

April TIF Revisited

Way back in April 2008 (before life went crazy and I shifted 2000kms), there was this little TIF (Take it Further) challenge where I came up with this…

The Beginning...

It was all about change and positive/negative Then as time went on I decided to embellish it a bit and so “Change” became…

Change Embellished

Its a bit hard to see but I stitched into the black (negative spaces)areas with gold thread and beads. Here’s a little detail…

Its come out quite rich in colour and detail.