Doing what we like doing

In this week's Sunday newspaper I read an article about how the author feels guilty for not wanting to go off and do adventurous activities on her holidays, but prefers just staying around the place.  And I thought I was the only one that loved being at home ..... where else can I sit and read whenever I like, do some stitching or journalling whenever I feel like it, spend time with my other half relaxing in our recliner chairs, stroke the cat, go for a walk in nature at the best part of the day, talk to my family members, in fact do all the things that make life worthwhile?
  

Ibis feathers collected locally from the riverbank

©Christine Linton

Embroidery and beading

Just thought I would post my New Years Eve machine embroidery.  It started off with hand embroidery for the city buildings at the bottom and for the first few fireworks, then I thought that it needed more life for such a sparkly type of evening, so I dropped a lot of metallic thread waste on the sky part and free-machined with clear thread.  Now the fireworks give the expression of excitement.  I used a piece of black satin given to me as a pillowcase, it was quite thick.  I mounted it on a piece of corrugated cardboard from a box, which is why it's not quite straight all round.  It has gift-wrapping ribbon hanging from it which I thought was an appropriate embellishment.

New Year's Eve embroidery 

©Christine Linton

New Year's Eve embroidery, detail of the fireworks 

©Christine Linton

Something I have tried to machine embroider but not yet succeeded to my own mind, is bird feathers - but I did bead one that I liked.

Beaded feather  

©Christine Linton

Cheryl Bridgart on the other hand has some stunning machine embroidered feathers in this image amongst a website full of stunning machine embroidery.  She inspires me to try again.

Just a little whimsy

Couldn't resist putting a link to this story for all the goat lovers out there, as well as the people who value common sense.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-01-23/comedian-claims-gruff-treatment-over-goat-fine/4480106

And on You Tube -

Comfort zones

We all love our comfort zones.  But ... out for a walk this morning, planning on a walk along Linear Park, feeling a strong psychological tug to walk up the side streets instead.  But I won't feel the "nature rush" I thought.  In the end I followed the tug.  After a pleasant walk - not immersed in nature but pleasant - I walked back across a grassy area to go home, looked over and discounted lots of bedraggled old feathers, then found - this!  And you can't even see the iridescent nature of the central mauve/blue area in the photo.  But a lovely reward for going outside my comfort zone.

 

Owls

Embroidered Owl  approx 2010?

©Christine Linton 2013

I'm not quite sure when I made this embroidery, but lately I keep seeing drawn, painted and stitched owls, so I'm going to take it as a good omen, perhaps meaning that I have the wisdom to follow my creative path .....
Found this blog on my blog feed which has beautiful art work of owls and this interesting info on owl .symbology.

Making texture in hand embroidery

My latest obsession is texture, in particular texture in trees, on the bark, the visual texture of groups of tree tops, the way the closer leaves can be seen in detail and the further ones merge into blobs of flat greens of various shades.  Texture on tree bark is a whole subject in itself, and I've been taking far too many photos of tree bark texture in the last few days; I'll have to do some heavy editing if I want to still have space on my hard drive.  I'm definitely looking at doing some hand embroidered texture around a tree theme, so I looked out my Hand Embroidery Unit Folder from 2011 and found this tree trunk texture piece that I worked in various threads and yarns, mostly couched.  It is one of my favourite pieces from that Unit.  It gives me a good start on thinking what I want to do with this theme.
 

Texture tree, threads and yarns, couching

©Christine Linton

While I was looking around for other textured embroidered art, I found this blog post from Alex Hall which has the most fascinating textural interpretation of pebbles - when I clicked on the image for a close up look, I was delighted to find rows of chain stitch, one of my favourite stitches, as well as bullions and french knots - worth the time to study it.
http://underatopazsky.wordpress.com/2011/10/26/embroidered-pebbles-2/

Experimental art - my own quote

©Christine Linton

This is my personal view of experimental art.  I think you already guessed that!

Working with detail

Looking at the pic from 2 days ago, I followed a design idea from my college work and picked out a detail.

detail from encaustic wax  

©Christine Linton

If you look at that image, which was depicting rock strata in wax, this detail is near the top left.  Isolated like this, it looks just like a row of teeth to me.

Word for the year

Last year I was introduced to the concept of taking a word and using it as a reference for the year, regarding your creativity and artwork but I suppose for any part of your life.  Last year I picked "develop" because I was in the process of developing new skills, and every time I looked at the word on my "wall" I remembered to focus on what I wanted to develop.  This year I have picked "extend" because I want to go in depth into various concepts in my art work.  Linda Matthews is the artist I am inspired by in this and if you want to see what she has to say on this link, you will be rewarded with a deeper understanding of the whole idea.

