Cow Parsley.

I'm having a go at free-machining some cow parsley now because I always liked the dry heads. This grows at the side of the road in Donegal where my son lives. It might be giant hogweed - there are so many variations and they all look similar. Anyway I sprayed it with 'snow'  for Christmas and it's been on the hall table ever since.

I'm using water soluble Avalon and some linen string for the stem.

 My stitching is a bit ropy but it does the job. I zig-zagged over the string.

I carried the string on up through two of the stems (not sure what you call those parts) - wish I'd done all of them with the string.

Not that happy with the colour of the variegated thread I used as there was orange in it that I couldn't see on the reel. 

They look more like palm trees to me at the moment!

Hopefully, I'll be able to tweek them a bit when I stitch them on to my fabric.

Acrylic Wax - what is that?

Hindsight is a great thing. Frances Pickering advises that you apply acrylic wax to the fabric and paper pages (to provide a seal and enhance the colour of the fabric) BEFORE you stitch on it. I'm a bit late!
What is this acrylic wax and and where do you get it? Google to the rescue - I read a bit about it on Kim Izenman's blog.
I've seen it before when I was at college, like liquid gold, it was off limits to us greedy students.
I've looked around for it -- you can never get anything in NI-- and to order from England, it's the postage that's more than the product. So with the info I'd gleaned from Kim's blog it was off to BandQ.
I bought a bottle of wood floor polish containing polyacrylate polymer and waxes. It's milky like the stuff I remember and it cost £5.48 for 500ml.
That should do it! Worth a try.

 I wrote on the fabric first with my uni jetstream pen. It's supposed to be permanent ink.

Then I tried out the 'floor polish.' It made the ink run a bit. 

 I realised I should have left the ink to dry completely before I brushed the polish on. 

After the fabric had dried I tried writing on it again and found the ink flowed much more easily over the waxy surface. The fabric definitely has a firmer feel to it and I think it's improved the colour.

 I'm quite pleased with  my wood floor polish. Maybe a product bought as 'Acrylic Wax' would give a better result, I don't know. I get a bit fed up of Art and Craft supplies where normal things are generally sold in tiny amounts and are overpriced.
So now I'm going to wax the other fabric pages that I haven't done anything on yet.

I painted these papers with Acrylic inks, let them dry, then brushed the floor polish over. Nice. I'm thinking of leaves and trees for these.

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I've done the couching for the daisy chain.
 I'm going to do some seed stitching over this to represent the blades of grass.

right side

wrong side

Primroses next.

Daisies and blackberries.

I've been stitching some french knots to the centres of the daisies and then I'm going to couch on stems to make a daisy chain. The petals in the book show a pinkish edge so I might add a bit of pink to my petals

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Been out searching for a pen that will write on fabric without bleeding into it.

I bought a Letraset Promarker pen and a Uni Jetstream and also tried out a Staedtler pen.

I preferred the paler outline on the leaf  - using the uni jetstream, the Staedtler looks ok too.

The Letraset pen bled into the fabric.

The polystyrene print blocks I made for the blackberry leaves worked ok using acrylic paints.
When it was dry I painted the branches and leaf veins with Koh I Noor. Now it needs some thorns, but I might do that with the pen.

I added the blackberries using a cotton bud.

When I was a child we would go over the fields to pick blackberries.
I  still like picking blackberries and making jam.

A bit of recycling.

I'm recycling this piece of 'art' that I made for part of my C & G course ages ago. What was I thinking? It represents a window in the Majorelle Gardens in Marrakesh and the felt background is the famous 'Majorelle blue.'
Frances P. is in favour of recycling and I can see a use for this!

I've taken it apart as I thought I could recycle some of those machine embroidered 'windows' and turn them into butterflies and dragonflies. Those smaller green leaves look a bit insect like too.

I can see wings in the windows.

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Blackberry picking.
I recycled a polystyrene box the Christmas dates came in and made some leaves and berries to print with.

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Here's some more recycling. This is a cake stand my son and girlfriend had on their table yesterday - it's made from mismatched china and glass.

It was made and given as a 'New Home' present from one of their friends. Very pretty.

Cakes were good too!

Bluebell wood.

