Dreaming Spirals

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!

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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!!

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I’m going to do a proper post on the making of these postcards, but just at present I’m experimenting with a different way of uploading photos to my blog because my current method is a bit cumbersome.

Here is one of the postcards I made a week or two ago:

Meanwhile, during my blogsurfing yesterday (hmm, have I just made up another internet word, or just picked it up subliminally from some press article or other?!), I found this post by Lisa Call on how she dyes 60-100 yards of fabric in a few hours. It is more or less how I did it when I last did some dyeing, except that I used smaller pieces at a time - ie. by adding more fabric to the dyestuff successively to make paler shades of the same colour but Lisa has described it beautifully. Imagine - 60 to 100 YARDS!!!

I just checked her blog and she has another post about it - the second of a number of posts she is going to write about her process. I enjoy reading Lisa’s blog - she always has thought-provoking or informative posts.

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I’ve been quiet this week because I’ve got a new toy… a Nikon Coolpix S6! And the first time I installed the software for it, it messed up my wireless settings on this computer so I had to do a system restore… The camera has a facility whereby you can download photos wirelessly if you get it set up right, but we’ve got a strange wireless network using Intel Anypoint and it doesn’t use the Windows Internet Sharing Software but has a quirky programme of its own, and its settings aren’t what Nikon wants them to be for the camera…. Agghh… So maybe I’ll just use the USB cable instead…

As a result of all that, I had to install the camera software separately - so far I’ve only installed the drivers, which enable me to continue using Picasa instead of PictureProject, which was supplied with the camera. So now I can either be adventurous and try and get the rest of it set up, or decide that the status quo is best and using the USB cord isn’t that onerous really…

All I can say is, hurray for System Restore!!

Back to last week… Here is a photo of the potatoes all cut and encased in clingfilm ready for printing. The kids loved it, though I was left wondering whether all that preparation and cleaning up was worth it just to let them splash paint around for 10 minutes!! The ones which worked best were the simple ones I cut with a knife - the lino print ones didn’t print too well. Too complicated…

On Tuesday I suddenly decided to make a huge pile of lasagne to put in the freezer. Well, I make the bolognaise sauce and then I make a pan full of cheese sauce - I’ve got this wonderful contraption called a sauce maker which heats and stirs the sauce for you so all you have to do is put in the ingredients and go away and wait. More or less. And then I put it all together in Tupperware containers with that lasagne that doesn’t need precooking…

Here’s the result. I had a couple of Tupperwares full of bolognaise sauce as well, plus a tub of macaroni cheese from the remains of the pasta from our lunch and the cheese sauce, which Barnabas polished off that evening when he came in cold and hungry from their rugby match (they lost…).

Here’s one of the first photos I downloaded from the new camera. It’s a fresh bouquet garni waiting to be dropped into a stew…

I finished the postcards, but I won’t post any pictures till the recipients have got them - don’t want to spoil any surprises! As usual, I got carried away and made more than I needed, so if anyone out there with a blog would like to swap one with me, email me and we’ll get together! Then we can post them on each other’s blogs… Anyone want to play?!

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I have just added lots more postcards to my ‘for sale’ pages - now I’m extremely crosseyed!

These postcards are £15.00 each, including shipping. They will be shipped blank in a jiffy bag unless specified otherwise. If you want them sent ‘bare’ through the post to create a work of art complete with greeting, stamp and postmark, please indicate this in the Paypal form. I am happy to ship anywhere in the world.

Have a look under ‘Pages’ in the sidebar to the right of this entry - Postcards and More Postcards! Enjoy!!

If you want to see any of them in more detail, email me and I’ll email you a bigger photo. I have included a detail with one of them just to show the general quality but I haven’t got the space to do this with all of them and they would take forever to load if I did:)

If you have any problems with using Paypal, let me know - I haven’t had much experience with it so I hope I’ve got the html for the buttons right!

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Diane of Going to Pieces, the Artful Quilters Blogring Owner, has compiled a really good list of tutorials gleaned from posts in the blogring. I was emailing her with links for a couple of mine, when I realised I had never posted pictures of some of the postcards I made from the collages earlier in the year.

Here are a few of them. I spent this morning taking lots of photos so hopefully I will get them put on the ‘for sale’ section of the blog before too long. I had a deadline to do this, because I have exciting news! Sheryl, a friend who I know from my City & Guilds course, has a co-operative crafts venture upstairs in Newport Market, and she has asked me to join in with them and sell my fabric postcards! Newport Council use the first floor of the market, which is a very attractive Victorian building, to encourage artists and crafts designer/makers who want to start out in business and they have regular craft fayres. I will be spending a couple of half days a week manning the shop, which is brilliant because I was looking for a way to get out and meet more people while the kids are in school. It is called Alpha Arts and Crafts - have a look at their website and come and see me if you are in Newport visiting!

Here, as promised, are some of the postcards.

Portals #1

Portals #2

Spirals #5

Spirals #11

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Here are a pile of the resulting squares which I cut out of all that lot!

Here’s the whole lot! I cut lots of thinner rectangles from the offcuts which will be added into the mix….

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I made this postcard for the Quiltart Travel Challenge. It is along the same lines as my Rainy Streets postcards but it features a prominent landmark in my town.

It is called Industrial Legacy and the statement I wrote to go with it reads:

The most famous landmark in Newport, where I live, is its Transporter
Bridge, a legacy from its industrial past. There are only two other such
bridges in the UK and seven in the world, not all operational. It has a
suspended platform on
which cars, cyclists and pedestrians go, which is then pulled across the
River Usk on cables.

I have been playing with layering sheers on top of painted calico to depict
the rainswept streets of South Wales, so I decided to use that as a
background for my travel postcard. Because our prevailing winds are
westerly, we get a lot of rain!

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