First Wildflowers of the Season.

 Usually the first wildflower to appear, the Hardenbergia is just lovely with its profusion of purple flowers. A white version is also available in the nurseries, but although pretty, it's just not the correct original wild colour.

         A little rosette of a Honeydew plant hugging the ground. No flowers just yet though.

                     The Yellow Star flower with it's plants dotted all around the open ground.

Shadow-Wings.

Now that the exhibition is up and running I can show my completed piece which I called 'Shadow-Wings'. Here you can see the shadows formed on the back of the piece behind the acetate sheet on which are mounted the textile components. Unfortunately at the exhibition it is hung in a darkish corner and there are no shadows to be seen! However, the piece did win a Highly Commended certificate in spite of the lack of shadows.

Country Letter Boxes.

 Sixteen years ago when I first started driving past these letterboxes, there were only 3 of them, including the Singer treadle machine base one. Now there are 8, and the old Singer base is still there.

    I think that the box on top of the old wrought iron base is an old munitions box perhaps.

                         The whole contraption is slowly sinking into the leaf litter and soil.

I wonder what Mr. Singer would have thought of using one of his wonderful old treadle  machine bases for this purpose.

A Chilly Morning.

                  After a very cold night the fog hung about for quite a while in this area.

I'm so glad that the powers that be haven't put in concrete footpaths on both sides of the road, it gives a lovely rural feeling to walk on the grass under the trees.

Final Book Post!

 This is an old bit of applique and embroidery that has been sitting around for ages. It's a little bit of machine embroidery for the sunflowers and the leaves and a little bit of iron-on silk stencil for the butterflies. It will make a good end 'paper' for the book cover and use up another left-over.

 The cover is finished! Here the back flap is folded over to show the outside and the inside front cover. If you look closely you can see that the butterflies now have bodies and antennae.

                                              The front cover all top stitched and finished.

Book Cover Continues.

 The cover for the handmade book is in a wrap around style, hence the long narrow format. The cover is lined and for that I have chosen a piece of hand dyed fabric in blues and purples.

This section will be the inside of the front cover, so I rummaged around and found 3 silk butterflies that I made many years ago. They don't actually have bodies as yet, so now that they have been bonded to the dyed cotton I can machine embroider their bodies and antennae.

More Colour Mysteries.

 The photo above was taken on a wooden table top and the colours are really blue, whereas the one below, taken on a black cloth is a lot closer to the mauve/purple of the real piece ...most interesting.

 I have joined the strips of flower stamp squares with a sashing of my hand dyed fabric in a purple colour. I did measure everything, but even so it's a surprise that the whole thing is exactly the size that I wanted it to be!

Book Cover.

Having made a paper template, I can see that I have enough squares to make the book cover. It's now a matter of carful placement to avoid having similar ones together.  Unfortunately this photo shows them all either pink or blue, when in fact they are shades of mauve. No matter what I do I just can't get an accurate colour range in a photo.

Colour Variation.

 The colours of today's photos are really odd, very pink! I set out to print some of the little 3 inch squares onto fabric, starting with an old piece of cotton that I had treated with Bubble Jet set some years ago. There result above is awful, too pale, too pink and too blurry. Maybe it has a shelf life!

 Here I've tried the same photo on commercially prepared fabric for printing, so much better, but still much too pink. After lots of manipulation in Photoshop I just couldn't get the colour range that I wanted, so I went ahead and printed several sheets anyway.

 Here I've used the darker print in the middle and the paler versions of each one around the sides.

The one in the middle of the left hand vertical row was done in reverse by mistake, never mind, it adds to the variety. These will eventually be used for a book cover, so not too many to make over all.

Centimetres and Inches.

 I scanned in my recently made flower stamps and turned them into all the Photoshop brushes that I needed. I wanted them all to be squares for a particular project, but I got confused and made them all 4 cm squares instead of inches!

 I then had to resize them all and as I did so I decided to make them smaller anyway, just 3 inches square. I also found that I didn't have enough of my own hand carved stamps. so I used a few brushes that I had made from actual flowers and leaves as well.

 I wanted all the squares to be of a similar colour, although a few have turned out a bit pinker than I planned.

 I want to print them all onto fabric which will change the colour anyway, so I'll need to do a bit of experimentation.

Melon Magic.

 In the supermarket this morning I spotted a display of Rock Melons that looked a little different to the usual melons. The patterning on the skin was amazing, but try as I might I could detect no smell of ripe melon. I would have bought one had they been ripe, but having decided not to by one I settled for taking photos instead.

 No one asked me what on earth I was doing, so I snapped away happily at the most interesting skins.

I don't use a phone camera at all, so I was glad that I had my Panasonic Lumix safely in my hand bag as usual.

Stamp Play.

Having made quite a lot of hand carved stamps recently, I decided to scan copies into Photoshop and to make 'brushes' from them. This is just a fun little garden using the Photoshop brushes that I made.

Salt Dyeing.

 While I was away with a group of stitching friends last week we tried out some salt dyeing using Genesis Liquid Radiance Dyes. Here  These  dyes which are made in Australia, don't need a soda ash pre-soak  and are very easy to use. The techniques used in these samples,( not mine unfortunately), are variations on using salt and various forms of scrunching and folding. The one above used a trail of fine salt crystals to make the curving pattern.

 This flame like piece was made by wrapping the cloth around a thick cord and dyeing into the folds.

                                 Another piece with random placement of rock salt crystals.

            Again fine salt was used and the fabric was folded and the edges dyed in the pink colour.

                                                 Larger salt crystals and folding used here.
                             A whole day spent exploring the use of dyes and salt, what a luxury!

Four New Stamps.

Having spent a few days away from home, I managed to find time to carve some new stamps for an on going project. The flower on the left is a sort of Chrysanthemum, but the leaves are more imaginary. The flower and leaf on the right are carved with the actual Passion flower and leaf right in front of me. The leaf turned out well with it's wrinkly edges but the pistol of the flower is a little too big for the petals. Not to worry, I'll use it anyway!

More Birds.

            This Wattle bird was enjoying the nectar from the newly blooming Japonica flowers.

 These King Parrots were enjoying a little bit of seed on the deck while being closely watched by 2 Crimson Rosellas. The male birds have the red heads and bodies and the females only have the red trousers.

Another visitor to the Warburton deck was this young Kookaburra who was quite happy to take cheese from an outstretched hand, while the adult bird was a little wary and stayed in the nearby tree.