Thought for the day

I read somewhere that fishes cry
every time their kinsfolk die.
What is sea, and what is ocean?
Little drops of fish emotion.

- Author unknown

Inspiration for future work

Two pictures I plan to use as inspiration for future work. The first is a fractal image and the second a photo I took of a protea that grows outside the 1820 Settler's museum.

A fruitful weekend

This is what I've been working on over the last three days. The background is pieced and there will be numerous things fused on top of the background. I'm really pleased with the way this is turning out and it may even end up looking as good as I've envisaged, which is really, um... unusual. I've had a lot of fun using my hand-dyes and hand-painteds.

Another reason I like living in South Africa

I've just returned from a trip to our local fruit and veg shop and after I had unpacked, I just *had* to take a picture of the bounty. :) After I returned from a trip to Toronto some time ago, it struck me how lucky with are with all the fruit that we have access to. Not so much because there is a lot of fruit available (there was even more fruit available in Toronto, and these days fruit is flown eveywhere) but because it is so CHEAP here, that we can afford to buy so much of it.

Butterflies in Houston?

A butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon and the knock-on effect causes a tornado halfway across the world ... or how does it go?

Well, when tons and tons of American quilters get together in Houston, the ripples can be felt even way over here in South Africa. I found a nice website, courtesy of Deborah (thanks!) with lots of pictures of quilts here.

What is quite exciting to me is that I recognise some of the quilts! - from having browsed the Web and seen the quilts on the person's website or blog. I also recognise quite a few of the quilt artists names.

Some of the very traditional quilts don't do much for me, but there is enough TOTALLY AWESOME stuff there that my mouth just hangs open. I WISH I could do this sort of thing. Wow, it is *very* inspiring.

Headaches again

I'm so sick of these headaches, I could cry. What else can I say...

I'll just try and bury myself in work, and at least that'll get done - maybe I'll be finished by the time the headaches let up; won't THAT be nice.

Mandelbrot

Fractal art caught my attention many years ago when the psychedelic images first appeared. Only later did the idea of interpreting them in fabric come to me. One day I stumbled onto the website of Rose Rushbrooke which completely captivated me. As far as I can gather from her notes she needle-turn-appliques (is there such a verb? there is now!) all her fabric down. Since I have been duly "corrupted" by Melody Johnson et al, I mix fusing, with needle-turn, with satin-stitching raw edges. It goes so much faster when you can fuse the very fiddly bits.

So here is what I have been doing over the past few days. The purple background was auditioned but rejected in favour of a brown (which will also be cut down and in turn appliqued onto another background.) I LOVE doing this kind of work.

Here is another Mandelbrot set, which I did some time ago and had just put away, not knowing what to do next.
I was surfing online and googled 'Mandelbrot' and was absolutely delighted to discover that Benoir Mandelbrot is alive and well at 80 and is an Emeritus Professor in Mathematics at Yale University in the USA. I even found an email address for him. I think it's wonderful that he has lived to see his mathematical work take off in various popular art forms!

I downloaded a freeware Fractal program and had great fun looking at various fractals. The maths is beyond me, but you don't have to understand it to enjoy the intricate shapes that are works of art in themselves. Try your hand here.

More leaves

During the workweek, I am not really able to do a lot of creativity-work, so I tend to focus on brainless practical tasks that prepare things for creative input. This has been the Week of Leaves - I pick up leaves outside wherever I am, bring them to work, photocopy them and stickly-tape them to X-ray plates to make templates. The above leaves are from the grapevine and wisteria that grow outside my front door. At tea-time, I go and get my cup of tea and sit in the tea-room listening to various conversations while cutting around the shapes. It's relaxing and I feel like I am making *some* progress creatively, even while at work.

And now it's T-time! :)

A small change

This morning I made a very small change to my profile. It used to read blah blah "... devoted to the part of me that aspires to be a quilt artist..." or something like that.

It now reads: "...devoted to the part of me that is a quilt artist..." .

It is, after all, permissible for me to think of a part of myself in this way.

These work-weeks...

This is another sighing post, so feel free to skip it.
These workweeks really take it out of me. What can be so tiring about sitting down all day just dealing with paperwork? - but by 17:00, all the funk has gone out of me. Yesterday was Monday and things were really quiet at work, but still, by the time I got home, I was even too tired to cook. I cut out a few more leaves in front of the TV, but then just went to bed at 20:30. Sigh. I hate being so tired all the time. I also know I need to lose some weight and get some exercise, and then the tiredness will improve, but try pushing through the tiredness to get there!
OK enough sighing, at least in this spot. Have a good day! (this mainly directed to my brother in Singapore, who as far as I know is the only reader of my (now public) blog so far - howzitbru!)

