First of Hopefully Three

I have started making some small, half meter-ish sized mixed media quilts. Why? well to try out some new stuff. I have ideas for three and here is the first.

This one sprang from the scrap box obsession I have at the moment. After cutting up all those hundreds of squares in my last post, hang on, I think I'm repeating myself here ....... Yes indeed, I have shown you this picture of my background fabric and scrap pieces last time. So on the next pic ............

I have laid out all those bits in a geometric sort of design. I tried to use the scraps just as they were, haven't done any trimming, just shortened a few longer bits and added a couple of hand dyed cotton tapes to bring it all together.

Next I wanted to experiment with a couple of lino blocks I had cut last year and some other texture plates  I have used for other things, but never printed with. I used lumiere paints mixed with a little textile medium and applied the paint with a piece of sponge.

I also wanted to try using some heavy threads through the machine, so bought some 12 cotton perle  and 30 wt Cebelia, well I think that's what it's called. It says made in France and that sounds pretty French to me so I'll go with that. The 30 wt was a little heavier than the 12 perle, I would rather have got the 40 wt, but of course didn't have it in white. As it happens the 30 runs through the machine fine and I think I now prefer it.

So I got out the dye pots and without much thought, dyed up some bobbin length skeins. Then decided I would like some lighter colours so dyed up another lots in bigger quantities this time.

After a bit of playing around with tension on the machine and working out which stitches would work and which wouldn't, I started stitching madly all over the place.

I knew at some stage I would use gold thread on this piece, so used gold as my bobbin thread for all the stitching. If the bobbin thread did show through, which it did at times, it just added to the gold anyway.

I finished off the stitching by adding some gold squares, particularly in the negative areas to bring the whole thing together.

I wasn't sure what I was going to do with this piece when it was finished but once it got to this stage it was just screaming out for some coloured tabs along the top. 

I then bagged the top with a piece of stripy Indian cotton, I know I took a picture of this but it seems to have disappeared. 

I finished the edge of with a row of heavy gold stitching.

And tied it to the backing with a few random gold diamonds 

So here it is, another awful photo I'm sorry. I set out to:-

•  use my scraps 
• try out some printing blocks 
• experiment with some hand dyed threads 
• not use any satin stitch in an appliqued piece

It's now hanging in the door way between my two work rooms where I hung it to take it's picture, think I might just leave it there for a while :)

Love your Scrap Box

With the price of fabric and dye stuff set to rise in price, I have been looking at ways to use up all the scraps of hand dyed fabrics I have accumulated. Luckily I keep a scrap box and all my odds and ends get chucked straight in there. My friend Helen made a lovely quilt using all her bits of hand dyes, so I had to give it a go. I did dye up my light background fabric which I then printed with a wood block as I am trying to keep this a completely hand dyed quilt again. Once I started cutting, I found I had enough for a second quilt so kept going till I had a pile of some 800 + squares. Here are the first lot, chained together with their light background fabric, and some binding strips already cut from the left overs of the left overs. The plastic bag contains the coloured squares for a second quilt.

You can see the finished quilt here at Main Creek you will have to go right to the bottom of the page to the quilt named Garden Lattice. This is Helens quilt, I am making mine a little larger as I had 2 meters of background fabric to use. I have to be in the right frame of mind for piecing, so leave the piles sat by the machine and go and do a half hour or so when the mood takes me, not the most productive way to work I'm sure.
After I had finished cutting all those squares, I was left with yet even more smaller pieces. I have been making some new stamps and playing around with these and wanted a project to try some more ideas out on, so after selecting a 1/2 meter piece as a background, I have started a small wall quilt which will have some stamping and lots of stitching done in heavy threads.

 More scraps on the chosen background fabric.

The Japanese are very good at using old fabrics and kimonos. There is a very interesting you tube video that talks about Boro or rags used in Japanese textiles. I think we will all be doing more recycling of our resources in the future.  Colouricious have just made a short video called Recycled Reborn. You will see the same idea of using strips of recycled fabric or rags to make a new piece of fabric here also. I have a small weaving loom out the back, so will have to give this a try with my really skinny bits of scrap. With a bit of thought nothing need go to waste :)

Back on board and stuff.

