Finding inspiration in unexpected places

As I mentioned earlier, I have been working on a small woven tapestry for the upcoming AusNZ online tapestry group's 2021 challenge.

The theme this year is Weaving Water. I have a LOT of pictures with water in them! Because of lockdown and only being able to walk for an hour a day (for a couple of months) I have been along various paths along the Yarra River. It is always brown water. Apparently it is due to the clay soil. 

I just noticed that I started it about a month ago, not a bad timeline for me. Maybe because of the lockdown I have given it more time than I would have normally. 

It is quite abstract, based on a piece of paper with paint smeared on it, ready to be cut up for collage. It is also in a landscape format and the tapestry is square. I also managed to turn the image upside down at one stage and it took me a while to work out why my, not very carefully done, cartoon didn't seem to be working. So then I ditched the cartoon and just looked at the image and tried to put in what I thought it was looking like, not what it actually looked like. 

It was a very relaxing way to be weaving - no good image to follow, no right or wrong bits (apart from some bits that just didn't feel right and got pulled out). 

I went for a walk along Darebin Creek this week - without a mask!! Hooray! The water was running fast because of recent rain and was also brown. It reminded me greatly of the tapestry which is almost finished.

                                         

Random things

 Today is 30/10/20. 

It looks a bit like we won't be having much Halloween around here, not that that bothers me, it is not a traditional holiday here. But the Christmas trees appeared this week, in the local shopping centre. 

Hasn't anyone told them that Christmas is a couple of months away??

We also have a plant growing that might be totally appropriate for Halloween, it stinks! It smells like something has died.

Stink Lily, Dragon Flower and other names. 

We were out tracing the smell to the flowers that have opened and have the incredible smelling stamens. The smell makes it rather easy, flies were already hanging around. It does get you talking to the neighbours and passers-by. 

The flowers look like they should be good for ecodyeing but I am not sure that I will get around to that practice again in the near future. Maybe I can put some of them in the freezer, once they start to die down. I really love the look of them, just not the smell. Apparently the smell only lasts for a day but several flowers can mean several days of smell!

Starting a new idea

 I have decided that it is time to start a new small tapestry. That is the benefit of having a group that organises a yearly challenge. It gives me something to think about. 

And the group that usually meets once a month is now meeting on Zoom and has decided to show our progress at the beginning of November. So I had better have an idea! Only some of us participate in the challenge, it is organised by another online group. Others will have different things for show and tell. Actually, Zoom means that we all get a turn and it is really quite orderly, unlike our usual chats and comings and goings, which are wonderful in a different way.

The theme is Weaving Water: so many ideas come to mind. But I had worked down to one image.

I played with it in PhotoShop to make it slightly easier to see how to weave it. 

It is of the Yarra after rain - very brown water. It will be a challenge not to put any blue in, if I decide to use this image. Even the sky wasn't blue. 

Then I started going through the papers that I painted, earlier in the year, for the paper collages I did with Tara Axford in her online course. I thought it might help me get a clearer idea of how to weave it if I did a collage first. 

I came across some papers I had just smeared paint on to a gelli plate and saw water! And one of them really appeals to me. So now I will have to decide what to do ... That will slow me down again. 

It doesn't look as good here as in reality but it still evokes water for me. 

It is exciting to have found something to inspire me. I won't make a decision immediately - I have been told I am a very slow starter - but I am tending to think that I might prefer to do an abstract image. I am always trying to do abstract but never quite get there. 

I can see some interesting yarns could be included in my more abstract idea. Decisions, decisions. 

As it is a lovely day today, and we can go out for an unspecified amount of time, I'll go for a walk and let the decision be made later. 

In the meantime, I could warp up the loom. I know the dimensions that are for the challenge: 20cm x 20cm. Not that I will necessarily do it square, that can be a difficult shape to make look good. 

UFOs

 20/10/20 - I have to post today!

I am in several online textile groups and people have been doing all sorts of things. One that caught my eye the other day was someone who had got out some UFOs and was actually (gasp) finishing them. 

That started me remembering: I have several pieces that range from the mid-1980s to earlier this year. I got out one, a hand pieced log cabin double bed quilt - it is HUGE because I must have thought that bedspreads went to the ground on beds, I think I was remembering the old chenille bedspreads that did (if I am actually remembering correctly). 

It is made up of many, many pieces of fabric. Polyester fabrics were all the go in those days, so it has a mix of pure cotton and polycottons, probably some polyester too. Fortunately, that won't matter much as they were all sewn onto a backing block, so differences in fabric weight and, hopefully, shrinking rates should not come into consideration. 

The method was to draw up a grid on the backing fabric, then cut the top layer into strips, fold them in half and line them up with the grid. Then you cut the strips to be the length  you want to fill in the next part of the grid. You sew along the fold, lined up with the grid and then folded the piece over and lay the next piece of fabric over that - you end up with three layers of fabric. This is a very effective method, easy to do. But ... if your quilt is large, it weighs a LOT. I weighed mine last night - two and a half kilos!! And that is without the batting or a backing piece. 

Now it will either go back into the cupboard or I will try to finish it off. 

One idea is to put felt on the back, doing away with the wadding/batting and backing fabric altogether, and using it as a throw on a couch. Another suggestion, (I asked some of the people at my Zoom meeting for the Embroiderers Guild's Creative Play group today) to use it as a floor rug. Another is to unpick it and make some smaller quilts. 

