I think that I shall never see...

... two trees that are the same in our journals! It's amazing - every time we bring our tree journals, we've done something different.

Helen's tree each month shares the same initial as the month so M for May is also M for Maple. She created several pages with acrylic paints and pen, in honour of this beautiful tree with its distinctive leaves, which provides us with glorious colour in May.

These pages were created from the maple photos in Photoshop.

Gorgeous possibilities here for stitch!

Yvonne was interested in the seeds of the raintree, parachidendron pruinosum. This is another Australian tree, found in the rainforests of the eastern coast, from the tropics to south of Sydney. The seed pods make interesting twisted shapes, with very black seeds. Gorgeous!

Yvonne's drawing was made with graphite pencil and watercolour pencils.

Nola is using her Trees book to try different techniques. This time, she was working with pastels. She coloured the background of her pages with soft pastels, and then painted over the loose pastels with gesso. This softened the colour and fixed the surface. Then she used her paper tree stencils and added more pastels through the stencil and then another layer of gesso. Shadows of contrasting colours and highlights of white were added.The result was very soft.

 

The background of the third page was made the same way, but the loose residue of the soft pastels on the surface of the stencil was dragged into the holes before more gesso was added for stability.

Her last tree was created the same way but highlights and shadows were added with oil pastels, which gave sharper lines and more shine.

Maz continues her research on Australian trees.

 

More trees next month!

And here it is...

... our work for Rhapsody in Blues...

The f that unites the pieces stands for forte in music, meaning loud or strong. But of course, forte also means a person's talent and we are showing out talents here. F also stands for our group, Fibrecircle.

It's always hard doing parts of works sight unseen, when you don't know what others are making. I think this worked out pretty well and it certainly shows our individual approaches to creativity!

You can see our work, along with many others, on the ATASDA stand at the Sydney Craft and Quilt Fair at Glebe Island, June 17 - 21. There will also be lots of brilliant demonstrations of different textile art techniques every day, so we hope you'll visit!

Some other things...

Do you ever get the feeling that the textiles world is an enormous web of connected strands? Very appropriate, for fibre and textile artists, I guess!

Helen brought along a work that she made for Lateral Stitchers. For those who don't know, Laterals is a group of the Embroiderers' Guild of NSW, who have been meeting for more than twenty years to make innovative textile art. They often have challenges and this one is Menu. Members were formed into groups to make works inspired by different courses of the meal and Helen was given Starters.

Helen also brought along  a work she has been doing at Fibrecircle for a few weeks. It's also for Laterals, on the theme of Ancient Civilisations. It's inspired by a tile border on a fishpond in the Alhambra Palace in Granada, Of course, it's canvas embroidery, with embellishments, which came from a bead shop in Covent Garden - she's never seen anything like them anywhere else. They work really well with this, don't they?

Yvonne was knitting a capelet, ready for the EWES sale this past weekend. The EWES are the Epping Weavers Embroiderers and Spinners. They are one of the many groups using the Epping Creative Centre at Dence Park, where they had their sale.



Meanwhile, Cindy was working on her piece for the Untethered group's exhibition out of hand in November. Untethered is a sub-group of ATASDA NSW, and their first exhibition will be held in November, at Wallarobba Arts and Cultural Centre at Hornsby. As three of our members are also members of that group, I'm sure you'll hear all about it! This is just a teaser of what she's making - it's looking fabulous!

  

Carol was working on her postcard for June. It's gorgeous and glitzy and I'm sure you'll see it again!

 

 
While we're still on things handmade, Helen brought us all a present of some handmade paper she bought at the Milk Factory Gallery a while back. It's beautiful, isn't it?  It's too pretty to use...

 

 That's us for May - we'll have more Trees and our finished Rhapsody work in June. See you then!

A little taste of something special

Last week, our contributions to our collaborative work, on the theme of Rhapsody in Blues, were due in. It will be displayed, along with many others at the ATASDA stand at the Sydney Craft and Quilt Fair at Glebe Island in June. It's not quite together yet but here's some teasers...

We'll show you the finished work soon, we promise!

And some other things...

Carol brought along a magazine called Vintage Fashion, which was a reprint of a lot of original articles. Some of the entries were hilarious to our modern eyes!

Women were urged to avoid "Mistakes we all make", including wearing the wrong frock, wearing too much pattern (how shocked the writer would be to see the mix of prints in modern clothing), the Mix Up Hat (wearing a hat that doesn't suit the rest of the clothes) and the many disasters of dress that might befall a girl going to a dance. We were all quite taken with the notion of chiffon knickers, made from "ivory chiffon with pale pink trim" which, we were reassured, would go well with summer gowns. At least, the wearer would be cool!

But our absolute favourite was the tip to set our hair with sugar solution, which, when "sprayed into submission", lasts a week! We imagined a group of girls in summer gowns being chased by a swarm of bees...

We weren't just reading amusing things out of magazines, though. Yvonne was making her postcard for June, which we're not allowed to show anyone yet. Robin, our newest member was knitting a beautiful lace scarf, which had us all lost in admiration.

Nola was working on a very old Fibrecircle UFO. Remember way back here when we made Round Robin book pages for one another? Nola was embroidering another page for her own book, the theme of which was Travelling to Byzantium.

Next meeting, we hope to have something a little different to show you!

Tree journals for May

At our first May meeting, we brought our journals to share again.

Maz's May journal pages began to focus on 12 specific species of gum tree.

First she researched some general information on gum trees.

Her first tree was the Blue Gum.

More gum trees next month...

Nola had done a lot on her journal since April. First, she had the second part of the block printing she did with Ezy-Carve blocks last time. This one was a relief block, where the background is cut away, leaving just the lines to be printed. The first prints were done with Permaset printing inks.

These prints are intaglio prints, in which colour is rubbed into the cut areas and a second colour added to the relief sections. The first print used the incised block from last month; the others used the relief block.

Her next trees were paper cut-outs that had been used as a resist  for silk screen printing...

 ... while this shows the resulting print, using the paper cut-out resist and a screen with a pattern in wax screen fill.

Then she embellished one of the screen printed trees with Inktense pencils.

Her last pages came from various stencilling with dyes. The first came from the day we used Dala Sun Dyes for stencilling and used another paper stencil, reinforced with gesso.

This tree was stencilled with Drimarene K dyes and another paper stencil, reinforced with gesso. It was printed over another of the screen prints.

Her last page showed a tree stencil design that she created with a glue gun, and the resulting print.

She has been busy, hasn't she?

More tree journal work coming soon...

Postcards

We had a lovely meeting at the end of April, although our numbers were down. The photographer was a little scatty so we only have photos of our postcards.

Helen's postcard was made with some orizomegami dyed papers she'd made, woven together, with some felt embellishments. Very effective!

Helen's second postcard was made with "bits and pieces out of a box", laid down on Solvy and machine stitched. She added some beads and other embellishments.

Nola's postcard was made from hand painted fabric, hand embroidered and coloured with Intense pencils. It looks a little washed out in the photo.

Yvonne's postcard was made on a printed paper background, overlaid with organza ribbon and embellished with hand stitching and beads.

As always, it's fascinating to see how different they are from each other.

In May we'll have something different to show you in our monthly postcard swap!