October birthstones

Yes, I know, we're in December! It's been rather busy around here so our October birthstones didn't get shared until  the end of November, and I'm only just now catching up on blog updating. Did you know there's this big thing called Christmas coming up? Seems to happen every year....

OK. birthstones. The birthstones for October are opal and tourmaline.  Both Cindy and Nola chose to focus on opal.

Cindy created a double page with a fold out, with lots of interesting facts about opals, including a photo of an opal ring worn by Elvis! She experimented with using metallic foils on glue to create opalescent colour on her page.

Nola became interested in the geology of opals. She discovered that there are many fossils made out of opal, as the liquid silica from which they form gets into hollows where organic material used to be.

The most amazing fossil she found is the Addyman Plesiosaur. This is an opalised skeleton of an ancient animal, which was found at Andamooka in 1968 and is currently on display at the Museum of South Australia in Adelaide .

Lots of opalised fossils of plants and animals have been found in Australia, including remains of a large ancestor of the modern platypus called Sterepodon.

We'll show you the rest of our birthstones next year.

For at least the first half of 2015, our chosen theme is Trees.

Challenges again

Remember back when we did two challenges in rapid succession? We wanted to shake things up a bit and try some new things. Not everyone took it as far as finished pieces of work, but we all played with different ideas.

Here's the bag Helen made from the letter challenge. It has a Japanese feel to it and we think it's just lovely!

Cindy made this design from the designs she made in the drawing challenge. It may find its way into a work one day - for now, it was fun just to play around with shapes and colours.















Maz also created a design from the drawing challenge.

It's interesting to see how she got to this point, from the earlier designs!

Nola had also created some line  drawings from the drawing challenge but they weren't photographed on the day She says they'll probably turn up as postcards shortly!

The challenges were fun to do, because they gave us a chance to play, with no real investment in the outcome. Often we're so busy doing the next thing, learning, making something for a specific purpose, we don't stop and try different things and just play around with them, with no special expectations. Hopefully ,we'll make some time to do this kind of thing again.

November postcards

Here are our last postcards for 2014.

Carol's postcard, her eighteenth since we began swapping, is a wonderful collage of sparkle and shine, just the way she likes it!

She used a combination of fabrics, threads and found objects, mounted on black felt.


This is Cindy's first postcard since she joined the group this year.

She also collaged found items with printed and dyed fabrics, which were stitched and distressed. Her card was bordered with machine zig-zag stitch.
 Maz's postcard, her 25th since we began swapping, combined commercial fabrics with hand stitching and couching. The edges were turned in and slip-stitched.

We've seen Nola's postcard before, when she was making things from the letter challenge.

She used one of her horse images to make a bird, which she mounted on card. The postcard was edged with overlapping cross stitches in variegated perle thread.


But Helen wins the prize for the most prolific swapper, swapping her 33rd card since we began.









Her card was made from layers of commercial fabric, stitched and couched with a variety of stitches. The edges were bound and it has a jaunty tassel.

There will be more postcards in 2015 - I really think we're hooked on them!

Pincushions

Did I mention we had a day making pincushions recently? ATASDA had a challenge to members to make a pincushion for display in the cabinets at Epping Creative Centre, where the NSW Branch meetings are held. So we decided to spend a day making our pincushions.

We all worked on pincushions but not everyone finished one for the challenge and not all finished ones got photographed. Here are some we made.

Maz got excited and made two. This one is a pear. It was made from cotton fabric with hand stitching and a wrapped stem.

Her second one was a fish. It has a beaded eye and raffia tied on its tail.









The fabric is the wrapping from a small gift we all received at the recent High Tea to celebrate the 40th birthday of ATASDA, so this will be her ATASDA commemorative pin cushion!

Nola was inspired by the brightly coloured birds she saw on a recent trip to Africa and made a brightly coloured nest pincushion with bright blue eggs. It was made from woven and knotted yarn and fabric strips over a felt base,, with a felt top and eggs.

Cindy made this very elegant hat pincushion. It has a card structure with fussy-cut cotton fabric, fabric flowers and lace, embellished with velvet ribbon.






All the pincushions will be displayed at the Epping Creative Centre until the end of January.

... and some work we've done recently

Cindy has been making books like crazy lately. Here's one from cereal boxes that she began in Perth before she moved back to Sydney.

 

If you want to see more pages of this book, check out the slideshow on her blog.

 
She's been really busy this fortnight, as here is a box she made in a Primrose Paper Arts workshop with Peter Stanford.

It opens up like this..

Really clever design and a really pretty box!

Some work we're doing...

Here are some things we've been working on lately..

Cindy started this work at the ATASDA NSW Retreat in Mudgee a few months ago.

It's woven strips of prefelt, hand stitched, with machine-couched and backed elements. She's not quite sure where this is going yet.

This is some canvas embroidery that Helen is doing.

When it grows up, it will be purses like these she's already made.



Cindy made this book recently. She says she needs to use up some of the pretty papers she's collected!

 

She's also been doing some gelliplate printing lately. Here are some of the base prints:

... and here are some she's been stitching.

Looking good!

Letter challenge part 2

This challenge was the one we did back in August - remember? Helen got us to cut apart letters and rearrange the pieces in new and interesting ways into a collage.

Maz created this design from her letters at our meeting in August.
She used it as her inspiration for an embroidery. She machine embroidered onto 300gsm paper, which she had pre-soaked. She declared, "Never again," as it was quite tedious to do! The paper was still quite firm and the needle tended to collect shreds of white paper on the way back up, which had to be over-stitched over to cover it up. Still, you have to try these things!





She had no particular theme in mind but we joked that it was the spirit of aviation. She was the only one of us to finish a challenge piece by the deadline.












Nola was making two different things from her finished collage, which looked like this:





The first work was a book of images based on the collage. She found the challenge difficult as the colours she was given were so dark and the shapes so spiky. She scanned the collage into her computer and played around with the images in Corel Photo-Paint, using different filters. Then she printed the images as pages of a book and added pencil sketching and some everyday expressions that relate to horses.

Nola's book cover with words meaning horse

 

She also printed the last image above onto cartridge paper and used cut elements of the image to make this bird collage. It will become a postcard to swap.

So from alphabet letters to horse to bird...

Cindy's original design used these elements...



So she had turned it into this design, printed and stitched on panne velvet.







She says it's a work in progress.


You'll probably see more of these challenge pieces, as time goes by!