Empress Wu Designs with Wilma

    Here is a chinaware pattern which was very popular in the 1970's. It is Acapulco by Villeroy and Boch and as a young 20+year old way back then , I loved this . It is perhaps not as spectacular on a small egg cup as it is on a dinner plate, but I think its colourful boho joy is still retained.  It was fun to sketch this , particularly as I cut the top of the egg to make it more interesting. How do you like your eggs - soft or hard boiled? 

  "Down on the Farm " is the current theme at Tag Tuesday - an art tag fortnightly challenge . With lots of other projects 'on the go', I quickly  made these farm inspired tags probably with more fever than fervour.  The technique is simple - tear up a magazine page and randomly and quickly paste all the  torn pieces down onto a sheet of paper. Cut out the required size for the tag and complete by choosing an image(s) as a focus . With these I also added some hand stitching and a button as embellishment. The vintage images are from a purchased collage sheet by Eleven Nine Design.  And here is another "farm" tag which I free motion stitched  in February, for another challenge, 29 Faces .   

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...

"Constrain" - cotton corset of the late 1960s /early 1970s , collage lining, vintage tin badge. hand and machine stitching , photo transfer   The late 1960s and 1970s were heady days for young women.... never before had the voice of women been heard so loudly and so strongly.  I wanted to capture a bit of the spirit of that 'burn your bra"  period with Corset no. 2 in my series  for the "Crossing Borders" exhibition.  Corset lining in progress - photo transfer and applique  Corset work in progress - reverse applique ready to stitch and stamping  I used some original vintage fabric from a curtain of the period and revers appliqued the floral fabric in some of the panels of the corset. Inside the corset, the lining depicts some of the recorded visual history of the protest marches of the time. The black and white photo transfer attempts to project a nostalgic feel to this art corset.  Corset work in progress - reverse appliqued s...

Were you excitedly waiting for a glimpse of THE wedding dress last Friday? Lace has been an old time favourite for brides, and royal ones are obviously no different. However, I was very interested to  find out more about this special lace dress - ... The skilled embroiderers of England’s Royal School of Needlework (RSN) contributed their technical embroidery expertise to create the bespoke lace on Miss Catherine Middleton’s wedding dress, veil and shoes and enable Sarah Burton to achieve her artistic vision for the bride The lace design and process was influenced by traditional Carrickmacross lace which originated in Ireland in the 1820s. Carrickmacross lace uses an embroidery technique called appliqué – the lace is worked by applying organdie fabric to a delicate net background and edging each motif with fine cord-like thread. Sarah Burton sourced a series of lace motifs to create a unique design, applied by the RSN and arranged to fit each part of the dress perfectly following ...