Dreaming Spirals

Now that my swap partner, who is Dayna of Scottie Acres has received her swap, I will post a photo of a bit more of it.  Dayna loves scottie dogs and so I cut out lots of outlines of these and used them to sunprint the scarf.  Here it is being printed by the obliging sun!

Here it is nearly dry and I removed some of the dog shapes because they had got blown off by the wind!  I love how it gave the dogs almost ghostly outlines:

Here is the scarf washed, folded and ready to go - I didn’t actually take a photo of the whole thing finished.  Duh.

I did an interview for the blog of the Boomers Street Team of which I am a member and it is on there now if you would like to read it.

Some more Print Gocco machines arrived this morning!  I will be testing them all but once I have done that I will list them for sale one at a time on a page of my blog and will post a notice to that effect here.  It is rather busy at the moment (the summer term is always busy with school events) so I will list them as I have time to package them up and mail them - that is why it will be one at a time!  

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I am not well at the moment - I have a nasty fluey sort of bug - I started shivering yesterday and it took a hat, 2 duvets and a fleece jacket to get warm.  I have been sleeping a lot today and feel a bit better now.  Let’s hope it’s a quick one.  I have felt as though I was going down with something all week - very lethargic and depressed.   But I am doing a swap on one of my Etsy street teams and I decided to do some sunprinting earlier in the week.  Here are a few details of it so as not to give the game away!

Here it is when it was nearly dry.  And here is another corner of it when heat set and washed:

The bottom picture is more the colour.  I took the first photo outside.  The sun didn’t come out very much that day but luckily I caught 20 minutes of it!  It is a silk scarf.

Of course, I mixed the wrong colour first so I had to do another one!  This is a part of it:

This one didn’t come out as well as the first but I painted into it with some red silk paint.  I will put up a picture of it when it is finished.

Finally, there is a blackbird’s nest on one of the stone lintels of our house, behind the wisteria.  This photo isn’t a very good one but you can just see two of the birds’ eyes poking out if you look closely.  I had suspected that there was one because a blackbird kept flying into the wisteria so I had a good look and there they were!  I think they’ve fledged now though.

This was taken out of our bedroom window!

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This is as far as the two hangings have got so far: they are fused on to lutradur and I will be adding stitching.   I don’t know whether to keep them as two, or to join them horizontally or vertically.  That decision will, I hope, come to me later.   

When I cut the lutradur, I was planning to wrap the finished hangings around some gallery wrap canvases that I have.  But once I started cutting the strips of fabric, I realised that they needed to be larger and wrapping them would lose a lot from round the perimeter.  So I think I will stitch them to some heavy canvas fabric and put a hanging sleeve on the back.  That’s the plan at the moment, anyway - these hangings seem to have a mind of their own.

Here they are side by side.

And here they are vertically:

I don’t think I ever posted a photo of the one I made at the Erika Carter workshop last summer.  I haven’t done anything else to it so far, but here it is:

It isn’t a very good photo, but it gives the general impression.  That’s another I have yet to finish.  I think I  have observed that I work in distinct phases.  The initial ideas, the percolation of the ideas, construction and finishing.  And often there will be months between the various phases but that time seems to be necessary for me to see them afresh.  I seem to be much better at finishing 10 wallhangings at once than one at a time!  Does anyone else work like this?

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