Empress Wu Designs with Wilma

I have missed Tag Tuesday ...  When the theme chosen by Sandie was "Wings" , I thought I could add to one of my series as well as practise my machine stitching skills for #The 100 Day Project which seems to be monopolising my time currently. For my "wings" tags, I created two on the theme of butterflies. Both are free motion stitched on my trusty Bernina sewing machine . I then applied "heat and bond", a double sided fabric adhesive and cut around the stitched "portraits". The cut outs were then applied to prepared tags made from cardboard,  covered with  book text and painted with white gesso. The red cheeks are coloured with Inktense pencil.  Here are the first two in the Red Cheeks series ... and they fit the "wings" theme too. 

And this is how the torn paper series began ... torn magazine page with a newspaper base. Is that part of a crossword puzzle peeking through?

This is the beginning of another series of torn paper /mixed media collages. Some of the postage stamps I have kept have such interesting themes so I am looking forward to creating more of these collages with stamps. Stamped#1 is definitely for cat lovers, but it has been awahile when it cost only 50 cents to post a letter in Australia.

Over the last month, I have been busily tearing up bits of  paper. I haven't quite gone crazy - I attended a workshop with Belgium based artist, Jette Clover who encouraged us to indulge in some daily art practice, making small collages. Here are some of the square collages I have made into greeting cards....  My stockpile is already diminished as I happily gave many away to thank the committee members of a group at a recent Annual General Meeting and others to accompany other thank you and birthday gifts. Tonight's post shows a few, but I think to maintain the daily practice, I will post one a day for the rest of August at least.  with Jette Clover, in front of her work for "Stitched Up" exhibition. 

Lots of stitching - I am not sure what this technique is called but I learnt this at NCEATA - Newcastle Creative Embroiderers and Textile Artists, where one of the members, Aileen  demonstrated how she creates such interesting fabric from scraps. 1. Small scraps of patterned and/or plain fabrics are placed side by side on some iron-on  interfacing. 2. Iron everything down to hold in place. 3.Then use a decorative  stitch  on your sewing machine. Use a matching colour of one piece of fabric, stitch over it, going off the edges over the adjoining pieces. 4. Change the thread colour and stitch again, choosing one of the adjoining pieces of fabric. 5. Then stitch again ... repeating the sequence over and over again. The first project I made was a piece of fabric large enough to cover an A5 size note book. Then I tried the technique out on smaller pieces for tags I also tried a variation of the technique. Instead of  using bits of fabric...

Border pattern   ( February 2015 - Wilma Simmons)  Was this on my bucket list ?  No,  not really, but after completing Stages 1 & 2 of the Creative Embroidery Correspondence Course with the Embroiderers' Guild about twenty+ years ago, this year I decided to enrol in Stage 3 - finally.  As I want to record what I do, I am sharing each month's exercises with you right here. If you are unfamiliar with these courses, what you get each month is an envelope with instructions, handwritten comments by your assessor and some threads and fabric and then the completed work is returned to the Guild each month for assessment. February's threads and fabric  For February's lesson, the theme was inspired by border patterns, emphasising the way stitches turn into patterns when used close together to fill shapes and spaces. Besides the embroidery, there were drawings to do - three border patterns and three square patterns like tiles. I love doing this part, bu...

Stitched tag : Theme "All Stitched Up' - The Emperor's New Clothes Hand stitched calico& metal embellishment Instead of just wise words this Wednesday.. here is a favourite story. "The Emperor's New Clothes"   A vain  Emperor  who cares about nothing except wearing and displaying clothes hires two swindlers who promise him the finest, best suit of clothes from a fabric invisible to anyone who is unfit for his position or "hopelessly stupid". The Emperor's  ministers  cannot see the clothing themselves, but pretend that they can for fear of appearing unfit for their positions and the Emperor does the same. Finally the swindlers report that the suit is finished, they mime dressing him and the Emperor marches in procession before his subjects. The townsfolk play along with the pretence not wanting to appear unfit for their positions or stupid. Then a child in the crowd, too young to understand the desirability of keeping up the pretence, ...

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...