woensdag 22 juli 2020

20 !!!!!

20

What a respectable old lady !

At the age of twenty ?

Old ?

YES

when you're a Burmese cat
you are !
(but our dear Bella is still going strong !)


*
These past few weeks I was busy with the concertina booklets
of Mandy Pattullo's workshop.
But my first fabric book was for daughter
so I only showed the second one in the tin box.
Today, while celebrating the summer holidays with a BBQ
I could give her the finished book,
her own Fire-keeper story.

 When still working on the covers and inside stitching with
MAGIC thread ...




Some close-ups :

Fire  !

Inside the hut 

at the end a new start !

*

The garden is as full as it ever was :
no sigh of the empty spaces after all the work at the terrace
and hardly any fence left to see







And inside, in the bathroom upstairs at the north facing window,
one of the orchids is very happy
and started flowering again



We're happy too
in our green oasis !

zondag 12 juli 2020

a booklet

The Stitch Club workshop by 
this week, was making a concertina booklet or "leporello".
Mandy works with a LOT of vintage fabrics
like old quilts.

In the workshop we saw her cut haphazardly through
an embroidered cushion cover,
just to have some fun pieces to use !
IIIIIIEEEEEEH !!!

I started with a paper booklet first, just for fun
(grandson also wanted to make one when I showed it to him
and he had a lot of fun with little pieces of wrapping paper
and washi tape !)

The one I'm showing here is in fact booklet number three
(when you count in the paper one)
Number two isn't finished yet
AND
is a bit of a secret.

So now number three !


A long strip of (tea dyed) cotton
and a tin box someone gave me as a present.

First the strip is neatly ironed into an accordion shape.
The strip is 8,5 cm wide and the pages are 5,5 cm to fit in the box.

For this one I used only reds
ranging from the lightest pink to dark red.
The peacock was the first thing I attached ...
on the lást page !
In fact I worked my way backwards to the front
and in lighter colours.

Here I was tacking down the last bits of the first and the front page
The stitching on the back is in sight
but that (and the frayed edges) don't bother me,
I quite like it actually.

"From pink dawn till evening red"

        double pages 1 and 2                                3 and 4                     

                   5 and 6                                            6 and 7                     











vrijdag 3 juli 2020

a rose is a rose is a rose



This STITCH CLUB week went by
working on a piece for the workshop of 

The strip-weaving was well known to me
because that was in one of Jude Hill's classes
and gladly I used that more then once
so no problems there.

You could definitely say that Sue
is a portrait specialist,
so on her strip-woven piece she made a portrait.

I thought about that
collected coloured strips 
(which are there in abundance)
.....
but didn't come up with a good idea
WHO
I would want for a portrait
(or too many idea's perhaps)

So I collected a second bit of (different) coloured fabrics
and wove my background.


The idea of the rose was of course there before I chose the pinks,
the rose itself I sketched from a rose on the "web"
Thin paper to stitch through
and three dark enough pearl cottons
that would stand out against the sweet pinks.

Those cottons, thát was one of my mistakes :
my hand (arthritis) ached soon
because of the three layers of my weave !

Here everything looked still all right
(removing the tissue paper gave me the déja vu
of a shredded paper hanky from the washing machine !!!) 

 And I thought the result was a disaster :
the rose simply disappeared !
(I posted it in the group anyway,
if only to show that most of the time you have to try
many times before something good emerges !)

I left it alone for a day or so
and thought about unpicking, stitch or even paint ...
Then
 back to the stitching
(with stranded cotton floss !!!)
and the rose came back to me !