African Dyed Fabrics

African dyed fabrics
When I travelled through Africa in 1990 I fell in love with the indigo dyed textiles of western Africa. The fabrics are a visual feast despite using something as simple as tie dye. The two pieces on the left I purchesd in Africa the other two pieces I bought off Maggie Relph, whose website I cannot locate at the moment, but who sells wonderful African fabrics. One of the pieces has a stitched resist. I think what I love about the African resist dyed fabrics is their spontaneity, and a kind of "roughness" of the technique, and yet the cloth is fun and exhuberant. Yesterday was market day at Apollo Bay- it could have been better but it could also have been worse. Fortunately we were in the shade as it got very hot. And then there was family and friends over for a barbecue. I love the long days at this time of year, and the fact that you can sit outside and enjoy the night sky.

Drochel to Print

Print
The drawings I posted the other day of the drochel lace, have now been made into a Riso screenhttp://nehoc.com.au and I have printed a trial run on some hand dyed fabric with gold textile ink.So now to the silk! Will go and do the market at Apollo Bay on Saturday and hope to sell some things. The fabric is all dyed and fish and seahorses made, and even some of my bags have come back from a little Gallery in Melbourne which has unfortunately shut down- so one less outlet!Hope to get my Australian lace piece made today as well, so that will be the two central pieces of my exhibition done- the other pieces will have to fit around these pieces and tell their own story.

KIng Protea

King Protea
I know I should be writing about my textile inspirations, but the King Protea is flowering at the moment- they are such amazing sculptural flowers.We have quite a lot of proteas in the garden but this one sets the largest flowers. Think medium cake mixing bowl and you can imagine the size of the flower.I need to do some dyeing but some bees have decided to use the space under my dyeing table as a most excellent place for forming a hive, and as we are waiting for the wax forms to come ,to put in the real hives and hopefully entice them into producing us some honey, we dare not move them or agrravate them- so no dyeing.

King Protea 

Drochel Inspired

Designs from Drochel lace
Thank you to all those who replied to my previous post. It is nice to know it is reaching around the place. The design I have posted today is a drawing I made from a scan some friends of mine made of the drochel lace I have previously posted a picture of in October. The friends have a super duper scanner and allows you to really hone in on the fine detail. What amazes me more an more about this piece of drochel lace is that the linen with which it has been knotted is incredibly fine and so the making of this lace must have taken a long time- the knots are barely discernible with the naked eye. I will make a Riso screen of this drawing- and I have altered the scale by photocopying and I will print fabric with it to use in my lace making.Where you see the little dots in the design was actually closely knotted threads, but it's too difficult to get that detail into a Riso drawing so I opted for the dots.

Chassy-Keys

Keys to the Cupboard
Our room at Chateau de Chassy was large and had the most enormous oak beams. Our clothes cupboard was an antique wardrobe and it had elborate metal decorations around the key hole and these lovely huge keys. I took rubbings of the key hole in my journal and traced the shape of the key. I transferred the rubbing onto fabric via the computer , set it with matte finish and then stitched around the outline of the shapes.
And on another note who is reading the blog???

More Things in the Garden

Rose
When I woke this morning in the summer palace, a mist hung over the valley and condensation covered every sprig ,leaf and blossom. Everything looked refreshed after yesterday's heat. We spent last night sitting beside an open fire and looking at the starry starry sky. I am going to make a concerted effort to finish the nanowrimo novel in the next few days. My first piece of "Dutch"lace is done, just have to work out how to finish the edges. Now I have to make the "Australian" lace- and then it is into the other lace pieces for which I have already drawn a number of designs.

