Dreaming Spirals

This is some stitching I did a few weeks ago.  For a while now, I’ve been thinking of making something in a labyrinth design, and I pulled some hand dyed fabrics out of my shelves which seemed to work well together.  They are loosely pinks and greens.  I enjoy layering fabrics, stitching a pattern into them and cutting back random layers to make the design emerge serendipitously.  I did this with quite a few of my favourite pieces of work - Dreaming Spirals, the namesake for this blog, is one of them.  My Landscape Series is another.

My design is loosely based on that of the labyrinth in Chartres Cathedral in France.  I drew the design and altered it so that it would work when cut back, and, using my light box, transferred the design on to tissue paper.  I then layered the fabrics, pinned the design on top and stitched along the lines using free motion stitching.

The next job was to remove all the tissue paper.  Here it is half done:

Next I started cutting away to reveal the labyrinth design.  I chose to keep the green as the labyrinth and have the other fabrics poking through in the spaces between but I could have done it the other way round.

This was laborious, but meditative at the same time.  I listened to Brenda Dayne’s knitting podcast, Cast On to while away the minutes.

Here it is three-quarters done.  Some of this got cut away a bit more to reveal an extra layer beneath, until I was happy with the finished piece.

And this is how it stands at the moment.  Not sure if I’ll cut away any more or if I’m happy with it as it is now.  Nor what I’m going to do with it next.  I think it reminds me a bit of the formal gardens with box hedges and roses planted between.  We shall see.

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Thank you to Julie for letting me know that the rss button on the right of the header wasn’t working for some reason.  2 hours later, and by dint of deleting my Feedburner feed and creating another, it does!  I upgraded Wordpress on 7 July and I think that must have caused the problem, so if you have tried to subscribe and couldn’t, I’m sorry but it’s now fixed!

If all the above is gobbledegook to you, I’ll try and explain a bit what ’subscribing’ to a blog means.  The difference between blogs and conventional websites is that their content is continually being updated by something called an ‘rss feed’.  You can find out when a new post is published on any blog by subscribing to their feed.  You do this in two types of ways. 

1. You can either go to a website such as Feedblitz, register and then enter the URLs of any blogs which you want to read regularly.  They then will send you any updates each day by email. 
2. You can register with a web based feed reader such as Google Reader, again fill in the URLs (the web addresses) of any blogs you want to read and they find any new posts for you.  You then go to your Google Reader page whenever you feel like reading new posts from any blogs you are subscribed to.  You can sort them into categories and then just scroll through them by pressing the spacebar.  This is what I prefer to do, myself.  The good thing about Google Reader is that if you are already registered with Google you can just login using your Google username.  And if you click on the little ‘rss’ button on the top or bottom of any blog you want to subscribe to, you can just do it with one click usually if your preferred blog reader is listed there.  Another popular web based feed reader is Bloglines.

If you already subscribe to my blog and haven’t had any new posts since early July, you may find that they all arrive in your reader with this one!!

As we are going on holiday pretty soon, I decided this afternoon to make a bag for my laptop.  I usually leave it at home but this year I thought I’d better have it as I now have my shop on Etsy and the Print Gocco machines for sale here on my blog, if only to tell people that I haven’t disappeared off the face of the earth!

I wanted a felted bag, so I decided to use some old felted sweaters and a woollen dress which I felted here a few years ago.  First of all I thought I would stitch the felt from the woollen dress to the one shown in the link above to make it firmer and give it more protection but after some thought, I decided to make an inner bag from the woollen dress and an outer one from the felted sweaters.  Then I decided I had better line the inner one as it was a bit linty and I didn’t want any nasty lint clogging up my precious computer!    The advantage of having two layers is that for carrying it around outside I could just use the inner one and when it needed extra protection such as on the journey in the car, I could augment it with the second!

Here is the inner one:

It needs buttons or fastenings of some sort.  I bought some gorgeous raku buttons from Pearl of Fehustoneware and these are going to be a strong contender!   Here is one of them:

Here’s my laptop snug inside!

And this is the outside bag:

And the other side of this:

This one doesn’t have a flap on the top - I think I am going to put some poppers or something to fasten it inside.  Not sure what I’ll do for a handle yet.  Any suggestions for fastenings or handles gratefully received!!!  I’m very pleased with them as a whole - I am sure I’ll use them much more than I wore either the sweaters or the dress!  The woollen fabric was too thick for the style of dress I made and it made me look awful when I was stick-like.  I dread to think what it would look like now!