I'm on to another page now and it's the woods where I used to go as a child to pick bluebells and primroses. I can almost smell them. I know you shouldn't pick wild flowers but there were thousands of them.
I ironed a piece of painted Bondaweb on to the fabric - it's less scary to paint on to that, than straight on to the fabric, and I like the effect.

This picture is one of the first bits of machine embroidery I did, that's probably over 10 years ago now.
I didn't like it because I didn't know how to get the perspective right for the track behind the gate.
I cut the gate out.

Then I painted with the Koh I Noor dyes again - I'm still struggling with perspective trying to put in a woodland path. I need painting lessons.

         I'm using a tiny seed stitch for the bluebells as Frances P. uses 'seeding' a lot in her fabric books.
                                  Keep persevering, it will all work out in the end. Yeah, right!

                                                                            ********
On to the next page.
I bought this bag of foam shapes in the £1 shop and turned them into printing blocks. They weren't very thick so I glued 3 pieces together with PVA glue and it worked alright.
A bit of effort and 13 stamps for £1. Not bad.

Making a daisy chain now.

I'm going to carry the blue butterfly through the whole book.

                                                                'I Wish I was A Butterfly.'

Too scared to start?

Too scared to start?   That's the question asked in Frances Pickering's lovely book.

Painting the fabric 'pages' was the easy bit.  Drawing?  Yeah, that's scary.

I've painted six pieces of fabric now and they do dry out paler. As I'm going to write on them I think they need to be light for the writing to show.

I've cut them 14" wide, 10 1/2" length but they've shrunk a bit so maybe I should have cut them slightly bigger ( each piece of fabric will be folded in half to make 2 pages).

       My book is going to be like a nature book - it's a flight of fancy back to the things I liked as a child.

 I'm going to start with some teasels. Not sure if I've seen them growing here in N. I. but I think I've seen them growing in Donegal. They always fascinated me.

I read about teasels in Wikipedia and found out they used to be used to raise the nap on fabrics, particularly wool.  Well you learn something every day!

Time to take the plunge... I didn't take the scary option to draw straight on to my fabric, instead I made a stencil and used some gesso to give me the teasel shape.

I painted over the Gesso with the Koh I Noor dyes

I gradually added more colour

So, I've made a start and it wasn't that scary - not sure if I should stitch on this now, think I'll decide later.

Tea - Dyeing.

Out and about on Saturday and I bought 'The Country Diary Of An Edwardian Lady.'  It was 25p in a charity shop in Saintfield. A bargain, I thought! Full of nature notes and lovely paintings of birds, butterflies, bees and flowers. Just right for my fabric book project.

I cut some material for the pages.










I cut the pages from calico, linen and old cotton curtain lining.

painted calico and Bondaweb ready for the book cover

The pages in Edith Holden's book had an aged look so I did some tea-dyeing to 'age' my fabric pages.

I left the pages of fabric in the tea for 2 hours

then left them drip- drying over the bath

I bought a box of words a long time ago at one of our craft group sales.
There are loads of them. I'll never get them back into the box they came in!

I just picked out a few of them and gave them the tea-dyeing treatment too, but only for a minute.

I might use them in the book.

'If I were a butterfly'.

I'm thinking about my fabric book today while I'm mucking about at housework and ideas keep coming into my head.  I think I have a title now that will fit in with our exhibition theme 'Flights of Fancy'.

For my front cover I've decided to use a piece of calico that I had left over from a previous dyeing session .

              I painted over the pink calico with Koh I Noor - a dye based water colour palette.
              It looks colourful enough here but dries out much paler.

Still wet but I want to see if the colours show through the Oasis plastic bag.

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My piece of calico dried out and I took it in to craft group for the experts to have a look! 

We decided the bag would look better without my colouring in (it looks gaudy). Disappointed!

I liked colouring in that bag.

I've been to the library, I like the illustrations in the children's books and thought they might help me.

Frances Pickering does quite a bit of drawing in her fabric books but I'm not too hot at drawing.

I thought I would add a bit more colour to the calico, to show through the bag, so I came home and painted it again.

I placed a piece of Bondaweb on top of the calico hoping it will soak up some of the dye.

I'm going to make a sandwich of the calico, Bondaweb and the Oasis bag and I might just colour in a few of the butterflies and flowers in paler shades this time.

                                         I love Bondaweb. Especially when it's painted!