My Experimental Day

Today I extended my skills with encaustic, and I feel I am starting to develop my own ideas of what effect I want to achieve and being able to see how to accomplish that aim.  Sometimes you can also see something extra to what you expected - I was aiming to show the strata in the rock formation along Linear Park, which has happened - Yay, success - but also I can see ribs ......
Encaustic, rock strata
 , 

©Christine Linton

Silk embroidered owl

Want to see a stunning embroidered owl?  Go here and scroll down a little; please, it's so beautiful!
http://www.helenmstevens.co.uk/wyrdembroideries/

Experimental crochet

A couple of years ago I learnt how to make spirals in crochet, and I used that technique to make a fringe on a scarf that I crocheted.  Last week, I used that knowledge in my experimenting.  I gathered up all the dyed string I could find and tied it together in a ball.  This is string that I used when I was pole-wrap shibori dyeing some fabric last year for my college assignment.  Most of it was a greenish colour but some was yellow and rust.  The dye was Procion dyes; these are chemical dyes but I have never had problems with them and I am careful about not inhaling the powder and wear gloves as well.

Anyway, this string had been waiting for me to use it.  I was making some spirals for another piece and tried the string.  The result was too bulky for the piece but I really liked the clunky look and thought I'd show it here.  The ends where I tied smaller pieces together add to the raggy effect I like to use in my work.

spiral crochet, dyed string

©Christine Linton

Naturally I did some blog surfing to find some more experimental crochet, and was blown away to find these wonderful works of extraordinary crochet art which I hope you will admire as much as I did.

Ibis on the riverbank

Trying out some lino printing on collage - looking for the effect of printing onto overlapping layers.  I used green and blue dyed and painted papers, from last year's marathon session of altering paper towels and other discarded and recycled papers.  A bit of red in there - well, there are always escaped flowers growing on the riverbank amongst the native plants, and I wanted an impressionistic effect with the collage to show the riverbank.  The ibis lino cut is on the right hand side at the bottom - you have to look, which is usually the case when birdwatching down among the overgrown edges of the Torrens river, such a good habitat for water birds to breed in, lots of cover for them.

Ibis on the riverbank - paper collage, linoprint
Christine Linton 2013

Taking the bus

My transport is the bus.  Chookys also ride the bus.

Chookys on the bus
Christine Linton 2013

Sketching birds

Working on my sketching again, I love any bird but owls are a symbol of wisdom.  I did this owl three whole years ago but I'm trying to do another.

 - and on this blog  from Valerianna I just found are some wonderful owl drawings to inspire me, and I hope they inspire you.

Changing the appearance of a weaving sample

How to still sew in the middle of an Aussie heatweave - had to go out and buy a fan for my studio so that I could sew; the heat 45 Celsuis/110 Fahrenheit finally succeeded in draining my energy.  So today I've been able to set up sewing again and stitched this Experimental Weaving onto my Connotations cloth. First I gathered these strips stitching from side to side which helps them twist, then gathered them; then wove them together.

Connotations Experimental Weaving  with gathered fabric threads.

Then I slid the weaving onto a space on my Connotations.  I let the strips fall naturally in different ways as I slid the weaving piece on because then I had two different appearances and two photos to look at.  (Addicted to photographing my work in all stages.)  Once it  had fallen into its new alignment, which makes it look totally different, I used bright orange DMC cotton embroidery thread to stitch it in place, varying my stitch size for a naive look.  My colour scheme for Connotations is blues, greens and orange.  I love this because of the high contrast of the orange, yet using blues and greens for the fabrics and orange for the thread (mostly, not entirely) means I am keeping some consistency.   

Connotations Experimental Weaving after stitching onto cloth

On the left of the weaving you can see an area of threads.  These are from my "waste thread" bag which hangs under my sewing machine table; I stitched these on by hand which is new for me because usually I free-machine thread waste onto fabric.  I'm consciously working a lot more hand stitching nowadays.  I find it very relaxing, the effect is similar to when you are walking in a place of natural beauty.

The fabrics themselves are strips of  hand-dyed, or painted with fabric paint, or plain commercial fabric (that is the blueish maive one.  The colour is exactly in the middle of blue and purple, if you put it against one of those it looks like the other.)

First feather found this year

A tiny lorikeet feather, green, blue and white, found this morning on my walk.  Happy New Year everyone.