Empress Wu Designs with Wilma

What a week - four days of workshops and a witch doll project dinner with Gumnutters Doll Group! I spent a whole day dyeing every bit of cotton and velvet fabric in sight, preparing a great stash for future projects. All of this fabric has been dyed with procion dyes. This was a wonderful day with textile artist, Roberta Hodgson. My class with the Sydney high school students was great fun, too. We did some wet felting, but it seemed to prove that glittery butterflies and love hearts are favourites amongst fifteen year old girls, whatever their background, circumstances and aspirations. The weekend was a Gumnutters' birthday celebration with the "unveliing" of the witches travelling doll project on Friday. . There were two groups of four and the project was "a body in a bag" , with each person working on the other three group members' dolls  with a theme of witches and wizards , but no wizards appeared. My multi-coloured organge/purple and green body re...

I recently taught a workshop at the Newcastle Creative Embroiderers and Textile Artists Creative Retreat. One of my very conscientious and creative students, Gay, sent me some photos of one of her completed works - a felted soft sculpture. The wet felt sculpture depicts a bottle, which has been lying on the ocean bed for sometime.... and has needle felted underwater plants  as well as polymer clay embellishments, giving the suggestion of schools of fish and even a mermaid. I love the way Gay has created movement with silk and the patterns created by the little polymer clay shapes/fish pieces. Well done, Gay. This will be a wonderful piece for the Outdoor Odyssey theme exhibition later in the year. I can hardly wait to see the other bottles Gay plans to create as representations of various environments.

Happy Australia Day and Happy Chinese New Year - Year of the Ox Here is my husband , Jim, resplendent in his Chinese coat (a traditional garment worn by dong ba, Chinese scholars from the Na xi ethnic Chinese group) and Brandon, our oldest grandson in his trendy Aussie T-shirt. We have quite a few family celebrations happening this week - all featuring lots of great food, of course. Our son and daughter and their families are both hosting parties this weekend, so there has even been cooking here in our kitchen. Brandon has been learning to take photos with my digital camera, and here is one of his images of Chinese New Year - he took many photos of food from various angles in various stages of preparation. This week I have been trying to catch up with the work from the online class I am taking from the Thread Studio - I have been working so furiously that I broke one of the felting needles in the embellisher machine. The "underwater" sample (left) is not quite finished - a fe...