textile seahorse: now available at incube8r!

i am thrilled to the gills to be able to tell you that i have an artist's space at the in.cube8r gallery in smith street fitzroy. Kind Dog prodded and reminded and generally enabled the process - making business cards and an artist's blurb thing for me and helping me organise and set up the cube.

at the moment i have a glass cube in the front window and am on the waiting list for some wall space.

2 of my pieces are for sale at in.cube8r:

rose window supernova 
30x39cm $225AUD

not broken
28x37cm $185AUD  

dryad's blanket

 i finally made a start on my dryad's blanket. i am doing dijanne cevaal's online traveller's blanket course and have found it hard to get the concept right for my blanket.

i decided early on that i wanted it to be a dryad's blanket and i would have three panels - the middle is cotton muslin dyed with procion dyes and the two side panels are green silk chiffon (the truer colours are the pinned photos, the stitched photos are bit too yellow). but i struggled for ages to find a theme for the piece - it's supposed to be a repository of traveller's tales and reminiscences but i couldn't catch my story -

until yesterday when i was pinning the layers - the pieced top over black prefelt and fine black silk cotton. the pins reminded me of stars and the  it struck me that the blanket could be a map as well as a collections of trophies, amulets and scraps of memory.

so my first layer of stitching is to embroider seven silver spirals to map the Pleiades.

light and shadow: heart reflections

here is my piece for the international quilt challenge 'light and shadow' theme. it's called heart reflections and is a little bigger than A4

wool/hemp; silk organza; hemp linen and plastic transparency. stitched, then sprayed with ink and finger painted with red and turquoise fabric paint.

and fiendishly difficult to photograph!

light and shadow challenge

'light and shadow' is the theme of the international quilt challenge  for september. after a number of damp squibs, i finally had a rush of blood to the head and finished mine in an hour this afternoon. i can't show you the whole thing until this friday but can show you a few glimpses of the work in progress.

 and i can show you another work in progress - another sea themed piece

 and today's prize acquisition - a reel of plumber's hemp! the chap in the shop it was the first one had had sold since he had started working there (presumably sometime after Armistice Day)

slack

i have been a slack blogger and even slacker artiste. little progress has been made on my traveller's blanket but it is evolving in my mind.  and no progress has been made on my challenge piece.

on the other hand i had a birthday last week and Kind Dog gave me this most beautiful ring (and matching earrings)

the house is full of spring flowers

and i had messy play this afternoon making paper with lots of silk in it

 and this afternoon we strolled down to alice's bookshop in rathdowne st and picked up a few gems viz.