Dreaming Spirals

I heard of Cyber Fyber some time ago via other blogs.  Susan Lenz has made a whole lot of postcards to swap with anyone who will send her one back.  She is then going to exhibit the ones she receives in January 2009.  I considered taking part in the first round of postcards but got there when there were only a few left.  But, to my delight, she produced round two recently so I snapped one up!

I’m ashamed to say I didn’t take a photo of my postcard before I sent it but it is one of my spirals series, of which some  are for sale in my Etsy Shop.    But here is Susan’s:

And this is the back - some funky fabric on there!

The postcard is made from a larger piece of painted silk.  It’s gorgeous!

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I’ve been moving fabric around all week on my design wall, for this river hanging I’m doing.  (Well, it started as two and I’m still not sure if I’m going to make it as one or two but we shall see.    It’s useful having a camera to take photos at the various stages.  I’ve got to a stage now where I think I’m fairly happy with it… the combination of fabrics together that is, no further than that…

The one on the left and the one on the right are two separate ones, although I might still make it into one long one with the green side at the top….  This was the first attempt.

This was the next attempt.  Well, more like an in-between stage really!

Here is the next stage of the left hand size.

And the right side.

And this is how I’ve got it at present (ignore the fabric at the top).  Apart from a few minor modifications…

Do you agonize over your fabric choices like this? !

Thank you, by the way, to Brandon, for pointing me to the solution for my Windows Live Writer problem with my other blog!! It’s now sorted!

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Golly - 56 comments!! What a response - thank you, everyone.  I can’t wait to sit down and follow up all your links and see if anything comes out a clear favourite.

So… the giveaway ended  25 minutes ago as I type.  I wrote down all the numbers of the comments on little pieces of paper and folded them all neatly.

BTW, the writing you can see is because I was being good and reusing paper that had one side already printed!

I gave it a good stir with the nearest available implement….

….  asked DS3 to pick out one of the pieces of paper…

… and trudged up to the top floor of our house to ask DS1 to pick out the other… and …. drumroll……

The winning numbers are:

Which translates to:

Pippa and Maggie!!!!!!!

I’ll be emailing both of you, but if you see this first, please email me your snail mail addresses and I’ll put your bundles in the post asap.  If you have a preference as to pink or purple, tell me - if you both want the same one, the first email to reach me gets it!

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I’ve decided to have a bit of a destash because I have far more fabric than I can ever use.  So I decided to celebrate the bank holiday weekend in the UK here by having a giveaway.  I haven’t done this before so it’s a bit of an experiment! 

I have sorted two little parcels of fabrics, thread and beads, one with a roughly pink colour scheme, the other purple. 

Here’s the pink one.  There are some good sized pieces in there!

Some hand dyed pieces, some commercial, silk, chiffon, felt…

All tied up with a length of rick-rack!

And here is the purple parcel:

Some batik fabric there, a bit of tweed, silk, hand dyed cotton…

And that is all tied up with some satin ribbon!

To be in with a chance to win one of these inspirational packs, you just have to have a look at my Etsy shop and leave a comment here telling me which is your favourite thing in it.   You have until after the bank holiday on Monday,  so on Tuesday at 5pm British Summer Time I will write all your names on to bits of paper, put them all into a hat and get one of my sons to pick a name randomly.    Very high tech!  Then I’ll announce the winners here.

Good luck!

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Sorry about that untitled post with the wisteria picture.  It was meant to go to my Daily Photo blog but for some reason Windows Live Writer has been unable to publish posts to it for a few weeks - it keeps getting an error message -and I sent it by mistake to this blog. Has anyone who uses Blogger and Windows Live Writer had this problem?

This week I’ve been thinking about a series I am planning (and indeed started) around my local tidal river and its muddy banks.  A lot of the fabric which I screenprinted in January was designed around this theme and I decided that I wanted to overprint some of it with horizontal lines of the gocco screens I had made.  These are the results.

Here is some of the fabric hanging on the line drying - I love seeing lines of dyed and printed fabric on the washing line.  Much better than clothes… The backgrounds are what I printed in January.

I printed this green fabric with a gocco screen made from a photo of the cracks in the mud.  The background is also based on the same photo but printed with a different method.  I’m planning on cutting most of these fabrics and fusing them in horizontal strips to represent the various parts of the river.

Here is a detail. 

The next piece was the ‘footprints’ fabric with a screen made from a photo of reeds overprinted on it.

And a detail:

This is some rust-dyed silk overprinted with the mud formations gocco print.

And some red-green fabric:

This has the same screen patterns as the green fabric above, but it is cotton organza or something similar and is slightly transparent.

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When DS1 saw my journal (the last one I made, out of the brown paper), he asked if I could make him one.  I finished it today.  For this one, I used a brown grocery bag from the farmer’s market - it produces a coarser surface than the brown wrapping paper.

The leather tie is a shoelace!  I couldn’t bear it as a shoelace; it kept coming undone.  But as a journal tie, it is brilliant!  The button is one I have had for ages: I think it was in my Nan’s button box.  It was the one DS1 chose as a fastening and I think it looks really good.

It has an inside pocket made of the same painted paper.

And another pocket on the inside signature.

He wanted plain paper inside the journal.

He is on study leave at the moment because his GCSEs start next week, and DS2 has gone to France on a school trip so I have been all at sixes and sevens this week and this is the only thing I’ve got done.  No printing for me:(  Or stitching - apart from mending…..

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Every few hours, one of the treasuries on Etsy is chosen to be the featured treasury for the Etsy home page.  Today a treasury that one of my Gocco prints was in, curated by Sara of SilveroftheValley, was in the prime spot!  I missed it but someone kindly did a screenshot and here it is - see if you can spot mine!!

Woo hoo!! It is so exciting!  (Sorry, I’m a saddo…).  Do check out Sara’s shop, though - she makes absolutely exquisite jewellery from art clay silver.  (If you want to know what that is, she explains that, too, in her shop profile. 

The wisteria is out at the front of our house at the moment and it smells absolutely gorgeous.  The weather has been really warm and sunny (mostly) so the smell has been wafting through the house through the open windows.  Here is a photo I took of it last week just as the leaves were opening but before the flowers emerged.

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