More fun stuff

How on earth did it get to be May already? I'm sure those Time Monks have been stealing our time!

Here at Fibrecircle, we've added a new member; well, not so much a new member, as a regular visitor who's come Down Under for a while longer than usual. Jan brought along a piece she's working on for her home guild. She began with  some pieces of fabric she dyed earlier. She painted primary colours of fibre reactive dyes onto dry fabric to give the lovely rainbow shapes. Then she scrunched the dried fabric around a pole, in the style called "arashi" in shibori , and dyed with activator in a cold black dye bath. You'd think that the pieces would end up very dark, but instead she had these wonderful patterned fabrics with lots of the original colour.

This one looks like palm leaves, doesn't it? She took two of the fabrics and laid them so that they made a symmetrical pattern. It's going to be the background for an illuminated letter.

The letter will be cut from another fabric Jan created. First she did some rust-dyeing using various nails, brads and staples and then dyed it with used teabags.Then she took some fabric inks, thickened with guar gum and dripped them onto the fabric.

 

Can't wait to see how this progresses!

Some of the Fibrecircle girls are working on a collaborative piece at present. One design challenge is how to represent some large purple textured leaves so Jan and Nola used some of these rusted cloths to try some alternatives. They took some fabric inks and thickened them with DR33, a modified guar gum. First they tried laying down a little thickened ink on a Plexiglas plate and taking a monotype from it.

This piece was painted with rice flour and water and left to dry until the surface crackled. Then Jan took some of the fabric ink and worked it into the cracks in the dried flour surface. It made really nice crackle marks where there were large cracks in the surface but, because the ink was very runny and it was hard to work it down into the finer cracks, it simply spread out underneath in some places, so those lines became very blurry. Interesting, though?

Nola also tried painting fabric with rice flour. The second one was painted with rice flour painted over a net, to encourage the crackles to form in specific ways (they did).  When they had dried, they had thickened inks brushed over into the cracks that formed.

It looked promising but, unfortunately, there was no visible pattern on the fabric once the rice flour was removed. It's possible that there were delicate lines that were not visible on the pattern of the fabric, or that the ink colour was too close to the fabric colour. This brand of rice flour, from the health food shop, was much finer than the one from a Chinese grocery that Jan used, so the crackles were finer. The flour paste really didn't adhere to the fabric well and it was hard to keep it on the fabric long enough to get media into the crackles. It's an interesting technique but the product obviously varies a great deal. Some people have found that rice flour sets so solidly that it's difficult to remove, and that certainly wasn't our problem!

Here's a piece of work that Maz made. It's for a ATASDA mini exhibition of 25cm (10in) works at our stand at the Sydney Craft and Quilt Fair in June.

The theme is Little Fragment, in keeping with the Fragment theme of this year's main exhibition at the Palm House, Sydney Botanic Gardens in August. Maz hand-stitched Aramaic letters onto hand made paper and built them up into layers.

 

Meanwhile, Bev went to the ConTextArt Forum in the Blue Mountains near Sydney and took a workshop on Surface Design with Sue Dennis. In the class, she experimented with different media and various ways of putting pattern onto cloth.

 

This one used Shiva PaintStiks to make rubbings from different textured surfaces.

This time, she pleated the fabric randomly and took a monotype from a piece of tablecloth plastic, rollered with a brayer from the back, first in purple, then in yellow. She added a ghost print from the plastic afterwards.

This one is printed directly from feathers.

For this one, she was interested in anything that made a circular pattern - buttons, washers. drawer liner, bubble wrap...

The first layers of leaves on this one were created by sun printing, using actual leaves as the resist.  Then the same leaves were used to print directly on the cloth in two shades.

 Bev was really excited by the workshop, so she went on looking for interesting textures. This one is a dry roller brayed over the back of a platter that held sushi.

 The following two pieces are from the same piece of cloth. First she sun printed the fabric with Dynaflow and then stitched it. Finally it was dry brushed with Lumiere paints, which picked up just the high points.

This part was made into a journal cover.

We've also been swapping postcards. Here's one by Bev. You can probably guess at the techniques she used!

 This one is from Helen...

... and this one is from Nola.

This cloth has a story, which she's shared over on her own blog, Inch by Inch Textiles.

When we met, Helen was working on another rug canvas embroidery. It's part of a triptych she has in mind, so there'll be more to follow.

Maz was making a beadwork bracelet from these beads:

Nola was trying out monotypes for the collaborative work, as part of the background for her piece.

She laid down Permaset paints on a glass plate, laid the cloth down and ran a brayer over the back. It doesn't look like much yet!

Once she'd done a couple of monotypes, she began drawing on one of her "paint rags" with a black pen. It ended up like this:

It will probably be cut apart for postcards, so I guess it will appear here again in some form!

Always creative

Sometimes, I look back at the things we make and my mind boggles at how varied they are! Between the six of us, we seem to cover most kinds of creative activity. Here's some stuff we've been doing lately:

These cupcakes were made by Carol, and they tasted very good indeed. She's been making Easter cupcakes for Scout fundraising, and we got the benefit!