All too hard today! At least I have seen it again and will let some ideas run around in my head. I'll have to source some felt or backing of some sort that will be big enough too!

Another good date - and lots of sorting

 Well, I know what I might be doing for the next year, or until the Covid19 virus lockdowns ease. 

I will be sorting!!

I started with the threads and yarns, then I moved on to the threads that are specifically for hand embroidery. All beautifully colour co-ordinated. I seem to have a lot of autumn colours, especially green!! Considering that I don't do that much hand embroidery, I do have a lot of thread. Some of is years and years old!! 

Now I am moving on to the shelves that have old books, street directories, bits of painted and coloured paper. I have them for those brief moments that collage takes my fancy. It isn't that often but it is another way of coming up with designs. So I will move them out of my room, into a box, then go through them at another time. By then, I might know if I will ever use them again. 

Mind you, that 'other room' is starting to look a bit daunting. 

I could sit down and go through some of them now but that would distract me from the job I am currently working on, which is just to move things and see what is there. I might even (gasp) throw some stuff out. 

I am working on the 2 minute rule - I think I 'should' do some cleaning up so I will give it 2 minutes. Then, if I feel like it, I might go a little longer. Sometimes I just do the two minutes, sometimes 2 hours. Or more. 

This is not a quick fix, it is a way of making it doable. And the other advantage is that I get to see things that I found interesting in the past and, maybe, get inspired to try again. That has been especially true of the yarns, threads and ribbons. 

I have a box of dried leaves and plants that I picked up earlier in the year, when I was enthusiastically embracing the Tara Axford workshop (online). I am getting some glimmerings of interest again and am glad that I have kept them. The ones that don't crumble when I pick them up could be new inspiration. But I do have to find a better way and place to keep them. 

The other good thing about today? I know what day it is! I totally thought it was Tuesday yesterday. But today is Thursday - 15/10/20.

Sewing on the coloured Shiva Oil Stick fabric.

 I have been reminded that I should post today, it being 10/10/20 (hi Liz!).

So here it is ...

I have done a little bit of random blackwork (except not black) on the fabric. I am still using the threads I have at home, it still being lockdown and no shops open and no going further than 5km from home. I could buy online but I tried that and didn't know enough about the threads to know how thick they would be, what sort of sheen, how they have been plied, etc. So I will wait until I can actually see them in reality, not virtually. 

And I do have enough to go on with. 

I also used some linen I bought recently (online) and other pieces that I have had for years. I don't even know what some of the fabrics I have experimented with lately are. Therefore, I didn't know what threads would work with the various fabrics. All play, all interesting. 

So ... I decided to just try a few of the patterns from various books and an online resource that I printed out a few years ago. I ended up doing my own variations, not because I wanted original designs but because I  was having trouble getting them right. 

Trying to do the patterns randomly, associated with the randomly placed colours (I had no plan, just wanted to see if it would work on linen), has meant that I am not too bothered about choosing the perfect pattern for the image. Also, it is hard to see the thread at times, it blends in rather well.

The yellow thread is very fine compared to the others and a bit hard to see - whilst sewing and afterwards. I spent quite a while on it and was wondering why I was bothering! But the light does shine on it and pick up some texture. The orange and yellow are Wonderfil threads that I have bought for the sewing machine. The thicker orange one (konfetti) is not much good in the machine, it is a bit thick , so I am glad to have found a new use for it. The yellow (Spaghetti) is good in the machine , not so much on coloured linen. 

The green thread is DMC that I bought online recently and haven't used yet. I got it from Lazy Daisy, which has gone totally online these days. 

I discovered that the colour didn't go through the fabric, so I can see perfectly well on the back. I did have to get my head around doing the pattern properly on the underside and not going over spaces that I had already done, something that is sometimes necessary when you are doing the designs. Usually, you don't see that side, it is on the back. But the back was the front - confusing much? 

Just doing random patterns, for random distances, was very freeing. Also, the coloured background made it almost impossible to see mistakes - there are one or two but I don't really care, they are very hard to notice. 

Using Shiva Oil Sticks on Linen

I finished my piece using my faulty design and inattention. 

I just decided it was finished - 'based on' the original drawing on graph paper. 

Then I got out the small piece of linen I had drawn on using Shiva Oil Paint Sticks. The instructions said to draw on the fabric and then leave it for 4 or 5 days to set. Having Corona virus inertia, that was easy. I actually left it for 6 days. When I picked it up, I rubbed it on some white paper and got a faint smudge on the paper where some of the oil rubbed off. 

Then I heat set it, with the iron, hand washed it and let it dry.  It didn't rub off anymore. And I noticed that the little bits of thickish substance were no longer there. 

Today I decided to try some embroidery on it. It was harder than I had anticipated. I sewed my design at least four times, possibly five. I found that I had a bit of trouble seeing the fabric clearly enough to be perfectly accurate. Eventually, I noticed that the back of the fabric is not very coloured at all, so I could sew from the back.

The reason I had to pull it out was not to do with the fabric being coloured, it was that I chose a design that I couldn't get my head around. I really need to stick to the easier patterns. 

What I have discovered though, is that the paint stick stayed on the fabric throughout the drama. You could see where I had pulled it out on the back but the front didn't show it up at all. 

I could only find links to the produce through various stores. Here is one.