Not quite Monday but I’ve been drawing angels this week so here are some for the Draw Something Every Day challenge. I have an imminent deadline for an embroidered Christmas card swap and I love angels so have been playing with some images that I could stitch. Fresh from delighting in the work of Tilleke Schwarz and Primmy Chorley at the Knitting and Stitching Show (of which more later), I realise how much I’m attracted to embroidered words and would like to explore this further.
Yay, I kept the Draw Something Every Day challenge this week. This is Tansy, who loves to snuggle herself into anything soft she happens to find – duvets, blankets, jumpers, baskets of clean washing, going away bags… I love the comfortable folds she creates around herself. I’d like to do this in machine stitching with a touch of appliqué.
Just a round up of some things that have inspired me as I caught up with some of my favourite blogs today…
And two new blogs: Inspiration Boards, thanks to Claire at Little Fish Creations, and kris’s color stripes, thanks to my friend Helen.
I know it’s not Monday, but I missed last week too, and I thinking waiting for next week is just asking for trouble. I commented on Juli’s Draw Something Every Day posting for this week that my hand and my pen had become disconnected. Here’s an attempt to reconnect them, but I didn’t use a pen! – I drew it with a graphics stylus. I use one for work instead of a mouse but I don’t try to draw with it very often…
I knew it had been a while since I last blogged but I was a bit surprised to see just how long. I have a good reason, though – I’ve been immersed in finishing my second assignment for OCA Textiles 1, finally put in the post (just) on time on Monday. It takes ages to get everything labelled and organised for sending to my tutor – I must try to do more of that as I go along. These are the two larger printing/painting samples I finished at the weekend. The top one is a repeating pattern that could go off the edges of the fabric – scrunch dyed cotton fabric, block printed with fabric paints, then stencilled with masking tape stencils in two layers, the first layer applied with a natural sponge, and the second layer applied with a sponge roller. When I’d done that, I thought the purple stripes were too strong against the background fabric, which was quite pale in places, so I painted the whole thing with thin turquoise paint and then rinsed it before setting.
The bottom one is a single unit inspired by log cabin patchwork. It’s all block printed, the ‘log cabin’ with funky foam blocks with holes punched into them, and the round shapes with carved erasers. The fabric is silk, and I used fabric paints as I wanted that brushy texture in the colour.
The next section of the OCA course is fabric manipulation and making an actual object like a bag or a waistcoat, which sounds great, but I must also finish the appliqué piece and get on with the final assessment for City & Guilds. I think if I really pull out the stops I might be able to finish it before my registration runs out in mid-December.