Dreaming Spirals

No posts for a week and then three come along at once, just like buses!

Recently I have come across a couple of UK sellers of organic cotton and other fabrics. Thinking of the environmental impact of conventionally produced cotton, which I was reading about today in the Textile Directory’s newsletter, I think I’ll try and buy organic and/or fairtrade in future…

There is Organic Cotton, which sells coloured cotton fabrics and calico, and Greenfibres. If I come across any more in the future, I will add them to this post because, no doubt, I shall forget and have to look back at my blog to find the links again!

By the way, the Textile Directory send an email newsletter once a month which is very interesting and informative.

I haven’t bought anything from either of these companies, but am just listing them here for future reference.

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On one of the Yahoo groups I belong to, we’ve been discussing monoprinting and I remembered doing some at college for my City & Guilds. What we did was to take two pieces of glass, put some acrylic paint on one of them, slap the other piece of glass on top of it and then pull them apart. The paint would then go into fantastic patterns and could be printed on paper (or fabric, I suppose, but we used paper).

These are some of the designs from it:

For the course, we had to compile what is called a Full Working Design. This is essentially designing something, presenting it in a folder or another appropriate way, as if you were doing it for a client who had commissioned something. But we didn’t actually have to make it.

For one of my Full Working Designs, I used one of these coral shapes to design a cushion cover. I cut out the painted shape and used it as a resist with some transfer paints. Here is the sample from my folder:

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I used papers printed with tranfer paints in streaky green/yellow colours and red/orange colours. I printed some polyester fabric with the green/yellow colour first, then laid the coral-shaped resist in the middle and overprinted with the red/orange colour. That is how I got the design. Then I trapunto quilted it to raise the coral design slightly. Maybe sometime I will make a cushion cover like it!

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Sorry for the dearth of posts this week (seems to be a constant refrain this year - I hope next year is better!) but I’ve been down with a lurgy; DS2 is off school with it now too. Also, ever since I got my tooth root filled and crowned I’ve been grinding and gnashing my teeth in the night for some reason, and my shoulders, jawbone and teeth really ache, so I’m off to the dentist on Monday to find out if there’s anything that can be done about it. I hope so, because it is really getting me down. Anyone had this problem and found a solution?

In the summer I bought this box of celtic rubber stamps:

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I haven’t played with them yet, but last week, not feeling like doing anything much, I painted the lid with a brush filled with a cartridge of silver ink. It’s just the sort of thing I like doing then - mindless but sort of meditative. I decided to take photos as I went along so I could see the construction of the celtic knotwork better:

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Hope I’ve got all these photos the right way round! It was incredibly difficult to tell!

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This shows the first loop completed:
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Start of the second loop:
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And the second loop completed:
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Third and final loop:
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And finished!!
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Drat! My sidebar seems to have gone to the bottom of the page. And I thought this photo plugin was working… I will need to have a look at the html in the template and see if I can fix it. Bear with me! Anyone know what might be wrong?

UPDATE: Thanks to Marty for her comment that YouTube was the culprit! I fiddled with the dimensions in the html and that has done it, so hurray! I will be able to use YouTube again…

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My son Zachary is really into Pixelart at the moment. These are kits, sold by my friend Sheryl at Creative Creations are made from photos and consist of plastic baseplates and lots of tiny plastic squares which you have to put in place on the baseplate with tweezers.

Here is his latest purchase, a Welsh Dragon, in progress:

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He has all the bits and pieces on a tray so he won’t lose any.

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This is the dolphin which he made first.

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You can buy larger ones made of four or more baseplates and I think he has his sights set on one of those next!!

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I said a few posts ago that I would tell how I made the landscape postcards, some of which I have sent out to people on a group I am in.

The inspiration mostly came from a train journey I took between Gloucester and Newport several months ago. The railway line goes along the valley of the River Severn and the horizontal lines of the landscape struck me. I took several videos with my camera as I went along and here is one of them:

The video isn’t very good but to get it best for YouTube you have to alter the format and I didn’t know how to do this so I thought it would give you the general idea anyway…

When I thought about making them, I decided to layer lots of different colours of the green dyed fabric I dyed in September, stitch the lines of the hedges and field lines roughly and cut back. I observed that the closer ones were the darker, clearer colours and the furthest away were lighter, greyer, fuzzier. I drew some rough sketches to guide me. Here are a couple of them:

I then layered the green fabrics in rough order of cutting, with some sheers as well to add interest and light reflections - in one of them there is water - and sewed the lines with my feeddogs down. Then cut back layers roughly, not always neatly along the stitching lines to add the impression of shadows and uneven hedges. You can see that in the following picture:

I used blue sheer fabric in this one. When I had cut them back to my satisfaction, I free machined trees on some of them:

(This is the one represented by the first sketch above).

I then trimmed the sides to postcard size and, before finishing off the postcards, I was very efficient and scanned them all! I then printed off some of the scans on our laser printer and stuck in samples of the fabrics I used, in case I decide to use these as samples for a bigger series.

Here is another photo at this stage:

Then I zigzagged around some and others I just framed with straight stitch:

When I had cut away the fabric to reveal the layers underneath, I had lots of cut fabric in the shapes of the fields and hills, so I decided to use these to make more postcards! I used some of my painted papers as a background and sewed them on. Here is one of them:

I also decided to fuse some, and I had some fabric which I had already bonded some fusible web to, so I used that…. here is an example of that!

So there you are - how I started making a few postcards and ended up getting carried away as usual!!

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Well, that seems to have worked in my browser anyway. I’ll just try one more photo and if it works and everyone’s happy, it’ll be business as usual!

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I thought the rooftiles (at least, I think they are rooftiles!) behind this fence made an interesting contrast. Or are they steps? I’m confused by this photo now, because there’s a river behind this same chain link fence on another photo. I took it a few years ago - that’ll teach me not to be organised and to label my photos properly!

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Bear with me for one more day of photo testing! This is the same plugin, but some of you seemed to need to refresh your screens to view my last blog post properly. I just want to see if this happens with each post, or if it was just after activating the plugin. So can you let me know if you had problems with the last post and still have problems with this one? Thanks.

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Here is a swan I saw on a river near Bath.

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And a close up of a tiny violet flower in our garden.

Update: I just disabled the random image generator in the sidebar so I’ll see if it works without that. I don’t really want that, so it’s no loss …

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