Spider Web 

Summer Palaces

Front of the property
When we first bought the block of land in Gellibrand there were few trees on the property,although the nature strip was full of trees. So we have been able to plant trees that suited our needs and also that of the wildlife. We used to come down on weekends and pitch our tent and dig and plant trees. Then we recycled a house from the suburbs of Melbourne which arrived in 3 pieces and was put back together and slowly you stop sleeping under the stars because you are inside the house with electricity. A couple of years ago I got sick of sleeping insidethe house , and in the summer we pitch tents aka Summer Palaces. They aren't much but the night sky is the richest jewel, and the air is fresh and pristine and you sleep as you should sleep. The birds wake you in the morning and the hoot of an owl sent me to sleep the night before last. Last night was too scarey to sleep out- too much thunder and lightening, but it's going to be fair weather for awhile. The tables next to the palaces are my summer work tables.

Summer Palaces 

Chassy Grafitti Before Spray Cans

Grafitti at Chassy
I got my journal quilts 2003 back from Houston last week. This was one of the pieces I created based on a photograph detailing a small section of "grafitti" on the attic stair wall at Chateau de Chassy. As you can see some of the scribblings go back to 1671, and several names were inscribed on the wall. I loved the idea that this writing/grafitti was so old and off course quite awkward as it had been carved directly into the stone of the wall. My kids would often sit on the stairwell and run their hands over the writing, because not only could you see it but you could feel it as well. I transferred the photo onto tissue paper which I sprayed with matte finish and then adhered to fabric. This enabled me to sew the lines around the writing without ripping the paper. I also altered the original colours. I want to do more of this work- it has a very Paul Klee like quality to me, but also shows the inclination of human nature to inscribe and even when writing is not possible, marks still being made by way of scratches and strokes.

Rainbow Box

Rainbow box
I hand dye all the fabric that I use in my work and I also sell hand dyed fabrics. I usually keep this box loaded up and when it is full it holds more than 300 fat quarters. The box had gotten low with being away so much so I have spent the last couple of days dyeing to fill it up again- and then it all had to be ironed. I also dyed some larger pieces- but they are still to be ironed. So today I am going to Melbourne past one of the shops I supply, Patchworks Unlimited , and do some shopping for italian food at the Mediterranean Wharehouse ( Italian supermarket), get some more dye, and come back tomorrow.

Dyeing

more shibori
When I visited Gallerie Smendhttp://www.smend.de in Koln earlier this year I purchased some Japanese cartons to create resists with dyeing. I have finally gotten around to experimenting with these on silk as I want to include pieces of it in my lace work. With the blue pieces I wanted it to have a watery feel, but to not have the lines one directional as I wanted more movement than that. Finally some warm weather has arrived , and I have metres and metres of fabric to dye before tonight, and then it all needs to be ironed.The heat dries that fabric quickly on the washing line fortunately.

shibori 

Tapa Cloth

Fijian tapa
I love tapa cloth and always make sure I visit the Auckland Museum in New Zealand which has a wonderful collection of Tapa Cloth as well as other Pacific islands artefacts and art. The above piece comes from Fiji, and my mother brought it back for me in 1980.It is only a section of a much larger piece. Tapa is actually the beaten bark of the mulberry tree and the designs are painted on. Once upon a time they were beaten onto the tapa with special beaters.
The piece below is Tongan tapa and I got it at the Tongan Women's Friendly Society in Auckland, which was housed in a disused church hall that looked the worse for wear on the outside. But inside was treasure- women teaching others to paint the tapa a whole room of cloths for sale some metres long and wide. None of them were signed so I cannot tell you the name of the artists, but the patterning and order of patterning was often distinctive to family groups.I bought my children a piece each which I will show another time- for like so many Pacific hand crafts this is a dying art.

Tongan tapa 

Fabric

Draped fabric
Today was a dirth sort of day- blahh, so blah, that I tidied up my workspace and found these pieces of fabric in amongst piles of other fabric that were not nearly so interesting. So now I have hung them off my book case, to have another look at them, to see if I can engender some enthusiasm and think of something new. Spent a good part of the day at a market because some huge bike ride has come through Gellibrand- over 8,000 extra bods in a town that normally boasts less than 200- but the market was an abject failure, no one was into buying anything except food and then it started to rain.And then my dyes did not arrive so I could not even dye some fabric to muster some enthusiasm. Maybe tomorrow. But my middle child spent her first day at High School for orientation and that got the thumbs up!

