Empress Wu Designs with Wilma

 A few years ago, I began scheduling into my day, the routine of a daily art practice.... seven years later, I still love #the100dayproject and am a strong advocate of "create something, anything, every day" .  In more recent years, I haven't been content with a mere 100 days and have often pursued shorter /or longer projects requiring some daily attention. For example, I completed 145 days of slow stitching my garden and then another 60 day random cross stitch garden.... but that's a digression....  This month, I am being far more practical... I still like to send and give Christmas cards, but am always getting them in the post very late, and trying to make some  special unique cards  for the family the night before.... so all this month, I am making Christmas cards - just one a day. By 30 November, I should have some to choose from for posting within Australia and for giving in December.  Here are my first 4 days ....  If you're wondering why bother ...

"How does your garden grow with stitch?" is an update on a post I published way back in 2015, when I stitched my first "impressionist garden" for a course I was studying at the Embroiderers' Guild.  Gardens are my constant inspiration for my artwork, and I create gardens in cloth  and stitch repetitively, using many different techniques. I am particularly fond of this heavily stitched embroidered "impressionist" garden.  In 2016, I stitched two small gardens in this style for an exhibition and they included photos of  my husband's grandmother and her brother and sister as children. Although the collector who bought these two works did not know our family, the children reminded him of his own family from England of about the same era. These two 'gardens'   have become my "stitch" reference and images which best showcase the technique although I don't have the originals any more.   Since then,  quite a few other gardens have gro...

  Wrapped wire and fabric bilby sculpture : Wilma Simmons 2016  Over the years I have been fascinated with the plight of the bilby and it has inspired quite a few of my cloth creations... With long pinkish-coloured ears and silky, blue-grey fur, the Bilby has become Australia’s version of the Easter Bunny. Unlike the rabbit, bilby numbers are falling rapidly. There were originally two species but the Greater Bilby is now commonly referred to simply as ‘the Bilby’ as the Lesser Bilby (Macrotis leucura) is thought to have become extinct in the early 1950s... Bilbies are nocturnal, emerging after dark to forage for food. Using their long snouts, they dig out bulbs, tubers, spiders, termites, witchetty grubs and fungi. They use their tongues to lick up grass seeds. Bilbies have poor sight and rely on good hearing and a keen sense of smell. To minimise threats from predators they’ll mostly stay within 250m of their burrows, but sometimes roam further afield depending on the food...

  At Tag Tuesday . Pinky O' Hagan is hosting a tag challenge which  asks for 'a bit of pink".... not so difficult if you like pink.  I don't use a lot of pink in my work, so it was quite a bit of a challenge when I thought only of pink - my thoughts went to pink roses, pink hearts, pink confectionery !!!  Then I referred to this week's colour prompts, #coloricombo by artists Este MacLeod.... pink with sap green, dark tea, and sea green. I'm not sure I got the colours in this palette exactly, but here is my tag, a stylised landscape  -  The collaged background of the tag has torn pieces of watercolour art rejects, painted magazine pages and a little bit of gift paper. The tree silhouette is decorated with paper  dots, cut with a hole puncher. 

  I couldn't have hoped for a more suitable theme set for this fortnight's Tag Tuesday ..... "Add a Postage Stamp". I often use postage stamps in my collage work, and I admit I really enjoy working with these miniature artworks.  The two stamps I've chosen for this exercise are both Australian.   The first one depicting a white tailed kingfisher is from a 1980 issue and this series is amongst my favourite "bird" series. The second is from an Australian animal series issued in 2019  .... who doesn't love a wombat?  The tags are both paper collages - with some stitching and  in the second, I stitched a real dried eucalypt leaf. And just to add a but of interest, I also decorated the backs of the tags, complementing the theme on the front.  I hope you enjoy this glimpse of  the natural world in Australia... 

Days 5 & 7 - the Gold Rush Era Stamp Series   It seems so long ago now since we were celebrating Christmas and New Year.... hope you enjoyed a great festive season. I took some time out, not doing much at all but I did set myself a little challenge of doing some tidying up which meant spending a little time each day using scraps of fabric and paper  to create something a little playful or as the mood took, useful!  Unlike the long projects I usually undertake, this was a 12 day project ( 12 days of Christmas ) - completely random, but finishing half done projects or recycling.  For example the first photo shows some collages  I did on days 5 and 7 to use a postage stamp release, the Gold Rush Era series, first issued in Australia 1981 ... yes I probably have had it in my stash since then!   Completing some other little projects was very satisfying .... On Day 1, I assembled a folded  paper folk cube from a kit my daughter gifted to me las...