Dreaming Spirals

If you’re a member of QuiltWOW, you’ll notice I have an article in the new June issue, about painting on fabric with acrylic paints. Maggie Grey asked me in the spring to write one, and I was thrilled because her online workshops site, Workshop on the Web is well respected and well known and QuiltWOW is the quilting version of it. As you’ll know if you are a regular reader, I love online workshops!

If you haven’t come across them before, there are free taster issues online which are well worth visiting.

Here is a sneak peek at one of the photos in my article:

I painted lots more fabric that I didn’t use for the article so I might post pics of them in the blog over the next month or two.

I was also honoured to be asked by John Turner, editor of the journal of the NSW Guild of Craft Bookbinders, if he could reprint my tutorial on making concertina books in the journal. Of course I agreed, and he kindly sent me a number of issues of the journal which I’m looking forward to reading.

If you missed the tutorial, which I wrote back in December 2006 and which still gets hits today, here’s the link to it.

Summer always seems to be a busy time with exams and kids’ outdoor activities, so I haven’t had much time for textile stuff. I recently bought some family tree software – other members of my family have done most of the hard work and have got back as far as the 1700s in some cases – but I thought I’d like to have a go myself. The software came with a free month’s subscription to Ancestry so I have been making good use of it while I can, delving into census returns and trying to solve the mystery of missing persons and wrongly transcribed names! I also went on a visit to the Black Country Museum just outside Birmingham where they have a cottage that my great great great grandparents used to live in! More in the next post, when I’ve uploaded my photos!

This week I’ve been having fun with the first lesson of the free online course which Maggie Grey is running for anyone who has bought her book, Textile Translations: Mixed Media.   We had to choose a motif and I had one of these made from a stamp of beach huts so decided to keep to my present theme of houses and make the book in the shape of a house rather than the sort of triangle shape she suggested.  These are all going to be stitched together to form the cover but this is as far as I’ve got so far.

This one will be the back.

And this one will be the middle.

Here is the reverse of one of the cover pages. 

I’ve got to stitch into them next so I hope the gesso and paint don’t break the needle!!!    More anon…

I didn’t make last week’s journal in Sue’s journal making course because it was a wire bound one and I have a Bind it All machine which I thought would do the job adequately.  But I did make this accordian fold one the week before, with envelopes as signatures.   I decided to make it from the remaining house fabric.

I had previous gocco printed some brown envelopes which I bought in Machynllech on holiday.  Some of them I got upside down but because they were put in vertically in this journal it didn’t matter!

The gocco prints are of buildings too, so they fitted in nicely with the theme.  I didn’t have quite enough so I also put this white envelope with a lovely bee stamp which someone sent me a while ago.  I kept it because it looked so nice and I’m glad I did because I’ve finally found a use for it.

We made little journals to go inside the envelopes and, being short of time, I decided to use some of the scraps from the previous house journal to make triangular ones, instead of the larger rectangular ones in Sue’s instructions.

Here they are sitting in their little pockets:

I even got an ATC sized piece out of the scraps and I think it looks great with this altered leaf on top of it!

Groan.  Where do the days fly to?   I finished last week’s journal on Thursday but have only just got round to downloading the pics from my camera.  I went to Bristol on Saturday and saw a cool Gocco exhibition in the Here Gallery – called Even Dwarves Started Small.  The weather was glorious.  I had tea in a fantastic cafe called the Boston Tea Party and was sitting out in the garden at the back.

This week’s journal was a coptic bound one, and I decided to cover the outside boards with some sticky foil stuff which I have.  I then decorated it with various layers to knock back the shine – some black gesso, stamping, 3D painty stuff, more 3D metallic painty stuff and more 3D painty stuff on top of that!!    Very precise today, aren’t I?!

Here is the top ready to be bound:

And the spine all done:

Outside each signature I have used this vellum with flowers on it that I got from Lakeland Limited.  (The journal, by the way, is very small – only about 3″ by 4″).

And this is inside the front cover:

Here it is standing up on my ironing board!

It is quite a different style for me but I enjoyed playing around with the various layers.

As I said in yesterday’s blog post, the first journal was made in preparation for making a house journal in the same style.  I didn’t have any suitable fabric for this, so I decided to print some.  I had a number of gocco screens based on bricks and houses – it seems to be a particular theme of mine at the moment.

I used some rust dyed fabric again (silk dupion) and overprinted the bottom part of this fabric with a gocco screen made from a photo of Beaumaris Prison in Anglesey and the top from a screen of a close up of the bricks on a building.

As usual, I couldn’t just stop there, could I?  I also printed these fabrics:

I also printed some paper (previously decorated with paints and other screens) to go inside the journal.    This is A4 size, by the way, although the pink fabric above is about a metre long – this illustrates the problems of showing the scale of photos on blogs!

Here is the journal cover before the signatures were added:

And with the pages inside:

Remember I did an online course in making journals with Sue Bleiweiss a few months ago?  Well, I’m now doing her follow on course.  And it is great fun.  I’m finding that it is inspiring me to use my screenprinted fabric rather than feeling it is too precious to cut into it.    And it is making me want to get on and screenprint more! 

This week we made a zigzag book folded in three – well, we made one to practise getting the technique right and another in the shape of a house. 

I decided to use this fabric which I gocco printed a few months ago, mainly because it was the right length for the project!

The only problem was, for it to be long enough, I had to do something with that splodge at the left hand side where I dropped some paint on the fabric!  So I got the same screen and printed it over the splodge in black.  I thought it came out quite well…

That’s the back page of the journal.  I actually printed it after making the cover, which was a bit rash!  But it worked okay.  I thought it made it look a bit mysterious.

Trouble was, once I started printing I had to keep going and use up all the paint, didn’t I?!

This is some rust dyed fabric which I overprinted.  I also printed on this watercolour paper on which I’d previously printed Rouen Cathedral!

Here is the book cover finished:

And here it is with the signatures sewn in.  I haven’t put any fancy pockets, tags or closures yet.  I probably will, but today the second lesson comes out!! 

I made the house journal too – more pics to come in the next post!