fingers crossed.....

 i think i may have resuscitated this piece

it seemed to have survived the washing and is now a bit more like its old self - you can certainly see more of the layers.

and i threw the rest of my caution to the winds and applied fibre paste, iridescent ink and xpander paint with abandon and my fingers. followed by red stitching and some paint sticks.

challenge woe

or how to fuck up a perfectly good piece of textile art in one easy step....

the next challenge for the arts quilts around the world group is due t be posted on the group blog on thursday.

uncharacteristically i actually  finished my piece a week early. it was  i was happy with it - it fitted the theme of doing sometihing different perfectly and i had tried out a few new techniques - i used sheet music, scrap booking vellum, some paper i had painted a couple of years ago and painted fusible web on a black coton background. all fused together and then some minimal stitching. i sprayed the whole thing with watered down ink and let it mature for a bit.

and then i decided that as some of the components were paper and vellum and already peeling at the edges, that i should seal the piece.  this was a huge mistake. the ink ran. and ran. and ran. instead of layers of colour the whole thing was now black. even kind dog admitted that the piece was only good now as a background.

so i thought of a few options to salvage the wreckage and nearly, nearly left it at that.

but somehow my malign anti-creative demon niggled away at me - perhaps it could be improved by dragging a sea sponge with black gesso across it? so i did. and i made it much much worse. at least before the gessoing you could see some variation in colour underneath the ink smears.

so then i threw caution to the winds and just ran the whole thing under the kitchen tap. and now it's blue.... hopefully when it dries it won't be a uniform blue but still....

the real challenge will be to be able to post something laster this week that is not a complete disaster - wish me luck.

fullest of moons

as has been noted all over the interwebs there is currently an uber full moon: to celebrate, Kind Dog and i decided to go and watch the sunset and the moonrise at the beach down on the west coast - just over an hour's drive away.

point roadknight has some bizarrely beautiful rock formations of different kinds:

 Kind Dog gave a learned disquisition on the provenance of the various rocks and i listened appropriately meekly.

 i did however find out that while Kind Dog is endlessly patient and tolerant of my textile art related quirks, he firmly drew the line at bringing back this splendid but too recently deceased crab. so i have to be content with a photo....

the tide was out

and the beach was surprisingly empty.

we had stopped at the anglesea supermarket and bought a scratch but satisfactory picnic and had impromptu cheese club on the beach. 

after a rather blusterous walk up to the point we sheltered behind the rocks and watched the moon come up. 

 the photos are not as spectacular as the real thing - i used my phone rather than lugging my camera along. as part of the complete world reversal of the last few months, i have been taking fewer and fewer photos - choosing instead to enjoy the moment rather than filter it through a lens. this does make for less interesting blog posts, i'm afraid, but a more interesting life.

a fine romance and an ambition

this is one of my favourite songs and i was very glad to find it on itunes as the old cd (ella and louis again) was lost long long ago. i have been playing it over and over much to the children's annoyance (although i think they prefer it to genesis)

and it made me think that perhaps given the world turned upside down nature of the recent past, that perhaps my best ambition for 2011 is to be a "strong aged in the wood woman"

speaking to ATASDA...

the Victorian Branch of the Australian Textile Artists and Surface Design Association very kindly asked me to come and speak at their monthly meeting last sunday.

even more kindly, Kind Dog made a very schmick but not too shiny powerpoint presentation of my textile art. (and once i work out the byzantine uploading process, i will) in the meantime here are some of the pieces i talked about:

Kind Dog also frogmarched me down to oakleigh (which is on the other side of town from chez seahorse), bought me spine-stiffening coffee and  generally lived up to his nome de blogue.

despite feeling sick with nerves i managed to talk for well over an hour and we lugged enough pieces for people to have a good look at textileseahorsean artistry close up. which made up for the lack of a projector.....

the quilt police didn't turn up and everyone was lovely so thanks neroli and barbara and the committee for asking me to speak - it was a gas..