Magic happens here!

I've moved my workspace to the bay window, partly for the wonderful light right next to the window (tho' a bit sharp on the eyes just as the sun rises) and partly to make a little more space on the big table (um, which is coming as soon as I clear off all the other stuff that has instantly migrated there!)

It's wonderful having the garden right next to me (this photo was taken at night).

T'was a good weekend

I began to cut out oak leaves from the dyed fabrics and now have a whole pile of them. I want to piece the background from various hand-dyes and painted fabrics and fuse the leaves on top.

... and I dug out my old fabric paints, which were due to be used up before they dried out or became unusable. I just splodged it on and it could have been neater but I wanted a brushstroked finish. Fun was had.

Arb stuff

The other day it occurred to me that I've posted pics of one of our cats, but not the other, so herewith a picture of Her Abbyness. Abby is around 3 years old and was recently diagnosed with food allergies. Yes, really. My initial reaction was "Puh-lease! a CAT with food allergies?" What would she do in the wild...?

But I guess if I look at the ingredients of some of the cat food brands, it isn't all that surprising - much the same as for humans. We really eat a load of junk. Abby had scratched the two patches above her eyes and up to her ears completely raw from the itching. She is now on an allergen-free cat food (very easy actually, if a bit expensive) and as you can see on the pic she is completely healthy again. And here is another completely arbitrary photo of some rose quartz I bought at a new garden nursery in town. Really nice stones and not all that expensive either.

And yeah, the above had absolutely nothing at all to do with quilts.

Munch Scream dolls

These dolls are for a project that I hesitate to say too much about before it is a little further along. That's really not fair, I know and I shouldn't even be putting the pics here, but I was really pleased with how the dolls looked, so I snapped a few photos. Plus I was on a roll with the camera...

dyeing fun

These so called "Sun paints" are really a lot of fun. They're paints, not dyes, and since the dye migrates from dry patches to wet patches, the idea is that if you retard the drying by placing objects onto the cloth, then those areas will be lighter. So here is a tour of my pretty wild garden.

First we have the ferns. They're pretty, I guess.


Next we have the geraniums in a patch that was once a herb garden.







And lastly the dandelions which compete with the lawn for space, and next to the dandelions, the bamboo which flourishes despite repeated efforts at eradication. Pretty, but horribly invasive. I'm sorry, the photos seem to be all over the place and whenever I try to change them they disappear, so I've settled for the uncontrolled look. Rather like the garden itself.




I want to do an autumn-coloured nature quilt, hence this dyeing. With oak leaves on it from the oak next to my house. (See earlier post "Oak leaves".) After looking at Gabrielle Swain's website and Frieda Andersen's blog I am so inspired!

It's also done

Still no name for this one (other than i name I used for the file to upload the pic, which is 'greendye'). It's also a bit skew, but I'm quite pleased with how it has turned out. Some detail shots:



On this last picture you can just make out that I wrote some of the text from the Leonard Cohen song Suzanne onto it:
"... and the sun pours down like honey/ on our lady of the harbour/ and she shows you where to look/ among the garbage and the flowers..."
I'm not sure it looks all that nice, but it is sufficiently subtle that it doesn't completely spoil it.
Laura is begging to have it hang in her room, so I guess that it where it will go for now.

It's done

Luckily the weather was not too warm on the day I finished the above snugglequilt, and I managed to persuade the snuggled one to pose. The backing is brushed cotton (or maybe brushed polycotton), which makes it nice and soft next to the skin. Unfortunately it makes it less useful as a picnic blanket - the brushed cotton picks up every blade of grass and it's quite a job to shake it all off.

But these bed quilts that you know will have to be able to withstand lots of washing, are really a load of work. "Work" in the sense of having to stitch everything securely, think about durability and utility aspects, as opposed to creative touches, which I wouldn't really term "work".

I read a book once, by a woman who had spent a year with a native American tribe and particularly observed their child-rearing practices. She noted that their language did not include the word "work" (as opposed to the term "leisure"). They had verbs for all the aspects of their lives, but did not distinguish between work and play, the way we do. I really liked the idea and it's a great way to look at one's life. I should do it more often!

Oak leaves

Still in progress, so I will replace this photo with one of the completed work, when it is done. What fun this is! I've been drooling over Emily Parson's quilt's recently and just *so* much want to make a floral work the way she does. I've been collecting and taking pics of flowers and plants, to try and come up with a suitable composition. This is a small test piece of the general idea.