These roses were made by Bev and her daughter from the pages of an old dictionary, for her daughter's engagement party recently.

Carol is still on a roll with those zippers and Gang Show scraps, making this brooch at one of our recent meetings.

These are more Orizomegami papers, made by Helen with food colouring. The red one has spray gold web, a rare thing these days as everyone hoards the last of their cans!

Here's Tricia's quilt top finished - looking very good!

Recently, Helen gave each of us a kit of fabrics to make a Harlequin Bag. I suspect she might be taking the opportunity to clear out her stash! Tricia made this one...

... and Nola made this one. They are very quick to make and rather sweet.

Nola finished off one pair of her earrings, which we saw in pieces last time.

She was also working on some postcards for future swaps. They came from the one piece of fabric, which had been painted and drawn on, but each one is being individually painted now. In the beginning, they were all the colour of the light one in the centre of the lower row.

Bev has been doing some rust dyeing, with oddments from her Dad's shed. I love how the washers and other bits have yielded such clear outlines.

Bev also brought her breakdown printing.

And here's another piece.

Maz brought along hers too. This one is on organza, so it's very delicate.

Here's a quirky doll that Helen made. Her name is Inga. Isn't she wonderful?

Last year, we did a lot of printing and painting, so we bought some cotton fabric as  drop cloths on our worktables. At the end of the year, we cut them apart and shared them out. Helen brought along one of her pieces, to try to workout what to do with it.

Here's Maz's piece of the cloth. She was printing on it with a round stamp made from furniture protectors - those little rubber shapes you can buy to stop furniture scratching the floor.

Here's Nola's piece of one of the drop cloths. She printed hers using breakdown printing and here's how it looks now:

It's looking very interesting, isn't it?

Bev was using up the last of the transfer dyes, by stamping with the thickened ones onto paper, using her own hand-carved stamps and some Indian woodblocks.

Carol was working on her inkle loom. She was making a sageo, a kind of strap, for her iaito, a blunt Japanese sword used for kata practice, in the style of Japanese martial arts that she follows.

Helen was beginning a new canvas work piece.

Tricia was working on her embroidered landscape, which she brings out and works on every so often. It's really coming together now, isn't it?

She was also pondering border options for her quilt. This was her favoured choice on the day, but it may change again before she finishes.

So as usual, we've been busy in so many different ways. I wonder what we'll see next fortnight?

And some other stuff..

Here's some other things we've been doing in our spare time!

As usual we swapped some postcards among ourselves. Here's one Bev made, which you last saw back here. Here it is, all finished.

She wove strips of fabric together and machine stitched over them, then added some hand embroidery. Simple, but it really works!
Nola began this one when we were playing with serviettes back in May 2011. She laid down an image onto mat board, and added torn tissue layers to create a mood.

The original serviette used images of 1950's women in playful ways but this has a very different mood.

To make this one, Helen trapped threads and fabric snippets under a sheer layer and machine stitched a grid to hold them in place.

Maz's postcard was also one you've seen before, when she was working on it last August. She created a felted background, added some hand stitching and some ribbon and bead flowers. It has a lovely delicate feel, unusual in felted works.

Tricia's postcard was based on the tile she made for ATASDA's travelling suitcase exhibition, Marrakesh recently. It has the same intense colours, inspired by the desert and the rich colours of the zellig tiles.

Here's another one from Bev, made from strips of fabric, yarn and braid, with fancy machine stitches.

Carol's postcard was partly in honour of the many zippers donated to the wardrobe department of the local Gang Show. She spent part of the day sorting them into colour groups.

Eventually, she included parts of one in her postcard, along with some scraps from costumes she'd been making for the next Show.

This gorgeous one from Helen featured a motif from a piece of fabric she had in her stash. It's very powerful, isn't it?

Tricia began this postcard when we were playing around with serviettes last year.

She added some special buttons to work with the antiques theme.

All these postcards are very different and use different techniques. I think what they have in common is a willingness to work with what we've done, rather than add yet more things to our many samples. I think it's also clear that small works like this don't necessarily have to be elaborate or complex to succeed as works of art.

Tricia has also been learning to draw in pastels. She's done some beautiful things. Here are some still lifes...

 ... and here's a drawing of one of her sons. She's really captured him so well.

She's also really been bitten by the quilting bug. Here she's beginning to sew her quilt blocks together.

Stay tuned for more on this, her second ever quilt.

Nola was inspired to make some earrings with lace motifs, by a picture in a book called Making Vintage Accessories. The picture used some lace that reminded her of lace remnants in her stash, from when her adult daughter was tiny.

Almost genuine vintage lace! She painted some of these lace motifs with metallic Setacolor paints, and matched them with beads in her stash.

Helen was working on a hand embroidery for another group. The theme was black and white, so she took a tiny section of a photograph and enlarged it. Here's how it looks:

Carol was trying out a craft for her Joey scouts, making dragon's eggs. Here's her sample egg:

Isn't it wonderful?

You could never say our work is boring or predictable, could you?