Blogtoberfest 10

Another pear.  This one is made from air-drying clay (which stinks, btw), deliberately left roughly moulded with finger prints in it.  Then painted and rubbed with a wad of kitchen towel and left to dry again, and then some gold paint rubbed lightly on bits of it.  Then stuck down lightly to a piece of patchwork fabric and peyote stitched around with seed beads to form a huge bezel, if you think of the pear as a large cabachon.  Then shadow stitched with black embroidery thread (perl or stranded, I can't remember).  I also can't remember if I used felt or thin cotton wadding for the wadding.

Blogtoberfest 9

When I was studying for my Diploma of Studio Stitch (Textiles) - textile art - we had a fantastic  teacher who was obsesssed with pears.  They are rather attractive, I suppose!  One assignment we were given was to choose from a small list of things (I forget the rest, but pears was definitely one of them!) and do three small items, each one using a different technique.  I started this as one of them but realised that it was so time-consuming that it was better to use it for my end-of-semester piece, a folder cover, and did three other pears instead.  (They will be appearing during Blogtoberfest!)

This was probably only my second major piece of bead embroidery and I am very pleased with it.  It mostly uses czech seed beads with some other beads from my stash, and some small buttons, sewn straight onto cream felt.  I still feel rather proud of this piece!

Blogtoberfest 8

Now for the giveaway details.  Every comment received this month will go into a special magic giveaway hat (well, the name of the commenter will!) and after the end of Blogtober I will get a completely disintered bystander (ie. my husband) to pull a name out of the sorting hat.  Each time you comment your name will go in.

The giveaway is a Mazey Pretty Things fabric brooch - see my sidebars for my Made It and Etsy shops to give you an idea of what they are like.  I will post to anywhere in the world with great delight.

Look forward to hearing from you!

Blogtoberfest 7

This leaf is also knitted with my handspun, but dyed with Landscape dyes.  Again it is yarn I made a long time ago, and the leaf was knitted quite a while ago, but the whole thing only went together very recently.

Blogtoberfest 6

The last of this run of hats.  I got really sick of knitting them after five1  But I am happy with the way they knitted up.  This leaf is knitted from handspun dyed with Landscape dyes.  I had a little collection of leaves that were variously used up in a whole host of things and these hats finished off the last of them.  As leaves are so useful for adding to all sorts of things I think I will have to knit some more now and get a new collection going!

Blogtoberfest 5

This leaf was knitted from gorgeous variegated yarn bought in Bairnsdale at the Jolly Jumbuck, a place which sells lots of sheepy products.  They used to have an amazing selection of yarn dyed for them by Marta of Marta's Yarns, who sadly died a few years ago (no pun intended); now their yarns tend to be different though still qutie nice.  I bought this, and a lovely green one, in the great days of yore.

Blogtoberfest 4

LUMPS

for my friend Karen at http://karenruane.blogspot.com/ who does the most amazing embroidery and who you must all check out.  (Please).

Blogtoberfest 3

This yarn is too pastelly for me but would look great on someone else.  The leaf is another handspun, ecodyed one, needlefelted onto polar fleece, with a few wisps of Angelina fibre needlefelted on top to give it an unexpected sparkle.

That was the one and only time I ever did any 'ecodying', which is such a buzzword now.  I must try it again some time!

Blogtoberfest 2

I've mentioned doing hats.  This is the first of the finished ones.  The embellished leaf is from various playings around in the past, while the hat is new.  The leaf was knitted from wool I spun and dyed with eucalyptus leaves a long time ago, needlefelted onto polar fleece and with some coloured flecks needlefelted on top of it.

Blogtoberfest!!

Whoops, I seem to have signed up for something which wants me to post EVERY DAY FOR A MONTH.  There might be a lot of single photos this month with few words!

For more on Blogtoberfest see the linkity thing on the sidebar.  It is dead cute but most definitely not designed by me, that's way beyond my techy skills!!!

I'm even doing my first ever giveaway.  (well, let's face it, I can't seem to sell them, so I would rather they went to a good home anyway!)

there will be details soon.  It will involve a fabric brooch from MazeyPrettyThings (see sidebars for Made It shop and Etsy shop to give you an idea of what I mean.

See you tomorrow!

It's a Nice Day for a White Wedding

On Sunday we went up to Bendigo to see the Wedding Dress exhibitions (one from the V&A, one Australian one).  It was fantabulous, but I can't show you any pictures.  Suffice it to say that it was full of frills and furbelows and white and cream and sparkly bits!  (And for anyone wondering, a furbelow is a ruffle !)  Even with corsets I wondered at how tiny many of the waists were.  And the shoes!  Women had very small feet in the past apparently, both in length and width.  But I suppose most people were, generally, smaller in the past than they are now.

