Postcards for March

There seems to be a lot of paper work around here lately! Two of our postcards this month were made on a card and paper base.

Yvonne also included fabric in her postcard collage, which was made on a background of mulberry paper. She added hand stitching with embroidery thread.










Helen's postcard was inspired by an Asian aesthetic. She collaged paper scraps and added metal embellishments.

Maz painted fusible web for the background of her postcard. She added hand stitching with perle thread and an edging of short and long stitch.









You'll have already seen the image in Nola's postcard. It was one of the trees she printed onto cloth with a compressed sponge stamp for her Trees journal back here. She added blended colour with Inktense pencils and some hand stitching with embroidery thread, before binding it with some leftover piping. 





Meanwhile, Cindy decided to have a try at needle felting. She added some hand stitching with variegated perle thread and hand stitched the edges.

So, once again, five very different postcards! We hope you enjoyed seeing them.

Some other things we've made

First, the good news! Maz received a highly commended for her work at Blayney. Remember when she was working on it back here?

Well done, Maz!
Cindy brought along a book she made in Ro Bruhn's Fabric Journal workshop at Berry Patchwork recently. She said she found it quite challenging but the book she produced looks wonderful.

Helen was working on her trademark canvas work as usual.

It's inspired by this Egyptian border pattern in Ornament, a collection of the work from The Grammar of Ornament  by Owen Jones, which she borrowed from Nola. She has another Egyptian image to include as well. I'm sure you'll see more of this!

The sun shone...

...which is a remarkable thing. Every time we plan an outdoor activity here at Fibrecircle, it rains. This time, it was not only the only fine day in the midst of cloudy rainy days but the UV index was high. We expected great things from our sun printing day.

 

Those expectations weren't really realised. We were using some Dala Sun Colours that Jan left for us. I think maybe we didn't understand the best way to use these colours. We used them in the same way as we'd used the Pebeo Soleil back here and here and Carol used the Sun Paint Kit for Kids here, but that may not have been the best method.

 

One strategy was to paint the fabric and then lay plant material over the top. We'd done this before with good results.

 

For her first piece, Yvonne painted the media onto cloth in stripes...

... added some leaves and yarn and put it out in the sun.

 

The results were quite faint, which was pretty typical of many of our prints.

This one from Cindy was about as exciting..

... as was this one from Nola.

Cindy managed this nice one with leaves..

... as did Maz.

Several of us tried overhead transparencies. Initially, we just laid them on but later Nola held hers down on the cloth surface with clamps, to maximise the contact with the cloth, and made sure the cloth was lying completely flat. These are Nola's..

 

The best of these was from Nola, but only because she accidentally put the transparency face down, and some of the ink transferred onto the cloth, which emphasised the faint traces of print.

 Yvonne's transparency print

Maz tried drawing simple shapes on stencil offcuts with a Sharpie pen.

but that wasn't hugely successful either.

The best results were with stencils, though Maz's first one was such a fizzer, she's asked us not to show it here at all! Cindy's was not terribly clear either

This one from Maz was a lot clearer...

 .. but the best of all was her bird.

But then she was using her own inks, not the Dala Sun Colours.

Then in desperation, we tried other things.
 

This one from Yvonne was with salt sprinkled over it and no resist...

... which came out rather nicely.

Cindy just crumpled up her wet cloth and left it to dry in the sun, with surprisingly pretty results.

As printing days go, this didn't really set the world on fire!

However, we haven't give up on these inks. We're going to use them as inks on paper, and maybe on fabric, when we meet next month. That sounds like a fairly safe bet.

Cereal box books - again!

We decided we needed another day to work on our books. Most of us still haven't finished, but it was good to have another day working together.

Nola was still painting pages. Her book cover was made from a Jatz biscuit box, which makes a spine 6.5cm wide. That needs a lot of pages. She's been painting pages every meeting lately!











She also printed some pages from a sheet of ultra-thick paper towel that she's painted with acrylic paints. The paper towel is super thick so it really slurped up the paint but it also printed a lot of pages.

 

 She says these pages will be useful because they have white areas to write on, as well as some colour.

Carol made a cover for her book. She wanted to make a small book with long thin pages and, of course, her trademark glitz.

Maz was working on her book cover.

These books are all going to be a long term project!

Next time, we're going to use some sun dyes that Jan left for us. Let's hope we have a fine day!

Journals - the trees just keep on coming...

Maz's journal pages continue to focus on Australian native trees. This month, she was interested in the large group of distinctive Australian trees, the Eucalypts.

She researched a lot of facts about this class of tree...

 
 

 ... and drew some leaf shapes. The leaves show the variation that's typical of this group of trees. Eucalyptus trees can be tall, single-trunked forest trees or short shrubby and multi-stemmed, like the mallee.

 She also studied the shapes of the fruits and the typical eucalyptus "mist" that forms over eucalyptus forests.

Nola continued to explore tree shapes in art media. This month, she used compressed sponge to make stamps. The stamps were a tree shape, a trunk shape cut from it, and the background shape from which the tree was cut, which yielded a positive and negative image. She printed them with Permaset printing inks.

 
She layered the stamp with different colours and printed ghost prints.

The backgrounds of her pages were created with Inktense pencils and texture plates.

More trees to come..