Waiting

While I'm waiting for summer to come back I've been inside fiddling with paints and fabric.  This also involves lots of waiting - waiting for crackle glaze to crackle, waiting for rusting powder to go rusty, waiting for paints to dry etc etc.  The trouble is that while I'm waiting for one thing I start something else and totally forget about the first thing, hence I currently have many half finished projects and a lot of mess!  Guess that's my random brain again!

I've also been waiting to have some time to join in with Gina's sketchbook project, and I've managed to start!  The challenge was to use one main colour and things close to home.  I chose purple, and flowers - obviously!

 

After preparing the background, (I used brusho, rather than watercolour, and clingfilm) I cut out a template of a fuchsia and rubbed round it with white oil pastel and then painted inside.  I then tried using markal paint sticks as well as adding pencil details.  I like the shapes that come from cutting away the page to reveal some of the next.
I also really like the shading that's left on the template!

I didn't do so well with the next bit - using a potato to print with.  I changed my shape to an aquilegia seed head (as the fuchsia was too big for my potato!) and think I got too fiddly.  I quite like them when there's hardly any paint on them though.  This is the area I've picked to enlarge (the next task):

I will show you more, but you'll have to wait as I got side tracked - again!

Seed Head Inspiration (2)

The weather has been very grey here today so I thought I'd share some more colour with you in the form of my other textile creation inspired by seedheads.

 Poppies on Garden Fleece (click to see the detail)

 The poppies on the top layer (made from garden fleece!) were formed by stencilling on gesso and then painting the whole layer with fabric paint.  It was then machine stitched onto the bottom layer of painted pelmet vilene (which had more poppies stencilled on with oil paint sticks).  Free motion stitching with sparkly metallic thread is not something I've cracked yet, and I shouted at it many times as it jammed and snapped and missed stitches etc!  After all that I got the heat gun out and blasted it - the fleece disintegrates VERY quickly!  Finally I distressed the edges (I don't like straight lines) with the solder iron.

Well, if nothing else, it livens up a dull day when even I won't venture into the garden!

Seed Head Inspiration (1)

Back in the summer Gina posted a series of blogs about a Sketchbook project (click here to see them all), and I had a go at doing alot of her ideas,  (I loved painting with ink and uncooked spaghetti!).  A few weeks ago I decided to experiment further with the stencil I'd made of a poppy seedhead, and stencilled with extra heavy gesso onto tyvek paper.  When it was dry I free-motion embroidered around the gesso and randomly across the tyvek.  Then I blasted it all with a heat gun, painted it with black writing ink, bleached it, and painted over the gessoed area with a gold markal paint stick.  Finally I highlighted areas with treasure gold (a purchase from the Knitting and Stitching Show last month) and mounted it on painted pelmet vilene.

 (To see the detail you'll need to click on the image to enlarge it)

I love how tyvek does its own thing, and how the gesso and stitching goes someway to controlling it, but not totally.  (I'll let you see how I used the same stencil with garden fleece another time!)