Spring

Spring has arrived with a bang in Perth and I am just up from my sickbed, have had flu all week, but the beautiful weather is too enticing to stay indoors. I have been searching for ideas, but found instead this quotation by Emily Dickinson, one of my favourite poets:

A little Madness in the Spring Is wholesome even for the King. Emily Dickinson.

I haven't been mad yet.......

Stash reduction

In the interests of stash reduction and filling in time when the painter was here I started this log cabin using mainly floral fabrics, it looks like the most amazing cottage garden with all types of flowers crammed in together. I suspect at the end of the day the quilt will be titled Cornish Cottage Garden. Oh, and the stash reduction, well so far I have cut up a large bag full of florals, but on the other side of the coin I have bought two fqs to add a bit more variety......

'Family' - TTuesday

'Family' - TTuesday
Originally uploaded by Maureen1.

I was a bit stumped by this theme. In the end I decided to collage the important things in our family life, things that are continuing through the generations. These are: gardening, growing both flowers and vegetables, cooking, working with textiles. The collage consists of fabric, drawn thread work, lace, card image and a photo of the next generation along, The collage is based on stained card.

Split nine patch

While the painter was here today, I started to cut strips from a bag of scrappy pieces I found to make a lot cabin quilt. I discovered I could cut some 5" squares and since I have been wanting to make a split 9 patch quilt, I decided to make a lap top size quilt using the squares and a piece of pale pink floral as background. We are making quilts for a women's refuge this year, so the pink background will be ideal. Have had this pink for years, am sure I will never use it for me or the family, we are not really big fans of pink.

Too much stuff

We have a painter in this week, today he is doing the room where I keep all my sewing stuff. I never realised there was so much when it was taken out of cupboards to be moved. It is really quite shaming. I had forgotten much of what I have, so the question is do I need it all? Who knows, certainly I just about always have on hand whatever I want to complete something, which as we suffer a lack of local shops is good news. No, no photos, I would be ashamed for you to see it all, besides it had to be scattered into three other rooms besides being piled up in the centre of this room.

Retreat weekend

The retreat in Dwellingup was wonderful. We were right in the middle of bushland and since it is wildflower season the bush was ablaze with all sorts of flowers and wattle as in this photo. One afternoon we tried our hands at making folded paper books. Here are some of the books made by my friends.

Folded bag

I had promised to post a picture of the completed bag when I had my new camera, well here it is. The bag is very glamourous and sparkly, hope no jackdaw sees me wearing it. I am taking it to my retreat this weekend, it will be good for the wearable art night, and yes, I will be wearing more than just this fig leaf sized bag!

Postcards for Auction

I have busily been making these three postcards for Auction in aid of the Canadian Cancer Society. The theme is 'dawn' because dawn is a new day, a new beginning, the end of a long dark night and into a new day. As a cancer survivor I feel very strongly that cancer is just a word, not a sentence and chose my theme to try to convey this idea.

Melanie Testa

Arlee has pointed out I got the link wrong yesterday. It should have read like this
Sorry for leading you astray!

Art Textiles

I found the site of Melanie Testa this morning. She quilts, dyes the cloth, beads, sells fabric and it is all very interesting. Well worth a visit. Her fabrics are simply gorgeous, I would love to be able to design and then dye fabric as well as this.

dyeing with rosemary - details

I didn't give any details of my rosemary dyeing because I simply didn't know how it would turn out. I decided boiling herbs for an hour and then boiling fabric in the liquid produced by the first boiling was overuse of natural resources, so I put the mordanted fabric and the dye liquid in a jar and put in in the sunshine in my garden. It stayed there for two days, with a little moving around to take best advantage of a natural resource, the sun. At present I have some brown onion skins soaking in distilled water to see if that will produce a brighter yellow. Alas no sunshine, because after the two days of lovely spring weather we are back to rain.
The yellow produced from rosemary can be seen on the silk background of the first Dawn postcard I have in progress.

On the postcard front, I have two more in progress, two waiting for beading and the third is, well, I am not quite sure how to finish it, but it will be a good addition to my Dawn series.

WIP Dawn Postcard

I thought I would make some postcards for the Canadian Cancer Society as detailed on Arlee's blog. This one is dawn and will be beaded and have a slogan attached to it as well as being backed and edged. The yellow background is fairly close to the dawn skies I have been admiring on my morning walks. It is also a small piece of the rosemary dyed silk I did.

dyeing with rosemary

Yes, well, the fabric did take colour, but to my eye it looks as if it has been in a washing machine with something that had a leach of colour, very pale and patchy. I foresee a bout of dyeing with procion coming up to get the fabric looking like it was meant to be dyed. I guess it is partly my fault for using low water immersion dyeing technique, guess it doesn't work in the same way as when dyeing with procion. The sun dyeing too maybe needed a bit more time, but our weather turned anti-sunny and we have had two long days of much needed rain, with maybe a third coming on after a peep out of the window this morning.

On a more upbeat note, I heard from the insurance company that our claim has been settled and that I should be hearing about a camera replacement soon. This has been a long time without a camera for me.