Serviette decoupage - much better

I podged the same two serviettes onto white fabric and it works much better. Now I have chocolate and lettuce fabric and even a piece of a tomato. This tickles me so much, I can't help laughing. The idea of putting a little food into a quilt, unexpectedly, appeals to my sense of humour.

I hope the person who first invented chocolate is happy and well-cared for on a sweet pink cloud somewhere....
I *really* don't like the rubbery texture of the dried podge, though.

Boxes and drawers

I have an absolute obsession with cardboard boxes and drawers and I collect boxes and spare cardboard to make cardboard drawers for the cardboard boxes. I am starting to wonder if I should begin to worry about this. (You know that feeling? When you notice yourself doing something so much that you recognise you are obsessed and wonder if you've crossed the border from eccentric to MAD.)

Eccentric I can handle, am comfortable with, often even proud of. Eccentric is a character trait and not pathological. (As long as it doesn't bother others or oneself, I guess!) Mad is something else. I've worked with mad as a psychiatric nurse and I've seen mad many times. It often begins as eccentric and harmless, but full-blown madness is not glamorous or desirable in any way. It may feel free to abandon the responsibility of functioning in life, but the loss of freedom is ultimately far greater.

So I had snapped all these photos in my "studio"(which somehow sounds so pretentious to me, especially since my "studio" is actually the lounge/sitting room which I have taken over, pushing the couches and chairs and TV into one corner and commandeering the rest).

The first is from the doorway:

The rest are of my boxes:








There are more in the kitchen and in other rooms. I enjoy making them and there's no doubt they help us find things, but it has got to where I struggle to throw out any box and accumulate boxes for future building and begin to envisage a time when the entire room will be taken up with boxes, like a miniature city with apartment blocks.

All because I don't know how to work with wood! Maybe it is just my Inner Carpenter trying to express herself...

Serviette Decoupage

Some time ago, I collected these serviettes and bought some "Napkin Podge" to try out this technique. I was really tickled by the serviettes I bought with blocks of chocolate on them and I envisaged making fabric that looked like blocks of chocolate. I tried it out yesterday and for a change the picture looks better than the actual product! I photographed this with maximum light as well as flash, and you can actually see the patterns, but in real life they are very, very dark and you can hardly see the patterns. So I guess they are meant to be podged to white fabric and I will try this next - I really *want* chocolate-printed fabric! Just imagine - I can send a piece of chocolate fabric through the mail, or paste it to a card, or make a chocolate cushion, or... a choccie blankie.. or... create a hundred different ways to sabotage any attempt to lose a bit of weight!

The podge gives the fabric a kind of rubbery texture, which I don't much like. Not sure how it holds up to washing.

UFOs

This bed quilt is a UFO that has been going for about a year and I now have high hopes that it will soon become an FO! I'm busy on the last third of the quilting, having cleared a WHOLE table to lie the quilt on, so that I can actually manoevre it around. Amazing how much that helps!

This quilt is for my youngest daughter, and when this is completed, they will each have two quilts. This means there will be no more arguing about who is more loved, as evidenced by who has more quilts! (Beware the second- (third- etc) child-syndrome where the baby books, photographs, lovingly stitched clothes etc diminish with each child (well yeah, less free time!) leading the youngest to declare, one day, that it is obvious that you love them less, since you didn't make them nearly as many things!) I love you both, sweethearts!

(The school principal had collected anecdotes about "What is love?" for her school prizegiving speech and we all laughed at this one: "I know my sister loves me because she gives me all her old clothes and then has to go out and buy new ones!")

This quilt was fun to piece - a very basic Sunshine & Shadow. I enjoy the way the very warm colours show up so well next to the black. The backing is soft flannel, so it is designed to be a soft warm cuddlequilt. Murphy ensured that it lay abandoned throughout the winter and is now being finished in the spring, just in time for those hot summer nights when you can't bear to have a thread on you ...

I have one more UFO/bedquilt that has to be quilted, the top of which was pieced about 3 years ago. After that, I think it will be some time before I piece a bed-size utility quilt again - there seems to be a short creative phase and a very long slog-to-get-it-all-done phase with these, and with time so short, I definitely want to do things with a longer creative time and a shorter production time.

And now it is time to go to the salt mines (a.k.a. day job) to chip away at the rock to produce more salt to add to my already high blood pressure. Life's a b*tch, but at least sometimes, you get to quilt!