wordless Wednesday

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 !

a booklet

The Stitch Club workshop by 

Mandy Pattullo

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                     

wordless Wednesday

*

a rose is a rose is a rose

This STITCH CLUB week went by

working on a piece for the workshop of 

Sue Stone

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 !