I can show you gratuitous pictures of Bendigo as I continued to experiment with my new camera.  (Which is a Lumix of some point and shoot variety, for those interested in the details - anything else would be too technical for me!)

The Bendigo Rotary Club Gardens were full of spring blooms in the spring sunshine:

And the - maybe the Town Hall?  Or some other grand Victorian gold era building - was adorned with dragons and lions very handsomely.

That may have been the same building that housed the tourist information office and a little exhibition space where I enjoyed 'Raw ‘n’ Funky, Fine Art Fashions in Felt' and this charming tiled motif on the doorstep.

It was a nice day to top off a week off work.  A sort of relaxing week in which I finished hats (coming soon to a blog near you!), set up an Etsy shop (see side bar of a blog VERY NEAR YOU RIGHT NOW), watched several episodes of Quincy ME, and carted my children around to medical appointments.  Including Wombat, in an ambulance, to a casualty department.  He came off his bike rather hard.  In the end he was better off than the bike, which is having surgery at the moment, while he escaped with (nasty) scrapes and bruises.  Fortunately we have always insisted on them wearing helmets and I am very grateful that the depressed fracture in the helmet was not magnified into his skull.

My Creative Space

I am trying to turn my 'Mazey Patchwork' into my signature style, and this week has been about working on this piece and taking close ups of it.  Basically it is a stitched form of complex cloth, which once it comes off the machine is cut up into random shapes and then further embellished with hand stitching, beads, buttons, etc, lined with satin or something similar and turned into brooches and other fabric jewellery forms.

Enjoy!  And enjoy other creative spaces here!

Stacks

A project of Stacks!  This is piles of Books to be Read.  There are other Books to be Read but they are scattered around the house.  I read A LOT.

Paper Stacks

“...Wednesday September 21st, The Altered Page will host Paper Stacks, an online collaboration. Please leave a comment on this post if you would like to participate. All you need to do is post an image on 9/21 on your own blog of your stacks – be they papers, books, journals, or anything else of your liking. On the 21st I will post a list of all participating artists on my blog so that you can be sure to find all the links to the stacks. Feel free to let your own readers know about this project by spotlighting it on a post on or prior to reveal day. Please (and this is important) email me with a link when your post goes up so I know to add you to the posted list on my blog.

This is one time when the higher your stacks of stuff, the better. “
Here is the link .

Playing With the New Camera - my spring garden

My Creative Space

I am enjoying a day off today! OK, so I took Wombat to the doctor this morning, but he was enjoyable company and we had morning tea so it was fun. Then we came home and I have been managing to relax creatively ever since!

The latest non-haiku. I;m not sure why the photo is so bad, other than my dubious photography skills. Oh, and the fact that the camera is dying and is going to be replace sometime soon. (Not that that will improve my photography skills, but maybe the pictures will bebetter by default anyway!)

The latest completed hat.

The latest hat-in-progress. I am actually get sick of hats but I want to finish off the yarn I bought to knit hats, which means one more after this one, and then embellish them and get them up for sale at Mazey Pretty Things.

And I have spent some time on my luvverly new sewing machine. I am making a Mazey patchwork cloth to cut up and embellish and turn into brooches, etc. I think of it as my version of a 'complex cloth' and each layer adds extra to it.

This week at work hasn't been too bad - I have been able to concentrate on my actual job, which I quite like, rather than running around doing other people's work as well as my own. And then having today off helps! Performance review tomorrow - a little nervous.

For more creative spaces, see here!

My Creative Space

At the Surrealist Exhibition in Brisbane I bought some of those magnetic poetry word things.  I decided to set myself a project of doing a new poem on the fridge a couple of times a week.  I was going to do haikus but got confused about the syllables - hence the 7,5,7 effect.  And I decided that I like it so that is what I am going to stick to.  I will photograph each one and post them on my blog.  I am doing a mixture of random and planned - obviously because I want the syllables to work out, there has to be some choosing, but I also want the poems to be fairly Surreal in themselves.

Another hat.  It will be adorned with either a fabric brooch or a scrumble in due course. I might try to sell these when I have the collection done - still about three hats to go.  I haven't had much time or energy lately to do anything.  In fact I am currently off work for two day with galloping stress and exhaustion so hopefully will find some time to do some gentle crafting.

The next hat in production.  The baby picture has nothing to do with anything - I was reading New Idea or something while eating my lunch (idiotic, but sort of stress relief) and the knitting just fell like this.  Note new phone!  Have replaced Stupid Phone (TM) with Smart Phone, still working out how to drive the blasted thing.

I am sure that other people will have more exciting Creative Spaces than me!