I am back, I think, can't make any promises, but after the usual Christmas chaos and a mouse infestation, I have got my room back in working order. I spent five whole days, yes FIVE getting rid of the remnants of mouse and filled 25 archive boxes with stuff to have a tidy, workable area again. I have reclaimed the book shelves that have sat covered in unread books for nearly 10 years, moved a few things around and hey presto, can even use that back room now.

The wall of boxes.

The reclaimed book shelves. I can actually use the toaster oven for my clay work there without having to dig it out from a cupboard. There is a 'to do' box there, it would be the one with the lid fighting it's way off :)

I can now actually see my dyed 1/2 meters.

And I have made a dyeing spot. Although it's limited, not like the big old rusty room I once had, it does the job. Yes I was dyeing some stuff, but that's for another post.

I am working on a couple of things at the moment, work allowing and will show you soon.

On the house front, the reno's are plodding along. The weather has been very unkind but we are getting there. While we are working on the outside of the house the inside stays much as is apart from the continual dust. We have just had to replace both the dishwasher and fridge, something we would rather have done after we had finished the kitchen, but both packed it in so had no choice, well I did try and do without the dishwasher but what a waste of time standing at the kitchen sink!! when I could be out in my tidy room doing 'stuff'.

A Colourful Weekend.

Just a few quick pictures from the weekend. Main Creek is looking stunning after all the rain we have had. The bird life both wild and domesticated are enjoying the abundance of feed and on this particular weekend, good weather. The dawn chorus must be an English phrase as there is nothing harmonious or serene about the awakening of Australian birds. They celebrate the arriving of the new day with shrieks and screams, hoots and ear piercing whistles, cackling laughter and whoops of delight, this is no gentle awakening but a get out of bed NOW.
There were lots of brightly coloured fabrics flapping in the breeze and I think the peacock thought he had to compete with all this unexpected colour, so he put on a fine display for us.

Blog Reader rather than a Blogger

I thought I had better explain why I have gone AWOL yet again.  Back in my March post you will see the statement "for when we do the big renovations, yeah like that's going to happen any time in the next decade".


 Well I have to eat my word here as the back of the house has changed from this - where I am showing my crow bar swinging friend Karen in a very technical architectural kind of way, the grand plan. Well the house wasn't exactly like that to begin with. My lovely rusty dyeing room, toilet, laundry and a vast expanse of more rusty roofing have been removed at this stage.

To this -

It's actually starting to look like a proper house !! We are doing most of the work ourselves, so every spare (dry) moment is spent adding weather boards, new windows and doors and all the other paraphernalia that goes with a big reno job. My back yard looks like a building site and my workroom is full of stuff that shouldn't be there. I am staining windows and doors rather than dyeing lovely fabrics and any painting involves a very large brush and a huge bucket of undercoat. I know more about different woods, types of windows, hanging doors and styles of weather boards than I ever wanted to know, can set and up load numerous types of nail guns and have become quiet comfortable using large electric saws and tools that I would normally approach like a dangerous wild beast capable of ripping your arms off.
So all normal activity has ceased here for an indefinite period of time. I shall have a lovely new house when it's all finished, which is already much more pleasant to live in, or out of as we spend a lot of time on the new back deck. The only downside to all this reorganisation and newness is that I have lost my work spots. I can no longer throw dye around with gay abandon and have old tables and twin tubs on hand to dye up a storm.
But as I speak, there is meters and meters of white cotton in the washing machine, (which at present resides in the garage with meter and meters of wood) being prepared for the last workshop of the year up at Main Creek. I have a weekend off :) no sawdust and noise for two whole days, just two days of blissful colour and sewing, well the ladies will be blissfully dyeing and sewing while I help them along the way but I will be a talking a language I am more familiar with and handling dye pots and fabric rather than drop saws and nail guns.
 So I have become a Blog reader rather than a Blogg - er. I still visit your blogs, drool over your creative endeavours, then slink away back to the world of chaos and dust. Of course, one day - in the hopefully not too distant future, things will return to normal and I will find new spots to dye in, my workroom will again become my own and used for it's intended purpose with the added bonus of a proper house!!

A Productive Couple of Weeks

Another long absence from my blog :( but I have actually managed to get out into my work room and accomplish something.
I have just been checking back through my posts, looking for this, thinking it was only a few months ago and it was a WHOLE YEAR!! where does the time go?
Anyway the Shall I - Shan't I has become a shall, mainly because a couple of ladies want to make this pattern at a weekend retreat next month so it HAD to be made.
I must admit, I haven't made a quilt for a long time and I really enjoyed it, so much so, I have the colours picked out for the next one, with a little help from my colour expert Jenny S.

