It is May and the wisteria is out in glorious bloom on the front of our house so I’ve been busy painting it! I love the way it sways in the breeze, almost like waves on the sea.
I did the purple blooms first and here is my paint palette while I’m adding the green stems and buds in between.
I’m just writing a short blog post this time because I am experimenting with a new plugin which allows me to write blog posts in Evernote and post them to the blog automatically. It’ll be a lot easier to blog if this works because I use Evernote a lot.
This is some of the fabric that I got printed on Spoonflower and it is now available for sale in my shop. I had it printed on the silky faille which is polyester – it took the colours really well and has a nice feel to it.
Woo hoo! It worked!
Over the last few months I’ve been gradually uploading designs to Spoonflower, the fabric printing company, with the eventual aim of selling them. At the end of last year I won a free giveaway they were offering, of a pattern and 3 yards of the fabric of my choice, so that gave me the impetus to get going. I still haven’t ordered the fabric but I have ordered swatches of a number of designs so that I can check the colours are what I expected.
Those haven’t arrived yet, but earlier this year Spoonflower offered a free swatch printing on a new fabric, silky faille, so I took advantage of it, and was pleased with the results:
Swatch of my fabric design!
You can see the full design here.
Spoonflower also run monthly design competitions based on various themes, and this month’s is lilies, so since I had one which fits the bill, I decided to enter it. I don’t suppose it has much chance of winning as there are a huge lot of entries this month, but I would love it if you could vote for my design here! This is a screenshot of it:
Here is my spoonflower shop widget with pics of a few of the designs:
Ick! What a mess!
I thought I’d share a few pics of my workroom. This is what my printing table normally looks like. As though an art supply shop had vomited all over it. With some haberdashery chucked in for good measure.
Hmm, a bit messy, eh?
Every so often I have to have a good clear out or it gets too much to create anything there, it seems to mess up my head as well.
One afternoon I decided to clear everything off and put the dropcloth in the washing machine. This is what the print table looks like underneath all that clutter. Wow, wish it looked like this all the time!
I have a large piece of MDF laid on top of the table, and a piece of carpet underlay over that, which creates the soft surface for printing.
Here is the table with a clean dropcloth on top, bearing the dyeing marks from a previous printing session or ten!
Wish I could say it still looks like that now, but unfortunately it is more like the top photo again… that clean table top lasted less than a day. But it definitely unleashed some creativity…
I actually made a quilt the other day! And it is the biggest I’ve ever made – it is just a bit bigger than single bed size – not remarkable for most quilters, but even when I did City & Guilds the largest I made was a lapquilt sized wall quilt and most of the others have been art ones.
African fabric quilt all finished!
It is made from African Dutch wax prints fabric – it is very colourful, isn’t it? The quilting wouldn’t win any prizes but I was pleased to actually finish something. I quite enjoyed just mindlessly sewing without having to make too many design decisions along the way.
Very colourful!
Don’t look too closely at the stitching!
I watched a Youtube video on making jelly roll quilts and there was a pile of African fabrics on my shelves so I cut them into strips and rolled them up… The Missouri Quilt Company who made the video have a channel on Youtube with lots of others if you feel like a good browse…
Not as neat as purchased jelly rolls!
Very colourful and inspiring seeing all these patterns rolled up together!
That particular fabric was used for the borders – DH bought it back from Zambia for me.
Continuing the paper theme, I’ve been immersed in Pinterest for a while, and have several paper related boards.
A selection of my Pinterest Boards
Relevant boards are:
Hello. My name's Liz Plummer and I'm an artist based in Newport, South Wales, UK, working mostly with fabric. I love dyeing, printing, painting and stitching.
This blog is about the influences on my work, inspiration, my daily life,
and the processes of creating. Enjoy!
