Scrap wors

I was looking at my bag of scrap-scraps (bits of fabric and thread that are too small to do anything with, such as the 5cm ends of threads you cut off when piecing or teeny bits of fabric cut off when squaring off etc - I keep everything) and I've figured out another way to use them.

Ingredients: Aforementioned scraps and some spools of thread (do not use your nice threads - the very cheap ones are fine.) You can use any threads.
Pick up some scraps and start winding the thread around them to make a sausage. Keep going, wrapping the thread around the scraps as much as is needed to hold them together. Do this until the sausage is about a half to one metre long (longer than that becomes really unwieldy to handle.) And you'll have a handful of sausage, or "wors" as it's called here in SA.

I thought I'd make another bowl, so I began coiling the wors and have just finished the base below and am about to start going up the sides. It's good for the state my brain is in at the moment (still not better) and goes well with mindless TV - and at the end I will (hopefully) have a fairly solid, useable bowl.

Rosalie has a website!

... where you can see some of her quilts. Exquisite. I'm very taken by her work and up close it is even more beautiful. She is teaching quite a bit in the USA these days. She has a wealth of skill, insight and experience - take a class with her if you ever get the chance! www.rosaliedace.co.za

Emmy Schoonbeek

I've blogged about her before, but she's worth another mention :) I love going over to her blog, Cramzy to see what she has been doing; I find it all very inspiring. She does a lot of embroidery and embellishing and has one of those needlepunching machines and puts it to great use.
Highly recommended! Emmy is from Holland.
-and I was very, very honoured to see that I am listed in her sidebar: thanks Emmy!

(and, yes, the timestamp is correct, I've been waking at about 2am every morning and unable to get back to sleep...)

Easy weekend

'Twas a slow weekend by us....

But some of us did find enjoyment in the fabric stashes:

Soft drink cans

I'm quite enthralled by the number of colours you can find on soft drink cans. This is a *small* selection! I could get sucked into trying to make something with the fronts instead of the backs...
(This is not fibre art. Sorry.)

(Aside: Began Cymbalta today. Black hole here, please, please a bit of respite?)

In the Meantime

I'm still churning out fabric beads, collecting tin cans and cutting them up for my second piece in the Armour series and painting some cloth to make a background for my Tri-Nations Challenge entry. I have decided on the poastcard I'm sending to Cyber Fyber so just need to get that parcelled up and taken to the post office.

Otherwise I'm not doing so great. So let's keep the focus on the fibre, shall we?

Padfolio

A couple of weeks ago, I made this padfolio, from the Free Projects on Fibre and Stitch, by Sue Bleiweiss. It has an exam pad inside, with some pockets for pens etc. The biggest compliment came from my younger daughter who asked if she could borrow it and take it to school with her! High praise indeed.
Of course I didn't follow the instructions exactly, as I always think I can see another way. All I can say is that next time I WILL be doing it just as she says, as I now understand WHY. But I always have to pick the hard path to learning.

More block printing

After printing with the last block of polystyrene from a vegetable tray, I found a larger piece of polystyrene and wanted to cut deeper so there'd be less smudging of the print. What to cut polystyrene with? I took the problem to my nightly mind-wanderings where I determined that the ideal would be a heat tool - now what did I already have that could serve this purpose. A soldering iron! It worked really nicely and I burnt (melted) out a pattern, rolled fabric paint onto it with my little craft foam roller and printed. Hey presto! Much easier than screenprinting. Now, with the next pattern I want to draw a design that matches up along the edges and try to print seamlessly
I didn't much like the result of the green flour resist I did earlier, so it proved to be the ideal cloth to overprint, and I think it looks much better now.
Fun, fun.
One of my daughter's blood test's came back very low, so we now have a further test on Friday to see if this could the problem (being deliberately vague here to protect her privacy.) Dare I hope for an answer, at last?

