Empress Wu Designs with Wilma

I love making little stitched items which are useful but have a touch of whimsy about them....  I don't make them often but I have released this one for sale in my Etsy shop.  The beautiful spring garden colours of this floral print make this little pouch a perfect gift for someone special. The pouch is small but surprisingly roomy - enough space to hold a few keys, money, secrets, or those special little treasures or it can hang as a decorative item on a wall or dressing table . The pouch and lining are made from quality cotton fabric, with a double drawstring and hand stitched fabric beads. The feature of pouch is the folded fabric flower and suffolk puff embellishment, enhanced by the fabric covered button, hand painted face. Size height 10cm/4 ins; Width when closed 5cm/2ins when open 13cm/5ins Contents of pouch pictured  are not included. Free shipping within Australia. 

Black , White and Red - a favourite colour combination! Tag Tuesday has this as its current theme.  Here is my tag .... a stitched face. I use my sewing machine as my drawing implement.... a technique called free motion stitching or free hand machine embroidery. Of course, nothing is symmetrical or perfect but this is quite easy to do. Just lower or cover the feed dogs on your sewing machine, and move the fabric around manually while stitching and so the sewing machine "draws" a line, free hand.  In the photo, the black line is the stitched line - what I try to do is an unbroken line, so often I go over and over the same line to get to the next  section of stitching. When I have finished stitching, I cut around the stitching and attach the face to a prepared painted tag with heat applique. Then, I use Inktense pencils to colour  features and/or shade the face.  In "Spots" I have also appliqued the clothing and the head wear.  'Spots" is the first in ...

Until you spread you wings you have no idea how far you can fly. ... Day 23 of the 29 Faces Art Challenge.... we are on a countdown now with only 5 more days to go! Hope you have been enjoying following my progress this month?

Tag Tuesday's theme is "Spring Flowers", so with the help of a couple of layers of paper serviettes, three paper flowers and some ink and pencil face drawings, voila - Spring flowers which also fulfil today's  commitment to the 29 Faces Art Challenge!  Spring flowers have also appeared on my tags in 29 Faces for the last week, so here they are for Tag Tuesday too. ...  all are ink, pencil and watercolour over the top of scrap painted or collaged paper.

Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, it became a butterfly... Day 21 of the 29 Faces Art Challenge. Today's is an experimental drawing over a metallic painted background....

Something different today - Caterpillar Girl . Day 20  of 29 Faces Art Challenge. . This is a pencil and pen drawing.

Day 19 - 29 Faces Art Challenge ... I am surprising myself that I am still keeping up... Today's is a quick drawing on the remainder of  yesterday's paper serviette.

Day 19  of the 29 Faces Art Challenge.... quite a challenge today, drawing over the top of a painted background covered with a paper serviette.

Day 17 - 29 Faces Art Challenge  - a facea day for February 2017. More red splotches and more flowers.

#29faces - 13 and "Bookworm" for Tag Tuesday: Wilma Simmons  "Killing two birds with one stone" - hope this isn't cheating?  Day 13 of the 29 Faces Art Challenge and Tag Tuesday for the theme "Bookworm"  As you know, the 29 Faces Challenge means creating a face a day... Here is the link to the 29 Faces blog .  There are on this blog 39 participants in this month's challenge,  Tag Tuesday has now changed and anyone can join in  - there is,as usual,  a theme, but there are now two weeks to post a link  on the Tag Tuesday blog.   Hope you will visit and look at the links to many different artistic tags created for  the 'Bookworm" theme . 

Tea on Thursday is becoming Tea on Friday ... but here is number 4 in my preparation for my exhibition later in the year. These are just  small experimental works. Plop your used tea bags , still wet, onto a canvas either stretched or a canvas sheet, Let the tea bags do their work, and remove them  in a few hours - 24 hours is even better. Work with the pattern. You could enhance the pattern with paint, pencils, felt tip pens . In this one, I did some simple embroidery stitches to create "Wistful". 

29 Faces ##19-21  A glimpse of what was on my work desk on the weekend.... Faces #19, #20, #21 for the 29 Faces in September challenge. and some blue textiles work for an exhibition project - more details and photos soon! Blue textile art 

For some strange reason, I have been making quite a few things in pink in the last couple of weeks. This week I finshed a little felt face brooch and a polymer and silver necklace - all very girly and pink!  Perhaps my new granddchild due in December will be a girl? The little brooch is made from a piece of handmade felt which I made while doing a demonstration at a workshop , and the spikey bits came later, again from a felting experiement. I put them together with one of the little faces I use for my Feltfollies, and here is a different look brooch.  The necklace heart pendant was designed to fit one of the little silver pieces I made when I was first learning to work with silver clay ( Precious Metal Clay - PMC). Then, I used to have bits of clay left from projects because of poor planning, and to practise, I used to make buttons or pieces I could use on dolls. This one didn't get that far and found its way onto a polymer clay shape. Thinking Pink in...