Empress Wu Designs with Wilma

 A small selection of pin poems from the collection #the100dayproject have been released for sale on ETSY ....  Link to my Etsy shop :  https://www.etsy.com/shop/empresswu Link to #the100day project:  https://www.flickr.com/photos/empresswu/albums/72157713803669781

Stitching a 'garden' background - Wilma Simmons  Using gardens as inspiration for art is long established practice in the fine arts, including textile arts. Monet's painting are amongst my favourite artworks and there is no shortage of  treatises about the gardens in art.    https://www.booktopia.com.au/monet-s-garden-in-art-debra-n-mancoff/book/ Some of my favourite textile artists ( like Anne Kelly) turn to gardens as a source of unending inspiration.  https://www.textileartist.org/small-worlds-recycled-textile-art-by-anne-kelly In a considerably more humble way, I have recently been featuring plants from our garden in my small wearable art pin series for #the100dayproject. Although we are in the winter phase of the garden where the colour palette is a more subdued, there are still some beautifully bright flowers, like the purple black eyed African daisies, late summer marigolds, tiny native violets and their potted cousins, violas. Even the p...

Thu Jun 11th, 2020 Yarn Bombing Day ·            ·            ·            Pearl one, drop one? Yarn Bombing Day is a day when fibre lovers all over the world go a bit crazy and ensconce everyday objects in woolly patterns. It is sometimes called yarn storming or guerilla knitting.  from ABC Newcastle  No matter what you call it, it is simply the practice of knitted  or crocheted works of art being added to public places.   For example some sort of colourful knitted pattern and wrap it around a bus stop. The aim of this practice was to try and take knitting from something that was viewed as merely for creating clothes and hats to something that could add meaning and colour to urban locations.  It’s not like standard graffiti where the point is to mark your territory. It’s also definitely not an act of v...

Chameleon rose from my garden.  The answer to "where is beauty?" seems  easy .... beauty is  all around us, but do we all see the same beauty ?  There is a Chinese saying, "Flowers look different to different eyes" Yes, we've all heard that before ..."Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."  Contemporary artists worldwide often challenge our notion of beauty and many celebrate the ordinary and the familiar, making comment on daily rituals and consumer items.  None of this is very surprising since early man recorded every day life in cave paintings  and it has been happening in the art world ever since.  Up until 1960s, household items often appeared in still life paintings, but it was the contemporary pop art movement where artists sought out the commonplace to elevate artistically. What could be more "everyday" than Andy Warhol's iconic Campbell Soup Tins ?  https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/andy-warhol-campbells-...

For all of us, being close to home is not an option currently. There are many positive ways to think of being close to home -  one, of course, is to find inspiration and make art . Recently, probably in the last few years, the sights and sounds in my neighbourhood have provided me with enough material for a lifetime of art making.... and I don't live in a magical place, just a simple ordinary  residential suburb in a regional city in NSW,  near some dedicated bushland, walking tracks, a village shopping centre and a hospital.  On daily walks in the neighbourhood, I have picked up sticks from the ground to make hundreds of "stick" dolls,  fallen leaves to dye and print cloth and paper, flowers and other plant bits  for  various artworks.  I am very grateful to have so much to work from so close to home and as I complete my second #the100day project - 100 small wearable art pins, I have tried to find a new way each day of express...

When I heard the theme for Tag Tuesday this fortnight is "Haberdashery", I rummaged in my sewing drawer to look for "vintage" items of haberdashery which I knew I had in my stash. I was particularly happy and surprised to find a number of cards of press studs, buttons and hooks and eyes. These brought back such great memories of the haberdashery shops which I used to frequent years ago when we lived in small country towns. They seemed to stock whatever you needed. You can tell the age of some of these items in my "habbie" stash as Australia changed to decimal currency on 14 February 1966, and the button card quotes a price of 1/3d...  As I have been making little wearable pins for #the100dayproject, accompanied by a haiku, I thought that Day 30 had to be about haberdashery ... hence my tag within a tag for Tag Tuesday....  "Just a word recalls Sewing notions long since used:  Haberdashery"  This is a cloth /mixed media collage with...

During the last week,  I think my #100pinpoems have taken a definite turn towards the more abstract. There have been a couple of days when I was prompted to convey a more direct representation of a moment in the day , but generally, I have moved towards stitching and collaging in a more impressionistic way. For example, on day 22, I tried to convey the feeling of waking up early for a Zoom meeting.... and ended up with what looks like sound waves representing electronic communication ( not the sound of me snoring through the meeting!)  "Alarm too early Sleepy nods in agreement  Meeting via Zoom."   stitched wearable art pin   stitched wearable art pin  Some of the tags although abstract, describe actual occurrences ....  Day 23 : I watched rainbow lorikeets flying into our garden to land on some tall grevilleas... I reproduced only their colour and a stitches a sense of the quick movement.  When they open ...