I'm back!

Apologies to those of you who have come here hoping to find something new and been disappointed time and time again. Life just became very complicated,as it does to all of us at times. However, with a new job where I'm very happy, and a whole new outlook on life, I have both the time and inclination to blog again.

We had a visitor in the house a couple of weeks ago. We discovered him in the ensuite bathroom and think he hitched a ride on the washing we'd brought inside earlier that day. He was a handsome fellow, and rather large, so we carried him outside again and took a shot of him to share -



He was most amenable to being photographed, so I captured a few angles -



I'm fairly sure that it's a Bogong Moth

Weaving Threads and Ribbons

A piece of hand-dyed fabric in oranges and yellows, and a pack of mainly orange, pink and purple threads was the inspiration for the playtime I had today. I attached some lengths of ribbon to a piece of water soluble fabric, then wove the threads and other ribbons through. Some of the threads varied in thickness, which added to the randomness of the grid. I then stitched up and down the short lengths to stabilise it, and allowed it to distort the grid a little more. Circles stitched over the top hold it all down.

It's all I managed to do this weekend. The call of the glorious spring weather and the garden proved too much. Who can resist being outside when the garden is at its best? The ornamental peach is contrasting beautifully with the blue blossoms of the Blue Pacific bush right beside it
I just love peach blossom. Cherry blossom is good, but peach is so much better! I just love that pink....

Playing with hand dyed fabrics

I've been playing with more ideas for bookcovers. This one is very similar to the blue one I made a while ago, which I ended up sending to Denmark as a gift for my mother-in-law's birthday. However, this green fabric (one of Lisa's gorgeous hand dyes) "spoke" to me, and it wanted to be the background for some flowers, so that's what it became...



More flowers - it must be the spring weather and the beautiful deep pink blossoms on my peach tree that are inspiring me. This one needs lots more handstitching, but I rather like the way it's shaping up. All the fabrics in this one are Lisa's hand dyes. The flowers are made from some of the trimmings that she was going to throw out! I'm so glad that I rescued them.

Stamping

The book that I received for my birthday, "Finding Your Own Visual Language" suggests cutting stamps from plastic erasers, as an exercise in finding shapes that appeal to you. I've cut my first two, with a craft knife, and with a fair bit of difficulty. On my first one, the edges seemed very ragged. So I was sure that it was going to be a reject. I inked it up and stamped it, and was very surprised! The ragged edges actually seemed to suit the shapes. I need to do more stamping with it, and look at a lot more variations and combinations than I have here, but this is my first page -



The next one I did doesn't appeal to me as much, but I think the design has possibilities -



I took these to show a work colleague, who has now lent me a set of lino cutting tools. I tried them on the eraser in my desk at work and it was so much easier than the craft knife, which has to be "jiggled" so that each line is undercut in order to remove the pieces of eraser. So I'm off to try some more designs!

Birthdays

A lovely friend of mine gave me this last week while I was in Canberra, but I was under strict instructions not to open it until my birthday. What a nice surprise. Thanks, Donna! The brooch that you made me looks great on my black jumper, too. I'll have to get a photo of that to share later.

My favourite present has been a new book - "Finding your Own Visual Language" by Jane Dunnewold, Claire Benn and Leslie Morgan. It contains lots of exercises to do, so I'll share some of them over the next few weeks as I start to play. I'm really looking forward to doing this.

Meanwhile, I'm getting organised for my mother-in-law's birthday. She loves blue, so I'm sending her one of my covered books. I've also made her a birthday card. The little motif on this card was cut from a find in the local OpShop. It was a linen jacket covered randomly with beaded motifs and must have been rather expensive when it was originally bought. It was damaged, and far too small for me, but a bargain, so I bought it for the beading. I didn't quite know what I was going to do with it, and it was hard to bring myself to cut into all that workmanship, but I'll be cutting up the rest to play with now that I've made that first slash into the fabric!

A Thank You Gift

I'm going to a "Relly Rally" this weekend over on the coast. It's because of my great-uncle's 90th birthday. Uncle Alec is my grandfather's last surviving sibling, so the family decided that it was a great opportunity to get together.

My great-grandmother lived into her 90's, so she was a rallying point for the family for a long time. I think that's why the family have remained reasonably close and enjoy a chance to get together. I'm looking forward to the reunion on Saturday, but am not really looking forward to the 5+ hours of driving to get there!

Dad and I are staying with his cousin Marion, who loves to draw and is a talented potter. I decided that a covered Visual Art Journal would probably be a good thank you gift. I love the unusual yarn that features on it. I've been trying to think of a way to use it. It gets lost if I try to use it with thicker threads, and it's not the type you can embroider with, so I've couched it down with a machine stitch. I hope Marion likes it...

Hand Dyed Cover

A few busy weeks and weekends have left little time to make anything worth posting on the blog.
Today, though, I covered a small book, using one of Lisa's gorgeous hand dyed fabrics.

The whole piece of fabric is dyed in beautiful sunset colours - purples, pinks, yellows and oranges. I needed such a small amount for the book, that the cover really doesn't do justice to the fabric, although I managed to reintroduce some of the missing colours with the threads that I used.

I didn't do justice to the cover with my photographs, either! The edge of the cover isn't wavy, although it definitely looks that way in the photos...

This is the front -



And this is the back -