I have called this quilt Hatley Garden, as it reminds me of  - yes - the garden we had in the first house I can remember which was at number 1 Hatley Garden.

Not a great picture but I've got nowhere to hang a quilt to photograph, especially one this big!!

 close up

I am really happy with the way it has turned out, particularly getting the colours so close to the ones in the original design. I couldn't dye that piece of blue again, must have been a random dye colour I picked up somewhere, so used a piece of batik fabric Mum sent over in her Surprise Parcel.  Now I just have to sit and write up all the direction so it can be added to the projects over at Main Creek.

I have another group coming up to Main Creek at the beginning of May. They will be dyeing on the first day, then using their fabrics to make a satchel type bag and / or a book sleeve on the second day. So using my hand dyes again I have finally got around to covering my diary and making another bag, this time noting down what I was actually doing so it can be taught at the workshop. 

I love making these book sleeves, I get to use all those functions on my machine that I usually forget about. I love the braiding foot to couch down threads and actually use some of those decorative stitches. This time I used my alphabet card and the program function to put the days of the week along the inside cover and the months of the year on the spine. This one also has some stamping and fabric weaving. The embellishment on the front is an ugly piece of lace stuff that I bought at the quilt show a few weeks ago which I have then covered in layers of paint, gel medium and garnet granules, looks so much better than the black and gold it was originally.

 Front

Back

Bit blurry but they are the days of the week.

During all this productivity I also managed to wash up another hundred meters of fabric, here is half of it.

Thankfully no dust storms to contend with, just the occasional shower. It is now all neatly piled in 8 meter lengths or rolled back onto its tubes ready to be dyed, thanks to the help of Jenny S and Kim this morning.

I have also been re-vamping the Main Creek Blog. Now that blogger has pages, I can organise the site much better and have all the brochures available to download, another time consuming job, but it's getting there. - so back to it :)

A Day of Domesticity.

Finally it feels like Autumn!! We have had weeks and weeks of hot and humid weather and I have done nothing, that's what it feels like anyway. This morning, with a fresh breeze blowing, and a much needed day off, I decided to get the garden sorted out, something I have been planning to do for weeks but weather and the lack of a wheel barrow has stopped me. The veggie garden is very bare at the moment with all the summer stuff finished and my poor soil in much need of a boost. I have plenty of compost but no way to move it from the end of the garden to the veggie bed. Steve has been promising to get a wheel barrow for weeks - but - it's got to be just the right barrow, a proper builders barrow for when we do the big renovations, yeah like that's going to happen any time in the next decade. I know I shouldn't be so cynical, but........
Anyway back to the garden and I made myself a nice little compost mover, a grape box, very waxy inside so would stand a bit of damp and dirt, and a length of old whipper snipper cord for a handle and I could drag it box load by box load, remembering not to be too ambitious as to how much it could hold as I would have to pick it up to empty it at the other end - worked a treat and the compost bin is now empty of good stuff and the garden bed revitalised

I must admit I don't know much about this gardening lark and just do what I think needs doing, but I'm sure my compost wasn't supposed to have quiet as much wildlife living in it, particularly the ants nests and remembered reading somewhere that not enough moisture was the cause of ants - so while I was dragging my box loads up the garden, I rigged up a sprayer to get it well watered while I was adding it to the bed.

Yes I did get a bit damp when emptying my box, but it's still warm here :) You can just see one of my erosion bundles tied to the pole there, it was completely surrounded by tomatoes plants when I first put it up, but is now a bit exposed.  As you can see though, this must be one of the turquoise ones as the colour is showing through it's wrapping, wonder what else is happening in there?

I have finally found myself a lemon tree on a dwarf root stock that will be happy in a pot and it seems to be doing OK along with the red peppers and rhubarb which has given us one delicious crumble already this year.

I am lucky enough to have as my main 'weed' problem, nasturtiums, which I let grow indiscriminately throughout the garden and they in fact help to control the unwanted weeds.

