STEPPING BACK, THE BETTER TO LEAP FORWARD!

Last Saturday I decided that I needed to step back for a little while to catch up on life and get Dev through the antibiotic stage.  Thank you to everyone who sent good wishes to Dev - I read them to him and I'm sure it helped him to get over a very testing time.  Fortunately the worries from each clinic came back clear, so we are both relieved.  So, just one more clinic visit next week and hopefully nothing else before Christmas.

I waded straight into giving the flat a thorough clean instead of the lick and promise it has been having, and felt much better for it.  Doesn't take all that long in a flat, which is a great advantage of apartment living.  

Apart from Dev's routine visit to the hospital on Wednesday, which takes a whole morning, I decided the rest of the week would be mine to do just what I wanted.

Every day holds something to lift the heart and bring a smile, and Wednesday morning was no exception.  As I drew into a space in the hospital car park, right in front of the car was a cherry tree in full white blossom, so beautiful.  This is my favourite parking space, in front of the lake.  In the photo you can just see a swan, and on the opposite bank a heron posed as a grey statue.  Enough to lift the heart all day.  I took a quick snap of the sign that is permanently fixed to the railings.  It always makes me smile, the two statements seem so contradictory.

Apron recycled from an African dress

'Me time' in the afternoon, but no drawing, no painting.  I did something I've wanted to do for quite a while.  I've had a long traditional Nigerian dress hanging in my wardrobe for over 30 years, and apart from a few times in the early days I never wear it.

There's a story behind the dress.  I was on a business trip to Nigeria and was taken by a Nigerian acquaintance firstly to choose a fabric I liked, and then to a dressmaker to have a traditional dress custom-made to my size.  The fabric was beautiful, but when I received the dress the extensive embroidery at the neck and in a wide strip of embroidery at the hem had been sewn with a shocking fluorescent green thread and the colours clashed violently.  I was so upset, it was completely spoilt.

Fortunately a colleague decided that he'd like to take a dress home as a gift for his wife, and I sold it to him at a knock-down price.  Hope she liked the colours!  I bought an off-the-rail dress in a tie-dye fabric, much cheaper quality fabric, a standard size and not too well made.  Still it held many memories of the trip, and I have kept it all these years.

But I wanted to clear the wardrobes a bit, and I needed a couple of new aprons.  Time for some recycling.  I managed to squeeze two aprons from the dress, and the hems still have the original stitching as a memory of their origin.  The photo shows the first one, and the second one is not quite completed.

Both aprons were made on the tiny Janome sewing machine I bought a few months ago, so it proved to me that it can certainly sew through a few thicknesses of fabric very well.

Last night I was up sleepless for a couple of hours, and for some reason I thought about the Dorset Apple Cake I used to make years ago.  I started searching the internet for the recipe but couldn't fine one the same as I used to have.  I did find a recipe for an 'Easy Apple Tea Loaf Cake' which appealed, and this morning I decided to make it.  

I bought a new electronic scale yesterday, which is very neat, slim and precise and just 7"square, which was fortunate because the quantities in the recipe were only in grammes.  The cake was very quick and easy to make, though I wasn't convinced the recipe would work when I was mixing it.  But here it is:

I seem to remember reading years ago that the split down the middle is a feature of apple cake.  Anyway, it's a feature of this one.  A smaller loaf pan would be better because the cake was only a couple of inches high.

How did it taste?  Absolutely delicious, and we ate almost half of it after our lunch.  I'll either double up the quantities next time or find a smaller loaf tin.

Yesterday I also bought a silicon loaf pan, but when I came to use it I couldn't decide whether it should be greased it or not, so I used my old tin loaf pan.  What do you do if you use a silicon cake 'tin', do you grease or not?

READY TO LEAP FORWARD

So I have created this week, but just not on paper.  It's been a happy week and I feel refreshed and ready to get the pens and paints out on Monday, so it was well worth stepping back for a few days.

LEGS, BUTTONS AND BOWS AND SEWING

Today I'm including posts for a few challenges.  At one time I was heavily involved with textile arts for quite a number of years.  The first two images below are appliquéd and quilted wall-hangings I made just for my own pleasure rather than for sale.  When I saw the themes for the challenges I remembered these, and wanted to share them with you.

BUTTONS AND BOWS

The stylish lady in this wall-hanging is just right for the Sunday Postcard Art theme of "Buttons and Bows".  I've always been too impatient for hand quilting or appliqué (and not good enough, either), so anything I've done has always been completely made on the sewing machine.

Does anybody remember the amusing old song from the 1950s and 60s "A Sewing Machine is a Girl's Best Friend".  It started something like this:

"Oh! A sewing machine, a sewing machine is a girl's best friend,

If I didn't have my sewing machine I'd have come to no good end.

A bobbin, a bobbin, a wheel, a wheel, I while away the day,

By night I feel so weary that I never get out to play."

SEWING!

In my opinion this lass is never going to get the thread through that needle!

