The travelling book collective

A couple of months ago I signed on to made. creative space's Journal Project and have been lucky enough to convince three other artists to collaborate with me on this via the post.  Tonight, I've finished my section of the book and over the weekend I will be bundling it up with some bits and pieces and sending it on to Joeli Art in Melbourne.

Here's the itinery:

And here's some process:

Getting back into stitchery at Toowoomba Brown Owls in May (it's a brain)

Heart, eye, brain, hand

The book

Completed cut-outs

Page one of finished work

Page two. As you may observe, I wasn't precious with lining up the cut-outs.

Pages warping, book out of shape.

Fortunately, this passport-sized journal fits comfortably in a flower press

Tonight this book will remain in the flower press, the recent wet weather has actually left the whole book feeling....softer? The pages were warping/curling from the damp air and applied glue.

My leg of this collective project has been both trying and rewarding. I have learnt from experimenting with different media during creation and in the process of putting it together at the end. On Monday, it leaves my hands to continue being manipulated in unforseen ways. Exciting.

Put an arachnid on it.

Sometimes things are very beautiful but they are also very... not boring (never boring!), but less interesting than they could be. This post was originally titled Put a skull on it as I had initally planned to hop on board the candyskull train to Kitsch Town, but I couldn't find any pictures of skulls that grabbed my attention. That's on the backburner currently.

Note how mean the bedbug looks. 

Anyway, this image of ticks did. And so, I have begun to use it in a small amount of embroidery, namely, this purse. A Pimp my Wallet, except the wallet won't cost thousands of dollars (that I obviously couldn't afford in the first place) for upkeep.

Side view.

.... top view?

Ingredients clockwise from left: diagram, tracing, carbon paper, scissors, sharpener, pencil, thread, quick-unpick, wallet.

First tick.

Placed fairly haphazardly, like actual ticks.

Tick break during lantern time.

I am still tossing up on whether or not to continue the tick pattern around to the other side of the wallet, and a final number of ticks. Also, I now need to find something to do some bedbugs on. I can hear the ghosts of puns past; "OOOOooooOOOoooo say something about a mean bedbug problem in the title of it wOOOOoooOOO...."

And I'll consider it.

In the interim...

It's been awhile. I have some study commitments, and like most, have to hold down 'a real job'. Fortunately, it's one I love, and I'm learning new things every day.

I haven't stopped though, just slowed to a crawl. Here's what I have been up to in the meantime:

150+ mushrooms, slowly, slowly.

So, I have talked about this one before:

I have done a couple more, and here they are in order of production:

Those ones have been created on some hand-me-down cross stitch material I have had lying around the house for years. Now, I am starting to think about what else I can cross stitch on. It just needs a clearly defined and evenly spaced weft and weave, right?



Raffia placemat from the best op shop I know (you know who you are) 

And to top it all off, I am expanding my stitch repertoire:



Stitch types: Long stitch, back stitch, running stitch, cross stitch

 


Trying to be artsy with the detail.

So there you go. Works in progress and recent experiments. I have also been delving into macrame, and wearable art. More on those later.

Crafternoon, July.

Every afternoon this last week has been a crafternoon, and it has been fabulous.

After finishing a major work, I was having trouble starting anything else. That was fear of commitment, and a fear of the ol' blank canvas. How about some low-key, minimal risk pieces to increase my confidence, and re-focus?

Back to some kind of drawing board...

Here are a pile of my favourite books, depending on the subject...today's search was 'cross stitch', so we have Beeton's Book of Needlework (1870), Goldenhands no. 3 (1972), Best of Handmade by both Woman's Day and Woman's Weekly (1974 & 1991), and a book on calligraphy. I want to do some things with words.

Can you read this? So far, it says 'Pubic hair' 

So far in cross-stitching, I have discovered about myself one new thing; stitching the words adds weight to the statement. As a reader, and a wishful member of the intelligentsia, I can use words liberally to express meaning, and verbosity can be an issue. If you are going to spend 5 minutes picking out each letter in tiny stitches, what is said needs to mean something, at least to yourself.

For my first stitchery, I chose the phrase 'Pubic hair is normal'... There were other contenders, but when looking through one of the Best of Handmades I found a 'delightful monthly floral calendar' to stitch, and one of the flowers was the Thysanotus, commonly known as the 'Fringed Lilly'. Double entendre, anyone?

Left to right: the plan, the work, and the book I sourced the plan from.

Close-up

The studio space, i.e. the floor directly in front of the couch.

Nearly there....

Done! Now I just have to finish it off...

Altogether, this took a couple of hours an afternoon, for four afternoons in a row. I think this was a good way to end this visual version of writers' block. I have a bunch of new ideas, and a new way of making.