Empress Wu Designs with Wilma

  Postage stamps feature a lot in my textile artwork.... and I have a lovely collection of old stamps. However, I also belong to a small group of artist friends who every three months, challenge one another with gifts of first day covers or stamp series.  A few months ago, I interpreted a series of stamps from New Zealand ...  In this round of challenges, I received a beautiful series of Australian stamps, depicting wonderful locations in different states.  At first I was at a loss of what to do with them to show them off... and at the time, I was stitching some backgrounds on my sewing machine.... The background is a collage of scrap fabrics and then overstitched  and overlayed with rows of decorative stitch patterns . I really liked one of these backgrounds for these stamps as Australian colours were all there..   After stitching the stamps onto the background, I "couched " contour lines in a random way.... this map does not depict a certain place. I...

 A collaged and embroidered art tag  submitted for the Tag Tuesday theme "Faery Garden "  Materials : gel print paper, tea bags, coloured paper.  Techniques: gel plate printing, mark making with acrylic inks, machine and hand stitching.  The stamp was on a tea bag, and is from an unknown source,

Here is a video of all the dolls in the Art Dolls Only Black and White Challenge... Just press on the image above to begin - only 2 and a half minutes of fantastic dolls!  And here also are some images of the doll I submitted for the challenge. It has been created from fabric which was made by putting black and white cotton scraps  side by side and stitching over them in different directions with different stitches on my sewing machine. The face is stitched free hand on the sewing machine.  To do this, lower the feed dogs on your machine, put your fabric tightly  in a hoop ( optional, but safe) and "draw" with your needle by moving the fabric in the hoop as you stitch. If you are a beginner, you might like to put some coloured pencil marks down to guide you, but I find by doing it freely, the faces are never the same and although they are not symmetrical, they do have some expression. 

This last week, I have been seeing red ...  No, I am not angry at all , quite the opposite. I am happy with my work but it  is  all red! Little red felted projects like the red character brooch above - a red jester? a  red king? and the red doll, I've called  Red Poppies. These were amongst the samples I made for a workshop last weekend at ATASDA Australian Textile Art and Surface Decoration Association. I have also been very lucky to have been given an embroidery sewing machine which is amazing - it requires no creative input from me. All I do is thread the machine up and press a button. I have always loved red work and decided this was a good place to start using this machine. Here are the beginnings of some little gift bags - am I really thinking of Christmas ?  Hope your week brings you a special "red letter' day. ( Red letter day: a memorable, joyful day) 

Meredith Woolnough is a beautiful talented young artist. Her current work is exquisite, stunning, engaging and awe inspiring. As you can see from the images, Meredith reproduces the beauty of nature in stitch – literally thousands of metres of embroidery thread stitched onto a background which is later dissolved. What remains is like a delicate “skeleton", but somehow with depth of colour, movement and strength. I think what is conveyed in Meredith’s work is overwhelmingly the love and reverence for her natural subject matter and her intimate knowledge of its structure.      Meredith’s latest exhibition is called “Ethereal Threads”, superbly presented at Timeless Textiles.  It is a collection of framed fine art which demonstrates Meredith’s attention to the details of presentation – each of the large pieces is pinned to archer paper and the play of shadow on the paper enhances the beauty of each.  There are  finely detailed delic...

This week , Anzac Day is commemorated in Australia - a remembrance day for those lost at war. April 25 was also the day when women in Columbus, Mississippi decorated the graves of both Union and Confederate soldiers in 1866. This act of generosity and remembrance helped establish "Memorial Day" holiday .  It always seemed ironic to me that, during the war years, women were considered able, equal and competent and  were respected in many fields of work, denied to them because of gender in previous years and sometimes in subsequent years.  Medical Doctor  My " Women at Work" series  was created to remember the struggle of women to establish themselves in the workforce.  They are quite different from my usual style of dolls. They are all simple  shapes with machine embroidered outlines.  From a distance, and even in these photos, the lines look as though they have been drawn onto the fabric, but it's all stitching. I have added a splash...