Of course there were postcards..

 Cindy's postcard this month was mixed media. Her postcard was based on paper serviettes, stamped and hand stitched, with painted Vleisofix and foiling and a buttonhole stitched edge.

Helen's postcard was made on a base of fabric strips, machine stitched, with flowers from Suffolk Puffs and machine stitched fabric leaves.

Nola's postcard was hand painted and hand stitched, with a fine picot edge.

Maz's postcard was based on hand painted cotton cloth, with hand stitching. The edges were folded under a paper backing.

 

It's always amazing how different our postcards are to one another's and how typical they can be of what we like to make. Cindy often works in mixed media; Nola likes painting, printing or dyeing fabric and stitching it; Maz also likes to add hand stitch to painted or dyed cloth. Helen embroiders on canvas mostly but she often makes postcards like this, with machine stitching and three dimensional elements. 



What a quirky day!

Last meeting, we were talking about ways to use Tyvek. This time, Cindy brought along a couple of her works that included Tyvek, to show everyone.

This one was made for a challenge with the extraTexture group. Each member made a work inspired by this photo of Avalon Beach by Rob Shelberg. The rock in the foreground was made from Tyvek. It's beautifully textural.

The other work, Hawthorne Pond, was based on Cindy's own photograph, based on a photo of reflections in a pool on a cloudy day. The leaves floating on the surface were made from Tvvek.

She says the trick with Tyvek is to use it for details. It certainly works well here!
Some of the girls were talking about World Book Day. It falls in April, but some of the events went viral on Facebook. One of them invited people to grab a nearby book and share the fifth sentence on page 52. Just for fun, we tried it.. 

Helen: "Politicians who vast piles of cash made the inbred aristocracy turn a blind eye to their vulgar origins. (Girt by David Hunt)

Maz: 'History heaves and pukes under every paving stone." (Flesh Wounds by Richard Glover)

Nola: "It was a sad state of affairs but these days, Bradshaw even envied him that status." (No Name Lane by Howard Linskey)

Cindy: "The streets of Geneva were deserted, the bars silent, the electric trains empty." (I an Pilgrim by Terry Hayes).

Make you want to read any of them?

Cindy was making scoubidous to use as luggage tags. Have you seen a scoubidou? Most of us hadn't.

Scoubidous are a knotting technique with plastic strips. You can do really complex knotting patterns of more simple ones.




Here's Cindy making her scoubidou.


You can see a lot more about them here.

I don't think any of us was working really hard, do you? Except maybe Cindy.
 

And what we were working on

 



Nola was working on her work for the same out of hand exhibition as Cindy's work in the last post. Her work is called wanton, a word used about women who were "out of hand". Her main interest is how we label people and the power those labels can have. You'll see a full picture once it's finished.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Maz was working on future postcards. She had this beautiful fabric as a base and was adding stitch.

 

 

 

This is the scrap remaining after she'd cut two postcards:

 

 

Very pretty and delicate!

 

This is the first postcard finished..

 

Love it!

 

Meanwhile, Helen was working on a little something, just so she had some work to do. She thinks it will become, " a notebook or something"!

 

She's also brought along the circle work for Lateral Stitchers that she was making last time.. Plus two more! That display is going to be great!

 

See you later this month!



Trees trees trees trees...

... and yet more trees...

We were a small group last time, between flu season and travel season! But, perhaps inspire by spring in the air, we all had trees to share in our journals.

Maz was inspired to investigate leaf shapes this month. A lot of Australian trees look very similar to one another at a casual glance, so finding the small details that distinguish them can be quite important, especially for those of us interested in dyeing with them!

 

 

First she had words for the different shapes. Isn't "oblanceolate" a wonderful word?

 

Then she drew pictures of the shapes. So now we know what oblanceolate leaves look like!

 



 

Her next pages looked at the shapes of the tips of leaves and the way they're arranged on the stem.  Specific Australian trees species are mentioned, which is really handy if they happen to be good for dyeing!

 

Then we have a specific kind of leaf cluster called compound palmate leaves, like you get on Umbrella Trees.

Last of all, she looked at the veins in the leaves, which can have distinctive patterns, and at structures in the leaf called domatia. A lot of Australian trees have specific domatia, such as bumps, hollows or bristles on the surface of the leaves. The kind of domatia and their location can be an identifying characteristic.

