Dreaming Spirals

I just realised that I haven’t put any photos of last week’s journal from Sue’s journal course up on my blog. 

It is a loose leaf journal which is held together with screw posts.  I bought these in November on our trip to London, meaning to use them, so I’m glad of the opportunity. 

The fabric for the cover is some of the marbled fabric which I made and blogged about a couple of years ago.  You can read about it here and here.  I hadn’t used any so far, and these pieces are just the right size for these journals so I can see that I will be making lots now.  I have cut more pieces of pelmet vilene ready but am now waiting for Joggles to send me some more Misty Fuse.

This is the front of this week’s journal:

And the back:

I put lots of different papers inside, some painted, some exotic.  Here is the inside front of it:

That is either mulberry or lokta paper, can’t remember which, with leaves embedded into it.

Tonight I made a start on Journal 4, which involves painting brown paper.  As usual, I mixed up too much paint so the workroom floor is now COVERED in painted paper… I think I will have enough to make several more journals!  I am loving this course - all the journals are different and it means that my interest has been maintained so I haven’t fallen behind, which is what usually happens at this stage of an online course!   The real test will be whether I finish the very last one - thinking back, it will be a first for me in my online course history….hmmm….

Once I have finished the preparation of the papers, I will be stuck until the Misty Fuse arrives (of course, I could go out and buy some bondaweb locally but I LOVE Misty Fuse now I’ve tried it - it is really easy to work with and to stitch into.  Come on, post office, speed the MF to me ….

Oh dear, this blog entry is starting to sound like a commercial….

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Yesterday I had a fun day - I went to visit Gill of An Elegant Sufficiency to deliver the Print Gocco she had bought from me a few weeks ago.  Sue of The Magic Armchair Traveller was there too.  You can see photos of what we got up to over on Gill’s blog.    Sue had fun on Gill’s embellisher machine and I got to play with Gill’s Bind It All!!  This is what I made:

Amazing, just with a piece of cardstock, some cartridge paper, a guillotine and this little machine…

And Gill got going with the Gocco - from photo to finished product…

Here is mine:

And this morning I got something special in the post.  One of the members of the Etsy Boomers Street Team put up a ‘fairy name generator’ on her blog a week or so ago.  This was mine:

Your fairy is called Bramble Icedancer
She is a bone chilling bringer of justice for the vulnerable.
She lives in leafy dells and bluebell glades.
She is only seen when the bees swarm and the crickets chirrup.
She wears bluebell-blue dresses. She has icy blue butterfly wings.

The fairy names were so popular and the descriptions so evocative that Joan painted us an ACEO to represent our fairy.  This is mine!    You can see the rest of them on Joan’s blog.  Thank you, Joan!!

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Last night I managed to get an Etsy Treasury and I decided to fill it with Bloggers whose blogs I’ve been reading for ages and who have Etsy shops.  A Treasury on Etsy is like a showcase of people’s favourite items from various shops there, and every few hours one of them is chosen to go on the Etsy homepage. 

Here is a screenshot of mine:

If you log in and click on all these items and leave a comment, it will help it up the treasury lists and may even reach the front page!  If they like it…    Here is the link to the Treasury - but be quick!  It only lasts another two days!

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I have now put my list of Gocco links on to a blog page - Here it is!

If you know of any other good links please leave a note in the comments section for that page, or email me. I have left several links out, such as the Save Gocco site and the actual Gocco website, because they are in the links on the DIY Definitions article, which has the most comprehensive list of links I know, and is well worth looking at. That is the first link on the page.

I will leave a permanent link to this page on the left sidebar.

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I’ve just had an email from Sara of Sarastexturecrafts that my Etsy Profile is on her Etsy Profile Blog!!!

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I have been busy this week doing lots of printing with my Gocco screens, both the unframed (for fabric) and the unframed ones (for paper, although plenty of fabric has found its way underneath those too).

I have been experimenting with various media - screenprinting gel for fabric mixed with Golden acrylics and Permaset screenprinting ink particularly.  I like the latter because it doesn’t change the hand of the fabric appreciably but I do love working with acrylics because I have a lot of different colours so it makes it more versatile.

