A Work in Progress

Not much to report at the moment - I have been very busy with my non-creative (but still very fulfilling!) domestic responsibilities this week so have been doing more baking than sewing or stamping! I have also lost myself late at night when I should be sleeping in reading Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy which I originally bought for Zach but which I have lost myself in (on Zach's extremely insistent recommendation!). I don't normally read fantasy but these books are intriguing.

Anyway, I have good news to share - I received an email from Somerset Studio yesterday saying that I am being published in the Jan/Feb issue. That email is making me reconsider making something for submission on the current "Heroes" theme!

The scan at the top of this post is a "work in progress" picture of the silk fusion postcards I am making for an exchange with Sue Smith and Jhodi Bennett. Jhodi chose the theme silk so of course I had to use some silk fusion paper I had made in lovely autumnal colours. I have stamped in turquoise Neopaque ink using a very large Fancy Pants swirl/flourish image and added a vintage image printed on inkjet fabric sheets. I have washed the image with diluted Antique Linen Distress Ink and done some free motion stitching on the postcard. I am now awaiting inspiration for the finishing touches...

Preparing for a garage sale...

I am so glad we have a Public Holiday next week - this garage sale I am planning for Sunday is taking over my life - I am looking at everything twice and thinking "are we REALLY going to ever use/need/want that again?"

So far I have stuff stacked everywhere - in the lounge room, in the entrance, in my little reading nook, in the study, literally everywhere. I have left my craft room(s) out of the sale altogether - I figure if I have to part with anything there it is probably better done via ebay.

Magazines are the major hassle - I don't have the storage space to keep them all but I love having them for whenever I want to flick through them. I can't be bothered cutting out and filing special articles but I notice a lot of them don't sell on ebay - you can't even give them away a lot of the time. I am, however, incapable, of chucking something that still has potential use/value in the bin. Guess I'll be re-evaluating storage options!!

The little canvas at the top of this posting is a simple little mini canvas I made for a couple of friends who recently had a hand fastening ceremony to celebrate their commitment to each other. I do a lot of vintage style and colour art and I mostly wear black, but I actually love a lot of colour in my life, so for this one I cut the heart from a really bright piece of hot pink and orange silk fusion paper I made. The canvas was painted in shades of blue and then I used a new favourite decorator napkin over the top. I used a white gel pen to add the dots and rub-ons for the word "love". I am ashamed of myself really - fancy using rub-ons when I have an enormous, but what will remain unspecified, number of rubber stamp alphabets that I could have used! My excuse is that stamping on a stretched canvas is (or at least, can be) difficult.

Last night I continued working on the backgrounds for my alphabet tags - I think I have decided that I need to change the image I was planning to use - I just can't get it to look right on the background, no matter what I do with the colour of the image. Anyway, last night I used bonding powder and foil to create a sparkly night sort of sky look on my tags - which had previously been coloured with denim Adirondak Color Wash and then sprayed with a purple and gold Moon Shadow Mist. (The Gossamer Gold is just magic and my all time favourite - I really must try it on fabric) . Unfortunately the whole foiling process took ages for the 30+ tags so I didn't get much else done, although I did cook a really nice stir-fry for dinner.

Fabulous Fantasy Fish Quilt

This is the last of the six quilts I made for the 2006 Exchange. It was actually the first one I worked on after my own. It was for Karin and her theme had the great title of "Fabulous Fantasy Fish". I didn't really come up with anything terribly imaginative when it came to the fish (which were cut from patterned fabric and raw edged appliqued and quilted) but I did experiment a bit with the surface - I made silk fusion paper for the background, bought a darning foot for my very old but trusty Janome so I could free wheel with the background quilting, created texture using puff paint and gold embossing for the ocean floor, stitched into it, dyed muslin for seaweed and sewed on small beads for a bit of interest. All up it was a lot of fun (and I learnt a lot in the process, including a lot of "what not to do"!)