Dreaming Spirals

Phew!  Just got back from a long weekend in Somerset and am now raring to go! 

As I was saying last week, I am having a big clearout of fabrics because I want to concentrate on dyeing and painting wholecloth fabric rather than using small pieces of miscellaneous fabrics for patchwork.  So, if you want fabric and thread for embroidery, patchwork, collage, layering or whatever, here’s your chance! 

I have sorted them into bags of roughly 300-400 grams (12oz to 1lb) .  The fabrics are mostly in pieces which are fat quarter or fat eighth size, some more, some scraps, some with bits cut out but still plenty of good usable stuff.  I think all the bags have at least some hand dyed cotton and/or silk fabric; there are also pieces of organza, chiffon, silk, scrim, velvet, etc.  It’s all a mixture, sorted by colour.    A real lucky dip!!

I am selling them at £18 per bag plus postage – UK is £2 and you can use the Paypal button at the end of this post. 

Here are a few examples of what you will get in a bag:

This one is mostly blues – 340gm.    There is some turquoise metallic organza, about 5”x19”, about a fat quarter (maybe more) of grey-blue hand dyed cotton, just over a fat quarter of turquoise stretch velvet, just under a fat quarter of pale blue cotton, a fat quarter of blue-green batik fabric with fish on, about a fat eighth of blue-turquoise mottled cotton fabric, approx fat quarter turquoise vintage Laura Ashley cotton fabric, same amount blue tulle,  about half a yard of Michael Miller zigzaggy fabric (the colourful one in the foreground), just under fat quarter of blue fabric with little ferns on, piece of navy blue cotton, some scraps of indigo dyed cotton, piece of nepalese hand dyed lokta paper, about 2 metres of blue satin ribbon, several lots of thread.UPDATE – SOLD NOW

This one is 330 grams and mostly greens (veering towards yellowy or browny greens).  Here we have some hand dyed yellow-green scrim or cheesecloth, about 12” by 30”, some green cotton fabric just under a fat quarter, green tulle about the same size, hand dyed green velvet roughly 12” square, acid dyed yellow-green silk dupion about 8” square, about half a yard of green rayon fabric with little diamond pattern, fat eighth or so of green cotton fabric with watermark effect, three pieces of various shades of green cotton, one with swirly pattern, hand dyed green-brown felt about 20” by 8”, strip of hand dyed cotton oranges, purples, turquoises, 4”x28”, hand dyed green silk rod, 4’ 1.5”wide green organza ribbon, various hanks of thread.

These are 330 grams, again, and more greeny purples.  There’s about a metre of green metallicy lace with daisies on it (very glittery!), some funny shimmery green/purple fabric, four different hand dyed green cotton fabrics (fat quarter to fat eighth size) … can you tell I’m getting bored with measuring things?!! – about a fat quarter of silk crepe which I bought in France, hand dyed with green and flecks of magenta and orange, some silk dupion, a very spectacular 9” square piece of silk habotai which I painted with pink and green silk paints using salt – it looks a bit fireworky, scraps of hand dyed silk rod and silk fibres, about a fat quarter of hand dyed green/purply-pink butter muslin, some very shimmery greeny polyester organza good for dragonfly wings, about a 9” square piece of hand felted fibres with silky threads trapped in it (green), some darkish green cotton fabric with a black overall swirly pattern on it.SORRY, SOLD!!

That’s all I’m going to describe because I can feel myself wanting to put it all back again and keep it for myself but I must clear it to get some space to create more!!! 

£18 plus £2 postage (UK) – if you are overseas, email me and I’ll send you a Paypal invoice with amended postage. Give me your colour preference in the ‘Message to seller’ box. Or leave a comment if you have any problems!

UPDATE: I have now put photos of all the bundles with Paypal buttons (postage to UK only) on this permanent blog page.

The colour combinations I’ve got are: yellows/greens; red-purples; blues/blue-greens; yellow/oranges; reds; golds/browns; purples; orange/blue; black/white; reds/dusky oranges; blues/browns; sea greens/blue; greens; and blue/turquoise. Ask me if you want to know more about them.

You may remember I exchanged postcards with Susan Lenz for her Cyberfyber exhibition. Well, it is now online here. My postcard is no. 225 – the direct link is here.

Please leave a comment for the People’s Choice Award!

As you may remember, I am in a Street Team on Etsy called Ecoetsy.  This week they are having an auction in aid of the Nature Conservancy, of a basket of Eco-minded goodies donated by members of the team.  You can read all about it on the Auction page of the Ecoetsy Website.  Unfortunately, you can only take part if you are in the US to prevent any legal issues as well as prevent shipping issues that may arise due to regulations that other countries have.   The auction ends on the 30 October. 

I donated a collaged piece of artwork incorporating a felted sweater in an Incan design and various wires from odd sources… you can see it below.

Follow the links on the website to photos of the donated goodies.  The Ecoetsy blog is also featuring the contents with descriptions of each of the donations.

While I’m on the subject of Etsy, I have a few new listings on there.  A couple of Moleskine journals:

And one of my Rainy Streets series of postcards:

I’ve also reduced my prices on a lot of things to reflect the fact that the pound is worth less against the dollar, so it’s a good time to buy Christmas pressies!!

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!

I have been busy over the last few weeks finishing some postcards for a postcard swap with Art2Mail.  There are 27 here (I think!).  Here is a tantalizing taster for the recipients:

I have also been installing a router for our wireless network – we have had a very temperamental, ancient system until now and I got fed up of getting cut off and having to go and tweak various adaptors.  The only problem is that now one of the computers the kids use, which still runs Windows 98, can’t connect.  So we are getting lots of complaints about being bored over this half term week…

On another note, the garden has still got some colour, despite it being nearly November.   Things don’t usually just grow for me, and when they do the slugs beat me to it, but I just stuck a few nasturtium seeds in last spring, and one of them is ENORMOUS!   It has grown and climbed from the patio across most of the width of the lawn and is still flowering.  I like to eat the nasturtium flowers.  I visited the restaurant at Garden Organic (which used to be called HDRA) a few years ago and they served various flowers in the salad and it gave me confidence to try some of them at home.  Nasturtium flowers have a nice peppery flavour.  Trouble is, I can’t manage to bring myself to pick many of these….

While I was pegging out washing the other day I moved the trampoline cover and underneath were these eggs – I assume insect or reptile eggs.  Anyone know what they are?   There were also a lot of slugs hoping to overwinter snugly under there as well!

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!!