More wrapping . . .

. . . of fabric round something cylindrical. a real bit of drainpipe this time.  It is quite a fine cotton, and the colour has mostly gone right through it, so I must have applied it a bit unevenly to get those irregular blotches.

The wet one from the previous post now nicely ironed.  A bit less colour on this one, so I should have applied a bit more.   

And the last one, just scrunched down in a plastic tray in the ordinary way.

Using paint, the runny silk paint variety, is easier to manage than dye, because of not having to mix up salt, soda etc, but you do have to iron to fix the colour.  Those darkest lines seem to come when applying paint but not with dye.  Interesting.

Colouring fabric . . .

. . . by wrapping it round a cylindrical thing and squashing it down in pleats, then painting it. I used an old wine bottle as my fabric bits were not large, but scrappy leftovers, and the intention was to experiment as I haven't done this for some time. It was mentioned on the Contemporary Quilt Group yahoo list and a link given, which spurred this activity.

Finished result, ironed, and looking a lot paler in this photo that in real life!

And here is piece 2, still damp and unironed

Why not do a bit of stitched resist while the paints are out? Scraps again, and set in motion by meeting a Dorset shibori artist, Annabel Wilson, and seeing her lovely meticulous work, see here, at an art and crafts fair at which our church stitching group had a stand last week. Some bits have worked better than others, depending on the type of cloth, and there is a mix here. I don't know what they are, being unmethodical. Also I have difficulty pullling the stitches up tight enough to resist enough often. But again, the pieces all have more marks on them that this photo seems to show.

Garden update.

In spite of the absence of rain things are taking off a bit, though slowly. Clockwise from top left: great colours in a hanging basket - thank you B&Q; potato plant flowering - one of last year's that stayed behind in the ground; a variety of tomato that isn't moneymaker; a courgette plant producing flowers but I can't see if there is anything more than flowers there yet; more B&Q trailers, though not trailing much yet; a self-sown opium poppy plus bumble bee; swelling peapods; the first red raspberry; and my black tomato plant has a tomato on it!!! Move over Jamie Oliver!

Under the sea . . .

. . . with West Country Embroiderers this month. or some of them at least, I don't seem to have managed to get photos of all the pieces of work. Apologies to those i missed:/

They are very pretty little pieces, intended to be stuck over a stone, or used on a box lid, or the front of a book cover, or . . . ? We ruched up fabric, covered rings and beads with thread, couched hairy yarn, made 'rocks' with padded fabric circles.

Homework . . .

. . . last Saturday for one of the DGDs, was to make a picture of a monster with a collage of food pictures. Grandad suggested she took photos of as many food plants as she could find growing in the garden and make her monster from them. So here are some of them.
Clockwise from top left - strawberry, rhubarb, spinach, oregano, tomatoes, grapes, lollo rosso lettuce, baby cabbage plants, oats (spilled from the bird feeders, not for us!)

And from top left again - shallots, curly lettuce, blueberries, strawberries, potatoes, peas.

Layer upon Layer . . .

. . .  in the mountain views in the south of Bavaria. 

Nice picnic spot.  Thanks to DD3 again for the pix.

Coloured houses . . .

. . . in Freising, near Munich.

I'm borrowing some of DD3's photos again.

Tidying up . . .

. . .  bits and pieces after my book making classes, I just had to use up some cover bits and pages that were left over. 

A slightly different treatment of the long stitches - wrapping the outer ones - and some bead dangles.

While painting a cover I like to paint an A4 sheet or two as well to use in the book, generally as the outer page of signatures.

A different stitching style, going over the spine edge to get into the next signature.  Buttonhole stitch over those stitches turned them into curly squiggles, to match the oil pastel squiggles on the cover (inadvertently!). 

Plain stitches in matching threads.  I was trying to copy a stitch design I'd seen somewhere, but just couldn't work out how to get smoothly into the next signature with this pattern so did a lot of fiddling about and improvising.

Printing with interference paints on black painted card, and a button sewn on the front to wind a cord round for a closure.

Another button plus cord.  I need a few more ideas for closures.

The background is some paper DD3 and i printed up to make something to wrap a present for DD2.  We made the big butterfly print blocks and the small butterflies and flower shapes came from a stick on set of bits in the children's craft sectin at Tesco.

I feel . . .

. . . another study in red and green coming on!

The strawberry harvest looks very promising at the moment in spite of a lack of rain here on the east Dorset coast!

Seen in our garden pond . . .

. . . this afternoon.

In der Konditorei . . .

. . . ein Stück Schokoladetorte, bitte. DD3 was in Munich last week and took this photo of cakes in a coffee shop where she went for breakfast one day. I said, surely not chocolate gateau for breakfast and she said, no, they had had more normal breakfast stuff!

Swallowtail . . .

. . . butterfly, photo taken by dd3 in the mountains in the south of Germany a couple of days ago.

Introducing fabric . . .

. . . . at last.  Having stuck with paper and card up to now for making book covers I have started experimenting with fabric in some form.  What has held me back from this is wondering what glue to use and how to make the holes needed for attaching signatures and covers.  This one has 2 panels of free machine embroidery using a sandwich of foundation fabric, bits and pieces and organza .  I then stuck a piece of card, which itself was backed with painted paper, on the back with PVA glue.  Then i poked measured holes all round the edge, and worked buttonhole stitch with perlé threads

Then I worked buttonhole again with a finer thread, putting beads on.  I then stitched the whole book together in the coptic style, with a lot of rows of the little chain stitches you get when linking back to the previous signature.

Then finally the bead dangles were made and attached.

This one has a piece of free machined sandwich, backing, wadding, bits and organza, cut to the size needed to cover signatures 1/4 A4.  I put 5 signatures in, with a separate thread for each, starting and ending at the top, then tied the ends in a couple of knots to form a tassel.  Then wove through the long stitches.

You can't see the colours in the cover well in these photos, but the threads pick out 2 of them, the pinks and green.

This one is different again.  Using up thread leftovers i worked running stitch through 2 layers - a wadding and a piece of cotton coloured with watercolour pencils.  Edges were oversewn, and a piece of card stuck on the back.  The book was then stitched together in the coptic style.  Two bits of twisted cord were stitched to the covers and tied in a bow to close.  It is another small. 1/4 A4 size book.

Finishing off

Books that i had in various states of unfinishedness during the classes i've been running, have now been completed. One with pages half A5 folded, with painted paper stuck to card covers, longstitch binding over ribbons, and a large silver brad to wind a cord round for a closure.

Longstitch again, with the long stitches linked into each other to form a herringbone stitch effect.  As usual the cover is cereal packet with oil pastels, and in this case, a wash of coloured inks over.

While painting the cover, instead of washing leftover colour from the brush I painted it out onto a sheet of paper.  This was then torn up to form the outer folio of three of the signatures (the pages in this book are one third A4).  I like the look of the coloured pages here and there in the book.

Another painted paper stuck to card cover and stitching over tapes, in this case plain white cotton tape painted to go with the book.  The lesson to be learned with this one was not to leave the covers in the hot sun, even though they had been left to dry under weights, because they bent a bit.