2 exhibitions and a Christmas card

Just to confirm I'm still in Blogland, but have been soooo...... busy for the last few weeks that I just haven't had any time to post and barely any time to read anyone else's.


The Allen Gallery, Alton, Hants


The Forestry Commission, Hants

I've been involved in staging 2 exhibitions, one with a friend and the other with my OH and another friend.



Plus my DD2 saw a couple of PC's that I'd made with some of her left over fabric from the baby slings, one of which you can see the method of contstruction for on the CG blog here, and promptly commissioned me to make her business Christmas cards for Connecta, so as you can imagine my feet haven't touched the ground.

We also had DD3 and her baby son to stay this week as she's having her bathroom and kitchen gutted at home, so I'm afriad our latest GS who is now 9 months old was rather a delightful distraction.

We're off to see DS1 and his DF this w\e so after a lovely chill out I hope to be back to normal next week :-)

A sunshine walk in the woods

Because the weather has been so awful for the past couple of weeks I thought I'd post up a lovely walk we had a few weeks ago at
our local Arboretum where we were greeted with this wonderful array of Autumn colours, in the sunshine!!!!!



Everywhere we looked there were these lovely reds that turned into golden oranges.



And just by way of a change orange into green.





And this collection almost had it all.



On our way in we saw these great sculptures



We did venture out to look for more Autumn colour on Sunday but although the colour was there the light wasn't, but I did manage to get this moody shot by boosting my camera to shoot in vivid colour.



So I had to content myself with collecting leaves for my next silk papers.

Final piece 2

Many thanks to everyone who gave me their input on the previous post. With yours, my tutor's and of course my OH's help I have finally managed to start getting somewhere with the piece.

As I knew I would I chose a comlpetely different design, but it was similar to the last one that I posted on the previous post.



This was largely due to my OH's input as he suggested that if I duplicated the image and flipped it, it would look like a cave, with a waterfall running down. The RH portion of this image has been stretched to fit the left and that's what gave me the waterfall look. I tried all sots of connotaions with this idea and finally came up with a rather 'heavy' result.



While I was thinking about what to do next I decided to get on with the part I did like, the cave, so I printed this directly onto PFD cotton, having first increased the saturation on the image to +10. I'd run out of Bubblejet 2000, so I thought I'd see what I got with no coating and was quite pleased with the slightly muted effect.



I now decided I would FME and quilt the main features, so I made the usual sandwich with wadding and calico. I have to confess that part of the reason for doing this was that I wanted to try out my new Bernina Artista 630 with the BSR (Bernina stitch regulator ) and I can now report that it's fabulous!!!

Partly because I needed to incorporate some fabric manipulation into this piece and partly because I thought it would add something to the textural quality, I bonded some sheer to the 1st and 3rd hanging areas of the design, FME'd it and then put the heat gun on it.



My Oh suggested that I needed more texture and said perhaps I should do some embelishing with wool tops to make it look like rock, impressed eh!! I was!

Anyway, great idea though it was, I decided to go for my favourite French knots and some beads over the LH hanging part, as this already looked a bit volcanic. The third area I worked in running stitch to keep it inkeeping with the original texture, and finfinally I stitched the waterfall area with some fine siver thread, by hand, so as not to loose the depth created by the original machine quilting.





At this stage I was now wondering how to put this into a final hanging and as a last resort I just had a bit of a doodle over the original design in PS and came up with this:



At least this one covers all the critria for the module, I hope. All I have to do now is work out how to do it in fabric.

I think the outside will be dyed silk organza and the hanging pieces could be organza bonded to acrylic felt and the zapped with the soldering iron.

PS sorry about the poor quality pics , but seeing as it hasn't stopped raining for a week they had to be done indoors.