Flour resist - 2 takes

Two takes on the flour resist technique I mentioned earlier, after washing and ironing. The first is brown on white fabric and the one below is blue and brown on a previously dyed purple fabric. I really, really like this effect. It's batik-like without all the fuss with melting wax and then trying to get it out again.
Today we venture south-west to our closest town to see my daughter's endocrinologist - hopefully he has some explanation for why she is feeling so rotten all the time. He is going to give us the results of the gazillion blood tests he did last time. I woke up at 2am. My depression has headed south again.

Fabric printing

Bought this wonderful book a few weeks ago. It shows several techniques, and I've been trying them out. I did a screenprinting course many years ago and loved what I could do with it, but I'm too impatient now to sit and paint the screen with shellac, and I don't have the equipment and emulsion to use the photographic technique. So when I saw this, I was delighted!
You cut out the bottom of a polystyrene tray (such as veges are sometimes packed in)
(I taped some "handles" to the underside, so I could hold them.)
... and then you scribble patterns into the styrofoam with a pen or whatever. Roll on paint and print away.
It prints imperfectly, but I like the charm of it. And you get better as you do it more.

Embossing cooldrink can metal

When I can't fall asleep (which is often) I lie in bed and think "what if" sort of things and try to let my mind free-wheel in a kind of brainstorming mode where no ideas are silly or unfeasible. Often in this frame of mind, solutions come to mind. I was lying trying to think of all the possible ways I could make impressions in the cooldrink can metal I've been working with - and it suddenly occured to me: an engraver! Of course! Luckily our local library has an engraver, that one can borrow on one's library card, so here it is and it works just fine. I do have to set it on the highest setting to get it to make a decent imprint, but it is way better than having to press hard with your hands, which I can't do at this stage anyway.

So I've been fishing cooldrink cans out of bins, especially on campus, where there are always rich pickings. If you spot me looking in a bin and reaching a hand inside, it's not that I've fallen on hard times and am looking for food, I'm just scavenging for art materials!!

18 today!

Today my firstborn turns 18. (Of course I'm not a day older.)
Happy Birthday Love!
- from your mom who clearly wasn't thinking at all when she said "yes, of course you can invite 42 people over for supper and a party..."

Like they say.. It's irresistable

The article on flour resist dyeing in the latest Quilting Arts is called "It's irresistable!" I had intended to leave the paint to cure for longer (since it's covered in flour, you can't really heat-set it, so you have to let time do the work) but yesterday my curiosity got the better of me and I couldn't resist throwing caution to the winds and washing out some of the flour, at the risk of losing the paint. (I didn't lose the paint.)
Now I wish I hadn't done it on a white background! I think I'll overpaint it with a transparent lighter colour, to colour the background, without losing the etching-like scratches. I have another piece drying at the moment, which I had previously dyed and have now overdyed.

What a lot of fun. Love it when the Quilting Arts inspires me to try something like this out.

The above makes me feel as though the old way I used to use flour resist is now quite boring!

Flour Resist

After the article in the latest Quilting Arts about Flour Resist, I just couldn't "resist" trying it again.
It is going to be hard to wait for this to cure, before I can wash off the flour - I want to see the results NOW.

Metalwork - more pics

At last I have managed to take some half-decent pictures of the metalwork hanging. (I only posted detail shots in my previous post as the full shots were blurred.) Here's the full view.
I've cut up several more cans and am planning more in this vein. Must try and find a way of doing the embossing, that isn't so hard on the hands.

Journal

I'm still making fabric beads ad infinitum, but thought I'd post these pictures of a journal that I made after I had seen the journals of Sue Bleiweiss.
I screenprinted this fabric long ago when I took a screenprinting class. The design is partly from a serviette and partly my own made-up doodles. I backed it with some batting and quilted it with some silver thread.
I used satin for the inside, but wouldn't use it again - too shiny and slippery - I would have preferred a cotton lining. But now I know. I sewed in 3 signatures of white and other coloured papers. I used old laminated posters (of which there are always plenty in an academic environment) as the stiffening, as I do not access to Peltex (which I think is what Sue uses). It worked fairly well, although it could be stiffer. But all in all, I'm pretty happy, for a first journal. Thanks to Sue Bleiweiss for inspiration!