Katie’s Cushion (and Charlie’s too)

I recently made a cushion for my friends’ baby with the baby’s name appliquéd on it. Turned out pretty:-)

I used some off-white broderie angalise (which I bought YEARS ago in Adelaide in Australia- I’m down to the last metre of it now… it served me well!) for the background, and three different cottons for the name and star.

The back is from an old pillowcase from the 70′s.  Classy or wha’!  Imagine that set on your bed:-)

I use butter paper to work out the shape of everything I make (check out all the pencil sketch-lines for the star; it was hard to get it to look well within the dimensions I wanted).  I buy it by the lb for very little- it’s great stuff.

I also made this cushion recently too:

This one was a commission- all the brief stated was that the cushion had to include Charlie’s date and time of birth, and his weight.  The background is a very flimsy pinstripied fabric (which I lined with calico before sewing onto); the green fabrics are linens, and all the letters are cottons.  The plane is made from a piece of an old-lady-style handmade nightdress which I bought for the fabric years ago in a charity shop (I think it cost about 50c- I got metres of fabric from it, it was huge!).

I love the fabric I used for the back.  I bought this fabric on a whim a few years ago, just half a metre; I’d no idea what to use it for.  Charlie’s grandad keeps cattle as a hobby so as as soon as I got the commission I knew which fabric was to be used.  I’m so glad I got to use it to make something for this family.

I like to use buttons that match the general theme on the cushion front.  These are little aeroplanes; for the Katie cushion I wanted to find stars but was in a hurry to get it posted (Katie and her parents live abroad), so I used 3 different old buttons from my extensive collection.

Very little cute knitted outfits.

I came across this video about designer  Anthea Chrome who knitted little outfits for the animated movie “Coraline”‘s characters. Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVOAq__q9-8

 

Friday Night Telly

Well, its Friday night and the only thing on the telly is Mastermind- which just makes me feel like I should read less YA fantasy and more Encyclopedia Britannica. I’ve been promising a work mate I’d crochet a hat for his new son and tonight seemed like a good night to do it. Been a while since I hit the hook.*

 

*Probably because I should be writing but I’m avoiding it. Note- teapot for illustrative puffing out purposes only.

 

Music to make art to: #1

I’m going off on a tangent here again, and I’m making no apology either- I plan on doing it more often too:-)  I’m going to post about music that makes me want to create.  I haven’t had much time for making anything at the moment, and all the unexplored ideas floating around my head make me feel like I’m going to explode sometimes… And so, I listen to music really loudly and the good songs make me calm.

I LOVE the lyrics to this song; and the video is just perfect.  It describes all my floating ideas to a tee.  And the landscape… well someday me and my fisheye will be visiting Iceland. Who’s with me?

“And at once I knew, I was not magnificent…”

Enjoy:-)

 

Wedding Dresses Print in Progress

Hey folks,

I’m working on a new print at the moment.  It’s based on a photo I took in a cool, old charity shop in Sheffield.  There were all these amazing old wedding dresses hanging from the ceiling…very eerie…

I quite like the image in black and white.  For the past few weeks, I’ve changed the print medium I use.  I usually laminate Photec (a light sensitive film) to an aluminium sheet.  Now because a.) I’ve been meaning to try it for ages and b.) the Photec has been driving me mad and the plates have been looking terrible..-Now, I’m experimenting with Photopolymer Plates.  They are already light sensitive and you just cut them to size.  They are greeny in colour, the other ones are blue.  A bit more expensive but if you do it right they can yield good results.

So, that’ s my latest news.  I’m hoping to get a good, high conrast image which still retains the floatiness of the dresses…

Have a look at some tests below.  Another new thing I’ve been doing is to apply grids to my test sheets on photoshop to help read the results afterwards.  It’s a great help.

Lastly, I’m going to try to figure out something to do with my digital photos…I quite like a lot of them simply as phots and not as prints.  It would be nice to try to start putting them for sale online.  I’ll try to set up a website and an etsy page.  Eek!  Any ideas or advice would be appreciated!  I’ll try to organise my work into a few catagories anyway…different subject matters..a mix of photos and prints..

In the meantime…here are some more test prints and pics.

KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK EVERYONE ELSE!  I LOVE SEEING ALL YOUR WONDERFUL STUFF! XXX

Katie x

-this is the contrast I’m aiming for on the print.

the blue section at the bottom right is where the plate has been dissolved..ah well..

Oh I have a big collection of TEST PRINTS!!!

Ye Oldie Cotton Reels and other Treasures

Kinda going off topic here (or not, it’s art supplies related I suppose).  Some photos of some old stuff I bought when in London just before Christmas. Only because they are just so pretty.

