Moving Right Along.

 Here I've cut the middle out of a stretched canvas panel and painted it black. The strips are narrow bias binding fused to a slightly wider ribbon to give the black strips a white edging. A lot of trial and error here, as the bias was supposed to be self fusing, but to a slightly shiny ribbon, it wasn't. In the end I had to cut strips of  fusible webbing, iron onto the black binding and then try to line it up accurately with the ribbon in order just to show a white edging. Tricky!

This is the first trial of a head of small flowers.  I stitched randomly onto a piece of silk fibre, then used a programmed stitch on my trusty old Pfaff work horse machine. With a variegated thread I sewed lots of flowers onto the  silk which was sandwiched between soluble fabric. Once washed away I have a passable massed flower head. I'm not sure about the colour though.

'Song of the Sax'

         At last I have 4 halfway decent copies which have been safely delivered to their destination.
        It's been a bit of a challenge, but I was determined to realise the image that I had in my mind.

Paste & Paint.

 About a week ago I was playing with a medium made of cornflour, glue and other ingredients to make a thick type of modelling paste that can be coloured and painted onto heavy paper.
http://mycamerandme.blogspot.com.au/2016_03_01_archive.html

 The idea is to sculpt the surface with stamps or anything else to give it texture. After the paper  dries over night, it can be ironed flat (it curls as it dries) and further embellished with rubbed oil sticks or more stamps.

Here I've used a spiral stamp.

 

This is one where I've inverted the colours in Photoshop.

 I think the image now looks like waves and a choppy sea!

A Touch of Gold.

   Here I've added a touch of gold to the gelatine print, and added a frame in Photoshop just for fun.
          The butterfly is actually gold too, but for some reason it's come out white in this version.

Gellatine Plate Layers.

 As the music themed pieces are pretty well finished, I thought that I'd have a bit of a rest from 'perfection' and have a play with the gelatine plate instead.

 I have a box of pressed foliage that I dip into from time to time and these are random prints done in layers with a bit of stamping on top.

                     I'll probably only use bits of each of these, but they are handy to have for cards.

Moving Right Along...

 Well here are 9 more or less O.K pages with the 2 different sized flying saxophones, a few are a bit less than perfect, but I can live with those.

 But below is the next stage, and let me tell you it's been extremely problematic, holes in the screen, blurred printing, too much ink, too little ink, and ink where I don't want it to be.

I only need 4 useable copies, but I'll be very lucky if I get that, bearing in mind that there is one more image to apply in the blank space at the top right of the page. Plenty of room for error unfortunately!

The Next Stage.

Having collected up 9 pages of background notation that are more or less blemish free,  I took courage into both hands and printed the first motif, a small flying saxophone. You might remember that I used the wings from a dead dragonfly to make the image in Photoshop. I'm allowing it all to dry well over night, as I couldn't bear to smudge one of them at this stage, having had quite a challenge to get this far!

Teaching Aids of the Past.

 These incredible botanical specimens are all made of papier mache and come apart to show students of botany the parts of the different types of flowers.

 They were made many, many years ago and are now in a collection held by the University of Melbourne.

Now of course, students would just look up the relevant species of plant on the internet to understand how one flower differs from another. I wonder though if the students from the past got a better understanding of the parts of the flower by being able to take it apart and put it back together again.