My Creative Space

Well, that was a much longer blogging hiatus than I had intended, but things just got away with me. Now my blogging mojo has, hopefully, returned.

I took three weeks off over Christmas and pootled around, doing some reading/crafting/TV watching/family stuff/time away. All very pleasant and satisfying. Another post will have some pics of our holiday in Adelaide and Mt Gambier. But this being my first Creative Space for the year, I suppose I had better post something actually created!

These are completed ATCs (Artist Trading Cards), my first ever, hence the distinct wonkiness. I did take pictures of the back too but have forgotten to put them on the USB which I am using at work to download these. I agonised over the backs for weeks, but in the end an article in Sew Somerset got me thinking and I decided to just embroider my name and the year in deliberately wonky hand stitching, and hand stitch the backings on.

They all have a basis of Mazey Patchwork, with hand embroidery and embellishments added after the initial machine stitching.

This has a heart-shaped Suffolk Puff held in place with a flower button, a silver charm that says Be True and some hand stitching. The fabrics are velvet, polyester chiffon (off-cuts from dressmaking) and quilting cottons from the stash.

This has a Suffolk Puff held down with a fancy button from somewhere, hand embroidery, a scrap of lace, and the fabrics are various scraps from the stash including a polyester chiffon.

And the final one has much the same mix of fabrics, hand stitching, and a clutch of tiny teddy buttons I bought at a craft fair somewhere.

For more Creative Spaces look over here...

Some embroidery

Remember the bits of Mazey Patchwork I cut out and showed a couple of weeks ago.  I have been slowly starting to embellish them, production line style.  First of all, some hand stitching - pics below.  When I have embroidered a lot of them, or got bored, I will find appropriate beads/buttons/stuff to add to them.  But I;m too tired to do anything most of the time :(  At least I have three weeks off work starting Christmas Eve!!

Picasa has gone all fancy and added all the fun filters that you can get on mobile phone apps now!

I would like to wish all of my dear readers a wonderful Christmas, if that's what you do, or a wonderful holiday, or a blissful unawareness of the fact that anybody is celebrating anything at all.  Maybe by next week I will have something else to show.  Then again, maybe not!

With Enormous Apologies to Edvard Munch

This is the nearest I have got to being creative this week - unless you count a few more centimetres of bright green knitting.  It's still not interesting enough to show.  I never did get round to doing any embroidery last weekend though I am getting some out RIGHT NOW as it is my day off work.  I spent the morning doing some Christmas shopping - now I only have to go to JB Hi Fi to finish it off, I hope.

This terrible piece of photo editing is a silly way to announcing my big news.  From January I will be the Campus Librarian, a significant promotion that comes with an insignificant payrise (after three months).  It sounds terribly important, but in fact our campus is the size of a postage stamp so it isn't really.  But, as a great man once said, with great power comes great responsibility.

So I am panicking and screaming - so far on the inside but that could change any day now!!!!

My Creative Space

I have had a bit of fun.  The to picture is a piece of my Mazey Patchwork, made by sewing various scraps onto a base fabric, like crazy patchwork only deliberately left all frayed.  Then I chop it up and embellish the pieces individually.  I finished the big piece quite a while ago but haven't done anything with it, so as I had the day off yesterday I cut out some pieces to start fiddling with at the weekend.

It looks like I might have a few hours on Saturday at my MiL's before attending my neieces 21st, so I am packing up some of the small pieces together with a selection of threads (probably mainly blues with a couple of contrasts) and I will pootle around embroidering them.  Further embellishments with buttons or beads or suffolk puffs, or maybe all three, will follow later at home.

For more creative spaces, pop over here.  It's the last official Creative Spaces for the year, though I promise I will continue to post any pics of anything that I might find time to do!!

My Creative Space

I am still experimenting with buttons.  i am was just about to give the whole thing away because I was getting frustrated with the scale, and I don't think these will take over from my other things in the long run, but I have gained some terrific ideas along the way.  They are all button brooches, so they look like buttons from the front but have a brooch back on, er, the back.

Ok, so this is, obviously, not a button, nor a brooch.  It is a cake.  Not even a cunningly fabricated textile cake meant to worn on something (a hat maybe).  It is a Stephanie Alexander chocolate cake and you can tell by the amount left over how disgusting it tasted.  This was a whole 24 hours after making it!

This is a brooch with seeds beads embroidered on silk dupion.  It is not a cake.

Ceci n'est pas une gateau.  It is a mass of French knots on silk dupion.  You may have seen it already before it became a brooch.

Yeah, I showed this one before too, it's cross stitch in variegated thread.  On silk dupion. 

This is silk dupion decorated with a scrap of sari silk from The Thread Studio.  Lovely Dale sent me a baggie of sari silk scraps when I won a Facebook giveaway.  I promised I would use them on something.

And this is a cake. 

This is one of the buttons I bought at the button fair I blogged about a while ago.  I have a whole card of these, the original card, which I am going to keep if I ever use all the buttons.  They are immediately post-war Parisian.  The fact that I had matching embroidery thread in the pile by my chair was a complete co-incidence!

(Actually, the blue thing isn't really a cake).

For more creative spaces pop over here.  There might even be cake but don't blame me if there isn't!

Take a Stitch Tuesday (TAST)

Anyone interested in this?

http://www.pintangle.com/journal/2011/11/26/the-big-list-of-2012-tast-challengers.html#comment16009104


Have a look at the Pintangle blog.  The idea is that every Tuesday the author of the blog posts an embroidery stitch and participants learn it, experiement with it, and post a picture of it.  Participation every week for a year is NOT compulsory.  This is some of what she says about it:

'Cost:
The challenge is free

Skill level:
All skill levels are welcome

How does it work?
Each Tuesday I will post a challenge stitch for the week. You work an example of the stitch. Learn the stitch, experiment a bit, take it a bit further if you have time then photograph it, and load it to stitchin fingers or put it on your flickr site or write about it on your blog. Then you come back here, leave a comment on the post where I posed the challenge and tell everyone where they can see your sample.

If you are busy and want to swing in and out of the challenge as life dictates that is fine too. I cant make it more guilt free than that. Simply put all who want to stitch are welcome. However, last time people that worked all the stitches said that they learnt a lot! Even stitches that did not initially appeal to them, they learnt from, discovered a way of working and sometimes were surprised to find they enjoyed them.
When does it start?
The first Tuesday in the new year which is January 3rd. It will run from this blog every Tuesday after that.'

I thought it might be fun to at least dip in and out of.  I remember seeing some of the results of the 2010 challenge and they were interesting.  I thought it might encourage me to learn, build upon and force myself to document some new embroidery skills.

My Creative Space

I have been knitting, slowly and not very interestingly, on the green cardigan from a few weeks ago.  Nothing much to show so we'll just move along here.  I will take more photos when it gets a bit more exciting.

What I have also been doing is playing with photo software on my phone.  It is ridiculously amusing.  And creative - sort of :)



This is a bowl of pansies picked by George and floated in a bowl to make me happy :)


This looks like I have been all clever and done a painting, but actually it is just the photo, fiddled with.



This is a Mazey Pretty Things brooch, and a prototype of a new type of brooch that will be forthcoming in due course (ie. when I get it right!)  This one is actually a button, not centred very well, but the real ones will be button brooches, a bit smaller, and hopefully properly centred :)

Then I played around with different effects.  It was fun :)









I hope to do some more knitting this weekend, start some embroidery, and maybe organise some craft books/magazines.  Plus reading, and cooking, and watching TV (oh, and washing and ironing and going to the supermarket and maybe even having conversations with family members!)

For much more interesting creative spaces, go visit here!