Commission–Tablecloth

This week I have started a fabric painted tablecloth. It’s a commission from a lady who wants me to make it for a friend’s birthday in October. I thought I’d blog the progress.
The lady had seen some of my previous textile work of this waistcoat that I made a few years ago for a Quilting Arts Magazine project. She liked the flowering gums and as her friend has a nickname of ‘Gumnut’ it seemed a good idea for a painted table cloth of flowering gums and gumnuts as a gift.
                                 

Firstly I did some tests on different fabrics, the first a thick cotton woven fabric and the second a plain white cotton. I heat set the fabrics after painting and put them through the washing machine to test for colourfastness.
                         
I liked the cream colour of the first fabric but it was difficult to paint on because of the raised weave. The white cotton was easier to paint but the colour is too stark. i decided to shop for a plain cotton cream colour.

ART ‘N’ ABOUT MARKET

This Sunday I had a stall at the Art n About Market held by the City of Wanneroo. I also gave a lecture and demonstration on polymer clay bead making. Ruth came to help me and had a beautiful display of her work. We had lots of interest and a few sales.

  

 

Polymer Pendants

I have been playing around with a tutorial in Donna Kato’s book The Art of Polymer Clay which is the zipper cane and i have used it in a few pendants that I have made recently. The zipper cane looks a little like a railway track meandering across the pendant.Some of these pendants are recycled! That is, they were old pendants that I made years ago with an image transfer on the front. The pendants that didn’t sell at the time were stuffed in a box and forgotten until the other day when I had the idea of recycling.

     

   

Scarf with polymer clay beads

Today, I had seventeen people in my polymer clay scarf beads workshop. It was a busy day making all the beads and getting them cured in the oven. The ladies did very well and some of them hadn’t used polymer clay before. Here are a few photographs. I will have more of the finished scarves later as we ran out of time to get all the beads threaded.

   

     

              

Swellegant Fold formed Copper cuff

  

I recently made this copper cuff. I cut the copper from a sheet, annealed the copper to make it soft and made the fold and added some texture. The patina I used was a verdigris, but I added some swellegant dye oxides for some additional colour.

Burning off in pine forest

I took these shots on the way home from teaching yesterday. It was just on sunset, the sky was amazing colours.
   

A new look–playing with blogger

I’m just trying out a few templates on Blogger.