This lovely geisha is my offering for the Take a Word theme of "Sewing", with artificial silk fabric for the central panel.

When I made this wall-hanging, I left the puffy cream silk background as a cushiony contrast to the extensive machine embroidery on the clothes. Sadly it doesn't photograph well, and perhaps I should originally have made the decision the quilt the background as well.

The image was taken from a beautiful card, but I've lost my record of who the artist was, so I apologise for not crediting it.  

ONE WORD

The challenge from Collage Obsession this week is "ONE Word", using the word as the focal point or as an element in the artwork.  This is just a fun piece that I made a while ago.  

In Photoshop I selected the legs from a photograph I had taken of a young friend, repeated it to form a design and then printed it out onto the cream cotton fabric ready for quilting with random free-machine quilting on the sewing machine.  For the challenge I've added a red border and the word "Legs" in Photoshop. 

I'll also be linking this to Artist's Play Room , Paint Party Friday and Inspiration Avenue .

JUST LOOKING-OVER SOMETHING I OVERLOOKED - A.P.R. CHALLENGE

This week Jenn's challenge on Artist's Play Room is 'WHAT DO YOU OVERLOOK?' 

 

I find the challenges Jenn sets really get my brain working hard to come up with a relevant idea, and some artwork that will hopefully be an original take on the topic.

As someone who by nature is rather forgetful I have always had to try hard to keep my brain organised about what needs doing by keeping 'to-do' lists.  

In the last decade or so the 'to-do' lists still exist, supported by bits of card scattered round the place with reminders like 'Get petrol', 'Order repeat prescription', or 'Post Ruthie's birthday card'.  So I don't actually overlook too many things.

Then I glanced up from my computer and looked straight at a textile wall hanging I made about 20 years ago, and the answer came to me. 

I'm always intending to blog about creative things I've made, drawn or painted in earlier years, but the intention floats into the dim recesses of my mind.  I decided this piece of textile art is definitely one of the things I tend to overlook.

Here's the wall-hanging I glanced up and saw on the studio wall:

"THROUGH THE WINDOW - WATCHING YOU WATCHING ME"

I used to be very much into quilting and textile work of various kinds, as well as drawing and painting.  No surprise really because needlecrafts have always been strong elements through my family - my mother, my grandma, and my great-grandma who - family tradition says - made the velvet suit for the painting 'Bubbles' by Sir John Everett Millais, which later became a famous advert for Pears Soap.

I  bought the brown leafy material in a market in Nigeria about ten years before I used it, and it was collaged onto the brown 'window' fabric with very close machine satin stitch.

It was a labour of love, and I would never sell it.  I still love it so much that it always hangs on our studio wall.  Many people who have seen it, particularly in exhibitions, find it disturbing because they say the eyes follow them around the room.

The hanging is completely machine stitched, and the whole face quilted with machine stitching.  I mention this because sometimes people who have seen a print-out or a digital image of it think it is simply drawn on.  And yes, it did take a long time and a lot of patience.

In this close-up of the eye, you can see the stitching more clearly and the effect of the quilting on the fabric and wadding below.

I watch him every day ..... and he watches, or "overlooks" me,
a benign influence on our workroom.

MORE FACES

I love drawing faces, and the I-pad suits me down to the ground for the kind of faces I often like to draw.  

I've been drawing faces with patterns on for as long as I can remember, and I'm always happy when I'm drawing or painting in this way.

Just writing that reminded me of a textile workshop I attended in 1989 with Linda Straw, an absolutely marvellous and original textile designer and maker, to learn her very individual method of appliqué, using polyester silks - very difficult to work with.

The first thing we were told to do was to draw a simple design we wanted to appliqué - and of course the mind immediately goes blank - so I just drew a simple patterned face which would give me six colours to appliqué on the light green background.

Linda's technique (briefly, because it's very involved to do and describe) involves laying all the fabrics on the background in your chosen order, just pinning them at each corner.  

The machine stitching is done from the back, and the layers of colour trimmed away from the stitching on the front.  This was my first attempt, and I was not skilled enough to avoid the puckering around the outline of the head.

  
This is a section from one of Linda Straw's wall hangings that I was lucky enough to buy the following year.  Beautiful work, and humour in the design, with the mermaid ready to take to the land in her 'bovver boots' and biker's jacket.

So, back to my latest I-pad painting on the  'Brushes' app:

Having painted the face with white on black, I used Photoshop to reverse the colours to black on white.

And then I took the original painting into two other apps I have and played around until I was happy with a new look, like this 'vintage' version.

This last version really interested me.  The filter I used on either Snapseed or Photogene (can't remember which), changed the painting into a pencil-type version that I hadn't even started with.

The patterns are not pre-planned, I just doodle as the mood takes me, and when I have finished they often look rather like Maori face tattoos, even though I don't start out with that intention.

Just one more - a montage of my three favourite versions:

Doing this painting and playing around with it was such fun.  And to think, every time Dev wanted to buy me an I-pad I kept saying I didn't want one.  How wrong I was!