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.

Seed Pods

The seed pods of the cape gooseberry
I collect seedpods from all over th eplace. These are from the capegoosberry which grows in my garden. Tha lantern like seed cases contain a small round fruit about the size of a marble which when ripe if golden yellow. They are family of the tomato. I love the delicate lace effects of these seed pods and can imagine these being made into big sculptural pieces.

From Dyebath to Turtle

From dyebath to pocket art
I have been abstaining from dyeing because I really must work on the lace I have been making. But I love to dye, and this morning I decided to dye some fabric, wash it , dry it, and it asked for turtles. And my sewing machine which has been playing up because it gets tired of lace as well( that's my excuse) was happy for the first time in days. I always think happy turtles. The back of the turtle has been printed with pearlescent textile ink with a lotus pod, and then freehand appliqued to the background. I dye with Procion MX dyes.

Otway!

Otway!
We live in the spectacular Otway region in south eastern Australia. We are surrounded by temperate(cool) rainforest that reaches down to the pristine southern ocean. I forget sometimes, that I live in such an area of great natural beauty, for I am often woken very early in the morning as the log trucks start rolling in their rush to denude it. I made this diptych as a commission for someone who lives on the ocean side of the ridge, and she wanted me to depict the sea, the rockpools which are such a delight in summer and the forest.Tree ferns are very prevalent here so no forest scene would be complete without them. I had forgotten about his work as I did it and then went overseas straight after and found the photos the other day . I wish now I had gotten better photos.I have dyed background fabric and printed with lotus pods and bracken. The treefern is made from silk and stitchng and has been appliqued.

Lace as Narrative

More
I have been working on making lace the last week or so and it is going very slowly. I am making 54 squares of "written" lace which reflects upon the physical differences of my Australian childhood as compared to my Dutch childhood.The squares will be set sampler style, with squares of something I have yet to design set in between all the lace squares. I have finished sewing the written squares for my Dutch piece and am now working on the Australian piece. it takes forever- each square takes about 35 minutes and is quite heavily stitched even though it does not look like it. This is also one of the instances where the camera sees more than the eye. When you look at these pieces with the naked eye, it takes a little time for the eye to see the writing- which is the effect I want, but the camera sees it instantly and that is depsite the fact that the romeo is still attached.

What i have been working on 

After the Rain

Old Fashioned
It rained all weekend, which is good for the garden and not so good for the humans. I spent the weekend working on my nanowrimo novel which I have entitled The Novel About Absolutely Nothing With Annotated Recipes- I anticipate that if I ever edit the novel, the recipes, which will include cooking ,dyeing, printing, and whatever requires a recipe, will make up the bulk of the book!As I wandered around my garden this morning all the pinks struck me. Normally I do not like pink as a colour to work with, but just about every flower in my garden is pink or red. This morning the droplets of rain sat like crystal treasures on the leaves and petals of the flowers, but I am ready for some warmer weather so I can work outside!

Bottle Brush- After the Rain