Hand Printed - Sunshine Lotus Flower Quilt

In preparation for my nieces 21st I've started to print up panels of lotus flower in yellows and grey  for her quilt.
Might redo the center panel as I dropped the leaf print onto the lotus flower and had to over print the flower.. one mistake and you need to start again. I did prepare to print two panels by cutting out two 21 inch square pieces of cotton right from the start but the printing will have to wait for another day as I do have to get ready for work.

The large panel and these two strips will form the large center star.
The individual lotus flower panels will be cut for the center of the smaller stars.

A rough sketch of what the quilt might look like. i'm not sure what will be in the two upper triangles of the yellow square..perhaps more printed pieces. Anyway it is a start. maybe I will get this quilt done before her birthday and not a year later like my nephews.

More Handprinted Stuff

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 More denim blue stamping done yesterday.. the same but different. The original stamping is the last photo. I did some strips of leaves to utilise as borders if i need it. If I do some more of these i think I will actually draw up a pattern next time, now that I have had a play with the stamps and have got a fair idea of placement.

I also printed off a few monkeys. When I made up my rainbow monkey quilt I was one monkey short and ran out of fabric to print on. So all those rainbow squares are waiting for one other monkey to join them to complete the quilt top ( or at least have enough pieces so I can sew it together to complete it).

Next days off

Denim Blue Pillow Cover- Hand Printing

Im a little bit excited about this printing.. I really like it..perhaps maybe a little inspired by the blackberries I picked yesterday and all those thorny barbs that I seemed to have caught my arm on .

The picture below particularly gives you a fair idea of what i was up against..look at the size of those things. Jordana says my arm looks like I have been trying to cut myself! Lol, they are a little torn to shreds but for all those lovely berries it was worth it.

I also fought against the biggest inch ants I have ever seen. I swore really loudly when I got bitten by one (I wish I had my camera out  just to show you how big it was. Their pincers really break the skin. It was very fortuitous that we had stopped at a bakery on the way to blackberry picking and they had apple cider vinegar for sale (with the Mother included)  and I actually bought some. So when I got bitten I was able to dab some on the bite and it took the sting out of it straight away..somebody up there loves me

Anyway back to the print. I thought I would make a pillow out of this one and the striped flowers could be the backing..or reversible pillow.

Below I was mucking around .. knid of making a wheel flower but I found placement diffiidult. It was hard to judge how far to place the next flower and allow for the spinning leaves of both patterns. It is also very time consuming!

We filled up that container - at least a couple of kilos worth and two other containers full of berries...berriicious!

Blue Stamp Mosaic

After yabbering about layers yesterday (and it being in the middle of the night, because once you start something and you just cant stop) I thought about the layers and how they relate to the painting i did a few years ago. I actually did two  in this theme. (the other is buried in the shed - I might revive it later today) Anyway I am blabbing cause I am tired but I thought I'd whip up a mosaic combining the two.

New Stamp, Blue Stamp

Printing more stuff... being inspired by the lovely detailed print of  Ernest Haeckel

It kind of reminds me of trilobites, the shape and form. When repeated a little like pebbled layers..

 So I added an extra layer with one of my first stamps .. a seed head from the Magnolia stamps, kind of  similar in shape.

I kept on dropping my new stamp on my material because i haven't fastened a handle on it yet ( a big block of wood.).So lots of blobs of ink and miss prints. You get to see the best bits! Photography is great because you can edit out the unwanted bits. If I get time I might invest in some perspex so I can see where I am placing the stamp as well.

Printed Stuff - A Compilation

I was looking in my stamp box after finishing printing the blue denim flower and saw I was getting quite a collection of stamp blocks. This led me to start to look over previous prints that I've made and I then  decided to put them all together in a quick photographic display.

Printed stuff and what I've made with it...

Well that's tha, back to the printing Block!

Denim Blue Stamping

Don't you just love blue and white colourings?  It is always fresh, never goes out of fashion and suits everybody.
For a while now I have been wanting to print in navy blue but can never find the right coloured blue printing ink, so I decided to mix my own colour.
The risk of mixing your own colour is that you may just produce muck - which becomes very expensive in terms of ink and when you do produce something you like you will never be able to produce that colour in the exact same way again...so how much do you mix??

Last night I decided it was time to carve a new stamp. I had been toying with the idea of producing something inspired by the Adelaide Festival Fringe artwork - By Ernest Haeckel, view here so see full display of this print.
Nature is very good at repetition and is very precise in its patterning.There is lots to inspire. I on the other hand am not so precise and would never dream of competing with mother nature, so have kept my design simple to make the carving a little simpler

By no means perfect, but in repetition is effective

Of course I ran out of ink and couldn't fill my length of material...so after mixing another batch I decided to change the type of print and mix it up a little.
It's hard to see here but there is a difference in colour - the second mixing is darker ( you can see it in the last photo)

So that's my afternoon of printing.. no plans for the material yet.
Cheers Monique x

Toddler Pinafore

The acquisition of some vintage style patterns has encouraged me to be creative with my hand printed fabrics. The beauty of toddler and baby patterns is that they use up less fabric and when you produce odd runs of fabric as I do it makes it easier to find a use for them (other than pouches)
Another Butterick pattern 248. This pattern had a total of three pieces. I only had bright pink bias binding and couldn't be bother making my own - it gives a nice bright pop of colour anyway. I like the fact that all the edges are neatly sewn beneath the bias - no zigzagging to neaten edges
Pretty good effort after night duty and 3 hours sleep.

Red Pouch , Red Pouch

More red pouches!

Waratah print

And Wheel Flower - An ode to Margaret Preston

 Lots and lots of sewing.. not much to say, except that I'm just about out of red and orange zippers. Time to change to a different coloured material

Sewing Like Crazy

See what happens when you let me at a machine for any length of time.... I turn into a complete Zombie. I had to throw something into the halloween mix! Caleb showed me the zombie app he downloaded and of course I had to get into the axe! I look terrifying

And yes I have actually been sewing.
I've made a few more pouches when I got home from work. I actually printed the fabric first and then whipped them up on the sewing machine. I've printed enough material to make 9 pouches - ran out of material otherwise I would have kept on printing. I've utilised 3 old linoprints that I've made over the years- 3 prints of each all in red.
Here is the first lino print made into a couple of pouches

No. 1

 underside of pouch

No. 2

Tomorrow (weekend yeah!) I can sew up the rest.. For now I have been banned from sewing in the lounge room as the family want to watch a movie.
Actually looking at the print it almost looks like blood smatterings when viewed after the zombie picture. At any rate it is a very red post!

Bibs n Bucket

Its the long weekend and after a blitz of cleaning I took the opportunity to drag out my sewing machine.

It was a  little cantankerous for a while and the thread kept on breaking - duh - every now and then you have to change over the needle. That done and everything  went swimmingly after that.

I have finally managed to make those baby bibs that I printed material for a few weeks ago.

They are really bright arent they?  I just have to buy some velcro for fasteners and then they are done.

I had enough for three geometric patterned bibs and two of the bright green circular patterns.

I used a small amount of the blue circular print to make a fabric bucket. Some how or rather I managed to fluke the measurements of the circle to match the length of fabric to fit the circumference - pretty happy about that! I imagine I could have looked up a pattern but it was kind of an impulse thing to make.

And that is how I  spent my afternoon. Went for  an evening walk up over the hill, my first since having a cold. I still seem to be breathless on exertion but at least I only cough occasionally. One of the girls at work told me yesterday that a patient described me as the tall funny nurse with a cough like a dogs bark... That says it all.