 
So now you know! With your leaf guide in one hand and a tree twig in the other, you're well on the way to identifying the tree species, and that will tell you whether it's likely to give you wonderful colour in your dye pot.

Meanwhile, Helen was continuing with her fantasy trees. She's inspired by the gorgeous trees you find in medieval tapestries. This one is a Tree of Life, which she drew with Aquarelle pencils. These trees are fascinating because they always had many different fruits on them, something even the most ardent grafter couldn't achieve!

Nola's trees showed more of her experimentation with techniques. This month, she was working with  different kinds of collagraphs. Her first tree was a print from a craft foam plate stitched with embroidery thread and printed with Permaset printing inks.

Her next prints were leaf prints, made by impressing a leaf into a piece of foam meat tray, using a marble rolling pin. This is what she got when she printed the plate.

Then she created an impression plate by putting objects on a piece of foam core sheet and running it through a press. These plates are all very low relief. 





While she was printing , she accidentally over-inked the plate. She took a very wet print to clean the plate and then took a monotype from the wet print.

She liked this one much better than the prints she'd been getting, as the wet inks gave interesting patterns that were very natural. She also liked the second print she took from the wet plate.

Sometimes these accidental prints are the best!

Cindy didn't create anything in her journal this month but she did bring a tree to show us.

Isn't it gorgeous? It's called "Can't see the wood for the trees" and she made it for the untethered exhibition out of hand, in November this year. The background is made from her prints, many from gelliplates. The canvas on which its mounted is also printed with white textural media. The tree itself is beautifully three-dimensional, made from couched yarn.





Exhibitions, workshops, travels and all the fun stuff!

Lately, Cindy has been making works for the extraTexture group exhibition. If you wanted to see it... too late, you missed it! But it was well worth seeing. You can see some posts about their exhibition and their works over on their blog and on Cindy's own blog. But here's another of Cindy's works, J'adore, which was in the exhibition.

Just gorgeous! Cindy sold a lot of her work at the exhibition - well done!

Helen was working on an embroidery-in-a-hoop for a display for Lateral Stitchers.

The background is painted, and Helen was embroidering on it by hand. They're all going to be displayed together at a meeting, so that's going to be a great display!

Cindy also did the ATASDA workshop with Cas Holmes and showed us some interesting samples from the class:

It looks like a fantastic workshop!

Maz has been travelling overseas but she brought us all back a little memento of her travels in Italy.

Isn't it gorgeous? Now to find something special to put it in...

And then there's postcards

We can't get enough of our postcards, because they're such a great way to work out an idea or use up a sample. For some of us, it's the only creative thing that is guaranteed to happen in our busy lives!

Yvonne's postcard  was made from fabric strips and hand stitch, with a buttonhole stitch edge.

 

 

Helen's was made with fabric snippets trapped under organza, machine stitched and embellished.



 

Carol's was also made with fabric snippets machine under organza but hers were stitched to a card background in a grid, with mesh and fabric flowers added.

Nola's was another, probably the last, of her Forest series. These were all made from painted cloth, drawn lines and Inktense pencils.

The thing to notice about our postcards is that they rarely require complicated materials. Each of us works with relatively few materials and they rarely require advanced sewing skills. We swap ours, as a fun thing to do at our meetings, but they could be mounted to make wonderful cards or included in larger pieces. Why not have a go at making one too? We'd love to see what you make!

August

Our apologies, there were a few hiccups with blogging this month!

So what have we been doing since you last saw us? Well, yes, we are still continuing with our trees theme in our journals.
Nola has been making rubbings. "The council came and trimmed one of our trees, and left a slice of tree trunk behind. It had interesting markings on both sides from the circular saw." Nola used watercolour crayon, dry...

 
... Inktense pencils, dry and watercolour pencils, wet...

 

...Inktense pencils, in two colours, wet, and wet watercolour crayon with an Inktense pencil overlay. It's interesting how each medium or combination gives a different amount of detail, enhancing or obliterating the natural wood grain.



 

Maz is coming to the end of her top Australian eucalypts. This time she focuses on Silver Dollar Gum Eucalyptus cinerea, beloved by Australian eco-dyers for its brilliant orange colour; Scribbly Gum,  Eucalyptus haemastoma, which has wonderful scribble marks on its bark left by moth larvae; and Spotted Gum Corymbia maculata.

 

 Cindy made some tree drawings with watercolour pencil in her journal.  

 They'll be the basis of some wonderful work one of these days!