Here are a few of them:

This is the screen of footprints in the mud which I made earlier in the year, printed with Permaset ink.

These are repeated screens of the reed picture and the trees one over some of the fabric which I screenprinted in January.  I did these with acrylic paint and screenprinting gel.

I also screened some with discharge paste, since yesterday the sun was shining and I could iron it outside to avoid the noxious fumes.   The paste blurred quite a lot through the screen - maybe I need to put it on more lightly - but I still like the effects.  This is the screen of a letter:

And the trees, which have a ghostly sort of effect:

I brushed the paste over a wisteria branch cut out of stencil plastic:

I also printed up some more Moleskine journals which are due to go on sale in my Etsy Shop soon.  I have just listed some bird cards and a Gocco print of the canalside houses on handmade Khadi paper.

I got a nice surprise this morning!! Someone told me that my Circles and Squares was featured on the Ecoetsy Blog - check it out!!

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I think my design process goes in fits and spurts and sometimes emerges over several months and years

I made this hanging from a piece of hand dyed silk… I started quilting it a year or two ago without much idea of where I was going or what it was going to become.  I eventually saw a sort of fantasy garden emerging..

This is how it was half finished:

I added the red scrim to unite the pink at the bottom and the flowers at the top but wasn’t really sure where it was going.  However, I finished off the quilt (or so I thought!).  It hung on my wall for a few months like this:

But I was never really happy with it as a piece of work.  So yesterday I went mad!!! I have some Tsukineko walnut inks and sprayed the pink bit and around various other parts with it.  I could then see a tree trunk emerging from that piece of scrim… I’m a lot happier with it now.  But I do leap in without thinking!!! I have no idea if the walnut inks will be fast on fabric and I think I’ll have to rinse it to get rid of the excess… watch this space!  Anyone know about the properties of these walnut inks?    Anyway, if it all rinses out, I know what to do now, but I’ll do it with silk paints instead…   What is that they say about fools rushing in?

Here it is at the moment:

I cut into the scrim a bit to emphasise the tree trunk idea.  Here is a detail:

I will keep you posted on its progress!

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Here is the second journal I have made on Sue’s course.  I made the outside with some yummy silk dupion which has been on my shelves for some time, too nice to use until now.

It is a bit smaller than A4 landscape size and is meant to be a sketchbook, although I’ve got a feeling I will be a bit wary of using it because I won’t want to get any marks on it!

The button is a ceramic one which I bought in a button shop in one of the arcades in Cardiff ages ago.

It is covering up velcro actually, rather than being a functional button….   We put grommets along the spine to hold those rings like you have in ring binders, which will open.  I’m not very happy with mine, mainly because I had to purloin them from a photograph album I made in the 80s and they are rather stiff!  But I couldn’t find any locally.

We painted watercolour paper to go inside the book.  I painted this one with a mixture of walnut inks and acrylic ink and water and laid clingfilm on top to produce the texture.  I made some tags out of it too.

This one is just acrylic inks (with a bit of white acrylic paint to make the red ink pink), diluted with water and with clingfilm added.  I think this looks a bit like fireworks!  I like the way you can manipulate the clingfilm to influence the patterns you get, although it is still unpredictable. 

You can just see the pockets in the inside of the sketchbook.  These are for holding pens and other paraphernalia.  The fabric is some Australian eucalyptus leaf fabric which I received in a swap. 

If you want to have a look at lots more journals which people have been making, Sue opened a Flickr Group - you can view the photos even though you can’t join the group unless you are in the class.

By way of a change, I thought I’d post a photo of my three boys sitting opposite me on the Tube last week.  We went to London to see the First Emperor exhibition in the British Museum - the first time any of the Terracotta Army warriors have left China.    I don’t post photos of them very often but I thought this was so funny.  DS2 and 3 don’t get on and you can tell!  This was the only one I managed to get with DS2’s head in it - in all the others, he managed to avoid me by hiding behind a newspaper!

I didn’t take many photos in London, but shot this garage as it looks so old fashioned - it is in the heart of Bloomsbury and I could just see Bertie Wooster (well, Jeeves actually I suppose) filling up the car there….

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