Happy Birthday Rohan!

I belong to a group called Stitched Together, who all met at College when studying Art and design in the late 1990s. Since finishing our course we have been meeting almost every month and every second year we mount an exhibition, we have had 3. In the alternate year we set some sort of challege to work on instead. This year we have each chosen an artist, and each person in the group is to make an A5 piece reflecting the work of the artist chosen for that month. The artist chosen for this month is Australian book illustrator Graeme Base. This is my piece from his book The Discovery of Dragons.

My little Grandson Rohan turns one on Saturday and I have been busy making him a special Birthday book. It has photos of all the family in it, each one transferred to textile and appliqued onto commercial printed fabric with pictures relevant to the family member on it. It has been a lot of fun to make, especially choosing just the right fabric for each aunt, uncle, cousin, grandparent and parent, not to mention the dog!

Today was the hottest day ever recorded in Melbourne. It reached 46.4C and outside in the garden it felt like a blast furnace with the howling northerly winds and searing heat. There are fires burning out of control around the state and the loss of property, bushland and wildlife is horrific. Fortunately there have been no loss of life..........yet!

We are fortunate in the city suburbs that all we have to complain about is the loss of our gardens and the personal discomfort of such extraordinary weather.

Garden Series 1.

Well, it's finished, the first of the garden series. It's very much a copy of the photo as you can see, but I got the distinct impression that the woman commissioning the embroideries was not an abstract kind of person.