Dreaming Spirals

I have just put a Print Gocco B6 machine up for sale - click here to go to the page it is on.

Email me if you are interested in buying it and have any queries - my email address is on the left sidebar underneath the Author section.

Here are a couple of things I made with my Print Gocco - the first is printed on paper and the second is an ACEO I made with a print on fabric.

Now that my swap partner, who is Dayna of Scottie Acres has received her swap, I will post a photo of a bit more of it.  Dayna loves scottie dogs and so I cut out lots of outlines of these and used them to sunprint the scarf.  Here it is being printed by the obliging sun!

Here it is nearly dry and I removed some of the dog shapes because they had got blown off by the wind!  I love how it gave the dogs almost ghostly outlines:

Here is the scarf washed, folded and ready to go - I didn’t actually take a photo of the whole thing finished.  Duh.

I did an interview for the blog of the Boomers Street Team of which I am a member and it is on there now if you would like to read it.

Some more Print Gocco machines arrived this morning!  I will be testing them all but once I have done that I will list them for sale one at a time on a page of my blog and will post a notice to that effect here.  It is rather busy at the moment (the summer term is always busy with school events) so I will list them as I have time to package them up and mail them - that is why it will be one at a time!  

I am not well at the moment - I have a nasty fluey sort of bug - I started shivering yesterday and it took a hat, 2 duvets and a fleece jacket to get warm.  I have been sleeping a lot today and feel a bit better now.  Let’s hope it’s a quick one.  I have felt as though I was going down with something all week - very lethargic and depressed.   But I am doing a swap on one of my Etsy street teams and I decided to do some sunprinting earlier in the week.  Here are a few details of it so as not to give the game away!

Here it is when it was nearly dry.  And here is another corner of it when heat set and washed:

The bottom picture is more the colour.  I took the first photo outside.  The sun didn’t come out very much that day but luckily I caught 20 minutes of it!  It is a silk scarf.

Of course, I mixed the wrong colour first so I had to do another one!  This is a part of it:

This one didn’t come out as well as the first but I painted into it with some red silk paint.  I will put up a picture of it when it is finished.

Finally, there is a blackbird’s nest on one of the stone lintels of our house, behind the wisteria.  This photo isn’t a very good one but you can just see two of the birds’ eyes poking out if you look closely.  I had suspected that there was one because a blackbird kept flying into the wisteria so I had a good look and there they were!  I think they’ve fledged now though.

This was taken out of our bedroom window!

This is as far as the two hangings have got so far: they are fused on to lutradur and I will be adding stitching.   I don’t know whether to keep them as two, or to join them horizontally or vertically.  That decision will, I hope, come to me later.   

When I cut the lutradur, I was planning to wrap the finished hangings around some gallery wrap canvases that I have.  But once I started cutting the strips of fabric, I realised that they needed to be larger and wrapping them would lose a lot from round the perimeter.  So I think I will stitch them to some heavy canvas fabric and put a hanging sleeve on the back.  That’s the plan at the moment, anyway - these hangings seem to have a mind of their own.

Here they are side by side.

And here they are vertically:

I don’t think I ever posted a photo of the one I made at the Erika Carter workshop last summer.  I haven’t done anything else to it so far, but here it is:

It isn’t a very good photo, but it gives the general impression.  That’s another I have yet to finish.  I think I  have observed that I work in distinct phases.  The initial ideas, the percolation of the ideas, construction and finishing.  And often there will be months between the various phases but that time seems to be necessary for me to see them afresh.  I seem to be much better at finishing 10 wallhangings at once than one at a time!  Does anyone else work like this?

I heard of Cyber Fyber some time ago via other blogs.  Susan Lenz has made a whole lot of postcards to swap with anyone who will send her one back.  She is then going to exhibit the ones she receives in January 2009.  I considered taking part in the first round of postcards but got there when there were only a few left.  But, to my delight, she produced round two recently so I snapped one up!

I’m ashamed to say I didn’t take a photo of my postcard before I sent it but it is one of my spirals series, of which some  are for sale in my Etsy Shop.    But here is Susan’s:

And this is the back - some funky fabric on there!

The postcard is made from a larger piece of painted silk.  It’s gorgeous!

I’ve been moving fabric around all week on my design wall, for this river hanging I’m doing.  (Well, it started as two and I’m still not sure if I’m going to make it as one or two but we shall see.    It’s useful having a camera to take photos at the various stages.  I’ve got to a stage now where I think I’m fairly happy with it… the combination of fabrics together that is, no further than that…

The one on the left and the one on the right are two separate ones, although I might still make it into one long one with the green side at the top….  This was the first attempt.

This was the next attempt.  Well, more like an in-between stage really!

Here is the next stage of the left hand size.

And the right side.

And this is how I’ve got it at present (ignore the fabric at the top).  Apart from a few minor modifications…

Do you agonize over your fabric choices like this? !

Thank you, by the way, to Brandon, for pointing me to the solution for my Windows Live Writer problem with my other blog!! It’s now sorted!

Golly - 56 comments!! What a response - thank you, everyone.  I can’t wait to sit down and follow up all your links and see if anything comes out a clear favourite.

So… the giveaway ended  25 minutes ago as I type.  I wrote down all the numbers of the comments on little pieces of paper and folded them all neatly.

BTW, the writing you can see is because I was being good and reusing paper that had one side already printed!

I gave it a good stir with the nearest available implement….

….  asked DS3 to pick out one of the pieces of paper…

… and trudged up to the top floor of our house to ask DS1 to pick out the other… and …. drumroll……

The winning numbers are:

Which translates to:

Pippa and Maggie!!!!!!!

I’ll be emailing both of you, but if you see this first, please email me your snail mail addresses and I’ll put your bundles in the post asap.  If you have a preference as to pink or purple, tell me - if you both want the same one, the first email to reach me gets it!

I’ve decided to have a bit of a destash because I have far more fabric than I can ever use.  So I decided to celebrate the bank holiday weekend in the UK here by having a giveaway.  I haven’t done this before so it’s a bit of an experiment! 

I have sorted two little parcels of fabrics, thread and beads, one with a roughly pink colour scheme, the other purple. 

Here’s the pink one.  There are some good sized pieces in there!

Some hand dyed pieces, some commercial, silk, chiffon, felt…

All tied up with a length of rick-rack!

And here is the purple parcel:

Some batik fabric there, a bit of tweed, silk, hand dyed cotton…

And that is all tied up with some satin ribbon!

To be in with a chance to win one of these inspirational packs, you just have to have a look at my Etsy shop and leave a comment here telling me which is your favourite thing in it.   You have until after the bank holiday on Monday,  so on Tuesday at 5pm British Summer Time I will write all your names on to bits of paper, put them all into a hat and get one of my sons to pick a name randomly.    Very high tech!  Then I’ll announce the winners here.

Good luck!