Petra was kind enough to take Laura and I to a car-boot sale;  well, I was like a child in the proverbial sweetie shop- I came away with 2 ladybird books, a Blockbusters board game (“I’d like a P please, Bob”), an old game of Donkey (so pretty! a bargain at £1) and a share in a biscuit tin full of cotton reels, old buttons and the like, all for the princely sum of just over a fiver.  I took what I wanted from the tin and left the rest with Petra (I didn’t really have room in my bag for much more than I took- Blockbusters was made in a time when big empty packaging wasn’t considered at all wasteful).  The pink silk thread is my favourite, it’s been transferred onto an older reel of what should be dark brown machine thread- I’m going to use it for embroidering (I have a project in mind for it, more on that when it hits the top of my to-do list).  But it was the cough sweet tin that caught my eye first, it’s full of pop fasteners and bra hooks; I just loved the design of it.  And I shall add my collection of these type items to it, keeping it’s recommissioned purpose alive.

The cough sweet tin. Relieves in half the time apparently.

The "Naughty Peter" Donkey game. Never Google the phrase "naughty Peter" with innocence, that's my advice.

And, to wander further into unrelated territory, a photo of my thimble:

My Gran was a dressmaker.  For as long as I knew her, her eyesight was failing and the only memory I have of her sewing involves me sitting beside her once, threading the needle as required, for she could no longer see the eye.  She died when I was sixteen and her grandchildren were told they could take some keepsakes from the house.  I took a cigar box and a few knick-knacks; I also took her thimble.  It fits me perfectly.  I like that symmetry; that she sewed and now I do too even though I never sewed with her; that I have her perfectly fitting thimble. It’s the circle of life – turns out Elton John was right

Post Surprise

Check out what arrived in the post yesterday… Have to give 10/10 for a speedy delivery!!  So what now? Well, the old thinking cap is firmly ON (but not so firmly that it restricts vital blood supply, phew).

Sketchbook with a Deadline

*UPDATE* I have ordered my sketchbook…

I came across this quite randomly, and wish I’d heard about it before.  It’s called The Sketchbook Project.  You sign up to receive a blank sketchpad by post from the Brooklyn Art Library in New York,  fill it up however you want based on a theme and send it back. Then your work will be catalogued in the Brooklyn Art Library and published in the Limited Edition art book series.  This is so exciting!  The possibilities… I think this may be added to the list of things I want to do this year (it’s a vague, meandering list; I really should write it down sometime).

So, who’s with me?

(I kinda like the tie-in with our blog-name too….heh)

Surprise! It’s War and Peace…

I bought a copy of War and Peace Volume One in a charity shop in November; it was bought with one idea in mind- to make a hollow book as a Christmas present.  I had ideally wanted a Sherlock Holmes book, but the copy of W&P was so pretty I had to choose it.  I walked home wondering was it sacrilege to cut up such a lovely old book… did I have the guts?  Turns out I did.

(In fairness, I did Google the edition I had in my hand- it was a mass-produced edition, it was first published somewhere around 1911, but I think my copy was from about 1926).

(I made a hollow book once before, when I was twelve.  I cut the centre out of a big children’s hardback edition of Lorna Doone which had been a present from an uncle… Thinking back on it, I can’t believe I did this, that the goody-two-shoes I was defaced a present from a relative.  But I did.  And I kept foreign coins in it.  My favourite was my South African Rand.  It has a gazelle or some other deer-like animal on it.  But enough about that).

I glued the outer edges together before beginning to cut.  When done, I glued the inner edges together.  The hollow is  just big enough to put a little Lego mini-figure surprise pack and some South African Rand.

I kept all the pages from the book, I figured I’d use them for something else.  And I did, as you can see in the previous post.  Recycling at it’s best.  Job well done.

Baby Book

Friends are days away from the birth of their first-born; for Christmas I decided to make them a baby record book.  Now, most commercial baby record books don’t have enough space for photos; they also have so many milestones to fill in that if parents are a little too preoccupied with actually raising the child to remember to pull the book out to note when little Ophelia first sneezed, then the pages can look a little neglected by baby’s 1st birthday.  I decided make a book that acted more as a photo album with space to fill in what ever milestones Mam and Dad feel are important.

Book cover

...from above

Example of the page headings used

I laid it out in two sections.  The front section has page headings for “first days”,  ”one month”, “two months”and so on up to “twelve months”.  The first pages have places for the information that definitely won’t be forgotten- date, time, weight etc. There is also a little envelope for the hospital bracelet.  When the babaí is born, I will embroider a name-plate for the front cover.

The back section has a few pages marked for “Milestones”, pages for the hospital scans and a few pages with envelopes of varying sizes for keepsakes like haircuts and the like.  The rest are blank for whatever Mam and Dad want to use them for.

The title-blocks on the tops of the pages are printed using little individual letter stamps; the paper in the background is *GASP* from a copy of War and Peace that was published in 1926 or thereabouts.  Yes, I cut up a book.  More about that in my next post…