The Project - an update

Having foolishly said i would attempt to do one embroidery a week i promptly put the project down and have done very little on it. I am working on the next image now....but it could be a long time before there are any results.......

following are some of the ones i have finished (almost) so far:

the girls from the street fashion parade in Reykjavik, tidied up

the next ones are from my photos from the Senckenberg (Naturmuseum Senckenberg) in Frankfurt: hello Karen! Hello Stella!

A couple of very good looking beetles from the insect display and the top image is a wonderful dinosaur from the gallery

I've done these embroideries on off white silk organza with black thread

And now we get onto my first tries at the Icelandic part of the story: some of the gorgeous flowers growing along the canyon edge at Dettifoss. two different versions trialling the leaf contribution.......not sure which one i prefer......i might have to do one with no leaves at all, just the daisies scattered

YET More things abstract & truely psychadelic

You know how it goes......you see something AMAZING and reach for the camera, only to find that you forgot to charge it the night before.........i got less than 10 shots before my good camera battery gave up. Then the only other option was the fairly crumby work camera of the point-n-shoot variety..........sigh.........

i was heading back to Sydney from Mudgee (lovely Mudgee) early one spring morning. It was foggy. And i decided to have a quick peek at Lake Windemere just in case there might be a good water-and-fog opportunity. Got more than i bargained for as there was an algal bloom happening and all the scum was lapping up against the shore and disappearing off into the fog. I couldn't take any successful distance shots due to the misty atmosphere, so i had to teeter along the steep lake edge without putting my foot in it. the mist has muted the photos a bit, but you will get an idea from these:

yeah, WOW, but not so sure how the hat got stranded in the shrub.......
i'll put some on the flickr site for your enjoyment

A visit to Merlene's Fibre shop

Merlene has her wonderful shop in Barraba,

 (1 hr NW of Tamworth on the Fossicker's Way). She grows the sheep, spins the wool and then dyes it with natural materials. THEN if she has time left over she knits-up wonderful things, along with 4 other ladies. Jumpers to die for......in delicious earthy tones. The bright pink-magenta hank showing in the photos below is from lichen collected on her farm. The blue from chlorophyll. And most of the other colours are from onion skins and eucalyptus varieties........
(Rhonda & I will be doing some more experiments this weekend using leaves and bark from my favourite tree,  E. sideroxylon (mugga ironbark), and some lichen Merlene gave me!)

 The hands of Merlene demonstrating a simple spinning technique using a bent coathanger. Nifty, and it almost has got me interested in doing it myself........but where to find the time?????

and a couple of shots inside the shop

lovely lovely lovely fibres

a treasure trove of inspiration

Find it in Barraba, on the main street and enjoy

and now a gratuitous shot of gorgeous icelandic sheep - a mother and her teenagers looking exactly the same

these sheep are so funny to see, they love to be outdoors and hate round-up time. they come in an amazing array of colours too.

tatty-cardie project

 This is an update on the recycling of my dad's tatty cardies........a full-circle project

                                                                                    knitted by mum

                                                                                    worn to tatters by dad
                                                                                    felted ,chopped and rebuilt by me for mum

So this gives you an idea of how my dad wore his at-home comfortable clothes. This was actually the only before shot, of a dark brown cardie that didn't felt very well as it was washable wool......his at-home shoes matched as well! held together by bits of string.......

On the play-day i just cut up the cardies: the dark royal blue into strips and the 2 beige and 2 brown into blocks and started to piece the bits together......

and finally (with some assistance by Nikki) i arrived at:

so now i am in the process of the stitching it together. people seem to like the effect of the large tacking (just see-able as the lime green). Mum was doubtful at the start of the project whether she would like it, but now she is pleased and will use it as a throw at her new abode-in-the-mountains.

and here is the update on the eco-dyeing project where i pleated bus-sticks into the silk and buried it in compost for two weeks (actually in a plastic box on my hot dashoard that got so hot the plastic box started to melt one day....)

maybe less than two weeks for the next trial........the silk is shredded and very fragile, but the colours and textures are lovely

some images on flickr

a bit of self -promotion......i've loaded some more pictures on my flicker site for you to look at

https://www.flickr.com/photos/alicole-sydney/

but not this one....taken somewhere in the west fjords.... travelling at not quite 80km/hour.......

a play day

it  finally happenned: A & R had planned to get down to some dyeing experimenting for a looooong time and on saturday we got down to business! G joined in.

We used 4 different dyes as our first adventure:

              1 red onion skins - simmered

2 coffee - simmered

  3 avacado - simmered

                                                             4 chlorophyll (a gift from Merlene, of the Fibre shop in Barraba. A plug for a wonderful lady and an inspiring shop in a small country town nw of Tamworth. 'Do yourself a favour.....')

mordant: alum

R worked with a few different silks and produced some wonderful pieces:

but the best one came out at the end of the evening:

don't know why it comes out sideways - all the others are right way up!

this silk was done in red onion with the spinner gum leaves laid in it, rolled up and then tied with string. 6 hrs in the hot dye bath. the blue sample next to it is the chlorophyll - an intense blue on silk! a sky blue on G's cotton pieces.

I worked with wool samples as i want to dye some larger quantities of 1 ply to get shades of more natural colours than the ones in the shops which are all either strongly variegated or strong plain colours:

my samples ready to pop into the dye baths

i forgot to take pictures of the results - next time!

the coffee came out quite pale; the onion came out lovely shades of limey olive green. both darker if left in longer......

greta doing some drawing practice

 

    

and then my other experiment using the 'bus-sticks' i've been collecting. they are small thin straight pieces of steel that i find on the roads around Sydney.....

i've packed the piece in wet mulch in a plastic box and i am keeping it on my car dash in the hot sun for a month to see what happens

More things abstract & almost psychadelic

Opportunities to photograph these wonderful ever-changing pits of earthy mush are becoming rare as the environmental standards are becoming tighter. These days it is more usual to use large removable tanks so you don't get to see the recycling drilling mud in all its glory. Here are some recent shots from where i was working in Queensland. These pits were only recycled water with no drilling muds added and it's the ground up rock that creates the wonderful froth and colours (metallic in the case of the very fine bright coal). Enjoy, (i certainly did, taking an awful lot of photos in between core runs .....every core run made a different effect in the pits.) And don't mention the cows.........