Under this old chair there is a hole in the concrete, which, of course always has weeds growing out of it, but once a nasturtium finds it's way in there, it's left to it's own devises and I think looks quite lovely and gives mad Mango a treat as he love a nasturtium or five.

I have also planted up the three pots with some asian greens and other things that are totally out of season, but interested to see what will grow in an Aussie autumn as it is exactly the same if not warmer than an English summer. So the garden is all neat and tidy, the pumpkin patch has had a bit of a weeding and the compost bins cleaned up a bit.

I have also recycled an old TV unit into a small coffee table by removing the glass door and touching up the bare bits with black paint, (a real Better Homes and Garden sort of project this one). It's an ugly thing but much smaller and more practical than the huge ugly thing  we were using before.

The morning started off cool and sunny but the clouds slowly built as the morning went by.

And now it is pouring with rain so the garden is getting a good soaking and the house is filled with the smell of just baked hot cross buns, the first batch this year, so I'm off for a coffee and at least two warm buns covered in butter, I think I've earned them :) Oh I do love a day at home.

Erosion Bundle Project.

I heard about this project on LOVE STITCHING RED and couldn't resist  giving it a go. Here is the link to the Erosion Blog where you can find out more.
I should have put more thought into what was going into my bundles, but sometimes I tend to think too much and never get anything done, so I just scouted around my very untidy workroom and put together some bundles, mostly fabric and threads of course :) I did follow a couple of links and looked at other bundle projects and got the idea to add a bit more organic matter, so grabbed my herb and spice jars on they way out to the workroom. I've put mustard seeds in one of them, might end up with with a big bundle of mustard plants LOL.

This one has the mustard seeds along with some scrim a letter from my mum, a mixed media piece that I didn't really like and other bits and pieces that I can't remember.

    

Paper bark, a polymer clay head, silk thread and black pepper corns with other bits and bobs.

This one has a big piece of harem cloth wrapped around another piece of paper bark, cinnamon sticks and paper pieces.

 And lastly some dyed muslin, thread, a little metal spade, gum leaves and nuts.

There are other things in the bundles too, even now I can't remember exactly what I put in so they will be a real surprise when I open them.

Having a very small yard it was going to  a challenge to find places to put them. One went into the wood pile which is under the ever growing pumpkin plant at the bottom of the garden, one is tied to the pole at the back of my veggie garden, another tied into the bush under our bedroom window, this is at the front  of the house an open to anyone walking past but is well hidden I think and the last is buried just inside the back gate. I'm so glad I took photo's and posted this as I'm sure I'm going to forget where they are !!

sorry the pics are a bit like find Wally pictures, see if you can find my parcels LOL.

I think there is a set date to reveal the bundles, but being in the southern hemisphere and summer time, I think I will have to leave mine longer, although it did rain a little while I was stowing them away, just have to wait and see what happens over the next few months.  Should be interesting !!

Tomatoes - Tomatoes - Tomatoes

The weather this Christmas has been very unseasonable, rain, rain and rain. Christmas Eve was hot and beautifully sunny. The picture below is my little gathering from the garden, but after lunch on Christmas day, the weather changed and it had been very damp ever since.

I only planted three tomatoes plants this year as I don't have much space and didn't want to end up with tons of tomatoes, good plan you may think, but with all the rain we have had this year year, those three plants have gone berserk, swamping all the other plants and tried to escape next door.

With all the rain the last few days, I haven't been able to get out and pick them, and they are now literally bursting out of their skins, so this morning with my trusty brolly and I spent half an hour picking off the best of what I could find in this jungle. There are three variety's here, little golden cherry toms, and red berry tom and a large beef tomato. The golden ones have grown right through the rest and are now heading North to the bottom of the garden. As you can see, not much else is getting much chance to grow!!

Here are the cherry toms ready to be sun dried in the oven, seems bizarre I know, I usually do them in the sun, but have not seen hide nor hair of it for days.

And here are the big fat beefy toms ready to be made into tomato and chilly jam.

A few hours later the jams nearly done and the toms semi dried with a little tyme and rosemary.

Now I have some little bags of sunshine ready for the freezer to go into pasta and breads and what ever else I can think of. The tomato jam has a really intense flavour, I've never made this before but think it's going to be a winner.

Before I go, remember my little painted pieces I showed you in the last post? they have been made into little needles cases and given as presents at our pre christmas afternoon tea. I think the recipients were happy with them .