Bogong Moth

Wing of the Bogong Moth
It is the time of year when there are many creatures flying around in the night air, and the bogong moth is one of them. The wings are rather plain except for this one eye which because of the plainess of the rest of the wing is quite beautiful. The Bogong moth is a large moth , its wingspan sometimes measuring up to 4 inches.

Bunji Sea Creatures

Bunji Seahorse
In summer we do a market at Apollo Bay on Saturday's when the weather is fine. Yesterday I went to the market- it was a slow slow day, but I did spend the week getting the bunji sea creatures ready. These are a little of our bread and butter in summer and we have been making them for years. I have officially been verified as having completed my novel for Nanowrimo, that is reached the 50,000 word mark, but I still have a little way to go to finish the novel itself. But I intend to do that before the 30th of November. I also want to get the two lace panels I have been working on over and done with by the 30th-as I want to photograph them on Thursday.

Bunji Sea Creatures 

Gellibrand

The hill behind our house
This is the hill behind our house- and this is the view I have when I walk down the back of our property. I love it when the hill gets that ring of mist around the top, which even happens in summer in the early morning. There is said to be a cave with indigenous markings on it , but it is also said that it has been bulldozed- who knows?Nobody I know has actually seen it. We are lucky because our view of the hill does not show the house that some guy built right on the top. The trees in the middle ground is the Gellibrand River, and the home of a healthy population of platypii ( duck-billed monotremes)- I have never seen any but there are many who have- so one day.....However we do have echidnas ( the only other known monotreme and often called spiny anteater) and I have seen them!

More Traveller Tales

Bedouin
This is another of the postcards, that I found by a father written to his children back in Australia in the early part of the twentieth century. This one carries no writing but was found amongst a bundle of ones he had written on so I am presuming he did send this one also. None of the cards carry stamps so I presume he sent them home in a letter to his family. This card appeals because the scarf that comes form the headdress is obviously dyed with some resist technique, which has created an interesting pattern. It also looks as if he is wearing some kind of coarsely woven cloak.When I look at this card and the one I previously posted of the griot I am fascinated by the richness of the textile, the expressivenss of it.

Playing

Playing
Spent some time yesterday, playing around with some pieces of fabric I found when I finally cleaned up the dreaded bookshelf, which had been growing with all manner of displaced things. The printed piece is a screen print of a bindii- a sharp pointy seed pod from a groundcover that causes many a nasty prick in feet even in thongs.It is almost as if there is a weird little prickly face in there. The grey piece is tie dyed, and finding it reminded me that I want to make some more of this fabric.I need to get into some serious work, but I am getting bored making all the square lace panels with writing- I want to be doing something else!

Birds This Morning

Birds
We have a lot of trees in our garden and as a consequence also many birds. The birds pictured here are the kookaburra, one of our resident family , he was quietly sitting on a post this morning. The next bird is the Gang gang parrot- these are quite large and this is a male because his head is red. They like to get into the wattle seeds and are very destructive , making a lot of mess, but on the other hand they are quite cute. The other parrot is the king parrot- very destructive of fruit on trees, but the male has a brilliant orange chest with a green and lime green streaks back. I photographed all these birds this morning.

Summer Is Coming

A part of the vegetable garden
One of the reasons I am able to be a textile itinerant is because we have a huge vegetable garden. This photo only shows a portion of it. Our season starts late because the ground temperature stays quite cool until well into Ocotber, so there is not much point in planting anything, unless it likes cold feet. However the silver beet has been prolific this year and this red stemmed variety is quite pretty- the red is almost as garish as procion MX8B red!So I am hanging out for summer and more vegetables.