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That is, Gocco printing a photo of canal barges.  This is like a companion to the wharfside buildings gocco print which I did a few months ago, from a photo taken in Birmingham.

This is the photo it was taken from:

Here is the finished Gocco print:

Notice the Japanese newspaper it is sitting on!

This is printed on a Moleskine journal - I’ve put this one in my Etsy shop.

Here they all are drying after printing:

I printed on to some previously painted papers and cards which I decorated around the time I did my City & Guilds in Patchwork and Quilting.  I nearly threw them all out but decided instead to cut them into postcard size and I’m glad I did.

I like the abstract nature of this print.  I could see it incorporated into a collage.  The background paint was done with Brusho powdered paint.

I also did an experiment with this black Moleskine notebook and some embossing powder:

I printed this, sprinkled bronze embossing powder on to it and heated it (this is another thing you can do with Gocco inks - as the ones for paper are oil based they dry slowly so you can use embossing powder like you do with rubber stamps).  What do you think of this?  I would love to hear your comments.  Does it look like a group of barges if you didn’t know that that is what it is, or would it qualify as some sort of abstract design?!  Oooh I can’t resist experimenting!

The school holidays have now started so for the next six weeks things might be a bit quiet here but I have got a few photos up my sleeve!  Including some stitched work for once!!

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I’ve been having fun with my Print Gocco machine over the last few days.  The advantage of buying used machines is that I have to test them, and so I get to have new screens to play with!  This time I wanted to try a three-screen print to build up the depth and layers.  I used this photo which I took in London as the base:

I altered it to produce three images, each time taking more of the black image away:

This was going to be the lightest colour and the first one screened.  In reality it didn’t print very well for some reason - very little of the definition came out.  It may be that the screen was a bit old.  In the end it didn’t matter because I still got enough of it, especially as it was the base colour.

This was the second screen.  You can see it is a lot lighter than the first. 

This is the third screen.  As you can see, only the outlines are visible, but I printed this in black ink and it was perfectly adequate as an accent to the other two.

Here are some of the results:

This is printed on handmade Khadi paper.

And this is on card.

Here’s another one (the photo is blurry, not the print) - in this one I pressed on the last layer very lightly so that only the bus’s outline got the black ink.

Here are four of them with a bit of a colour variation!

Here are a few abstract looking designs on painted paper!

And this is a print on top of a London tube map!

And I printed this on a Moleskine journal.

This is a larger Moleskine journal which I am using to make notes in while working through Walking in this World by Julia Cameron (a sequel to The Artist’s Way).  I decided to get an abstract sort of print when the ink in the screen was getting low and I didn’t want to waste it!  I quite like the way this has turned out.

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It has been an exciting day today in terms of getting my work featured on other people’s blogs and things.    I have to blog about it now because the kids have a school concert tonight so I must go and get ready soon. 

Firstly, and most excitingly for me, was that Fantasy Garden was featured in an Etsy Finds email - this is a daily email which goes out to 12,000 subscribers with favourite picks from Etsy on it.  Here is the link to it if you would like to read it.  Thank you to Jamie for including me!

I was also mentioned on Cuteable, a blog for shoppers looking for handmade goodies, and Scarf It Up!, the blog of fellow Boomer Louise. 

Here is Fantasy Garden:

Woo hoo!!!

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I have been rather neglecting this blog of late so I am going to try and remedy that by bringing in more details of my daily life and what I’m getting up to.  And I’ve also decided to close my Daily Photos blog because I think the photos would be better incorporated into this blog.

A week ago I took the kids on the train to Weston-super-Mare for the day.  It is only across the Bristol Channel from us as the crow flies but by land you have to go all around and through Bristol so I hadn’t been there for several years.  It is a typical Victorian British seaside resort complete with pier:

As you can see, the tide goes out a long way!  There weren’t many people on the beach because it was a VERY windy day!

It also has the usual beach stalls selling balls, wind breaks and other stuff, and a cafe to get your polystyrene cups of tea to warm you up.  There are donkey rides, too, but I only got them inadvertently in the background of a video I took of the kids playing football.

We also discovered this elegant Georgian crescent.

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I have just put a Print Gocco B6 machine and a PG10 machine up for sale - click here to go to the page they are on.

Email me if you are interested in buying either of them and have any queries - my email address is on the left sidebar underneath the Author section. Or you can pay by Paypal using the ‘Buy Now’ button.

Here are a couple of things I made with my Print Gocco - the first is printed on paper and the second is an ACEO I made with a print on fabric.

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