I tried to shift it here, but there are so many people with links to the old site, I decided to leave it there. Plus the benefits of having to write my own css didn't seem to be worth it.

I'll be taking this one down sometime soon, so best update your links!

I picked up some sari silk yarn today at the local wool store, Wool Trends. It's fabulous stuff and should prove eminently useful as I work through some of my next projects (another couple of books, a series of boxes and some bowls and vases). I have great hopes for it! As an aside, Wool Trends is one of those fabulous shops that is crammed with all sorts of fibres. One that caught my attention, apart from the sari silk, was Seasilk, a seaweed fibres and silk composite. I almost bought some and may yet go back for it (I just need a definitive purpose for it, as it was expensive). Have a look at the colours. They truly are as vibrant as they appear in the photos and the feel of the stuff….. it's like flexible pussy-willows that drape like they were a part of your skin. Amazing stuff. All I need is a use for some….

Ah, I love having an chance to play with some new products. Recently I wandered through Kent Hardware store (Kent are the spawn of Irving, a New Brunswick company) and discovered that they are ceasing to carry the Pebeo line of art supplies. The remainder of the paints were seriously discounted (I paid $1.30 CDN for a $7 bottle) and included some of the silver glitter finish and the expandable paints. Score!

The silver glitter finish isn’t bad at all. It’s basically glitter in some sort of acrylic medium suitable for use on fabric. You can paint it on already painted and dried fabric and the base dries clear. You can also mix it in with the other acrylic-based paints. Opaque paints will obscure the glitter a good bit (unless the glitter happens to be on top of the paint), but the transparent paints mix well with it and the transparency of the paint allows the glitter to shine through, although the sparkle is somewhat diminished.

The glitter hold on well during a wash (I didn’t machine dry it) and is fine after being ironed with a pressing cloth (ironing the fabric from the back would likely achieve the same effect). It seems to rub off a bit when you rub it hard, so it’d probably be better for things that got minimal abrasion and washing. \

The sparkle of this isn’t overpowering, also, so it’d be reasonable to use moderately in landscape quilts (snow in moonlight, for instance, or water shimmering). Heat setting makes a definite difference to how well the glitter adheres, btw.

The expandable paint was also rather niffy. I’d read about it a bit in Quilting Arts (issue 24, winter 2006 – Linda Schmidt) and was therefore rather keen to add it to my repertoire of techniques and tools.Finding it on sale was an added bonus! I tried it several different ways. Firstly, painted on parchment paper rather thickly, allowed to dry, ironed and then peeled off. This gives me the option of creating pieces that could be sewn or glued as layers in a work. The resulting pieces were rather brittle, however, so care needs to be used in peeling them off and handling them. They painted nicely, though:

The expandable paint was wonderfully easy to work with, although I think a squeeze bottle with a fine applicator tip would be excellent for very detailed work. As it expands in all directions after heating, you need to start with rather fine lines for such things as tree branches:

But I like the effect. It’s white and dries white, so tinting it before using is helpful. After it has dried and then been heated, you can rather easily paint right over it as I did with the tree above. A keeper as far as materials go!

Finally, I ‘ve been playing with the Sprinklettes (not a girl group from the fifties), purchased at Michaels.

Basically, it’s iridescent glitter that can be mixed with paint and used on fabric. You can also stick it on with fabric glue. I’ve only played with this a little, but I have found the following:

• it needs to be mixed with its adhesive, not just sprinkled on top
• if just sprinkled on top, much of it will wash or rub off
• a fine coat of thinned fabric glue over top of it really helps to keep it on
• it mixes well with fabric paints, especially transparent ones
• it’s quite visually powerful and easily overdone
• it is attracted to everything via static electricity
• it gets everywhere. And I mean everywhere. Places that will astonish and thrill your husband kind of everywhere.

Here’s what colours come in the bottle:

Now that I’ve got the sparklies out of my system (and underwear), I’m off to do some preliminary sketches for another series.

I’ve been knitting a lot, lately, in and around other things. I don’t knit in the warmer months as I find my hands just get too sweaty, but cold winter evenings are perfect for clicking together needles (I like bamboo) and wool. This winter, I’ve discovered the joys of felting or fulling wool and have been trying different types of wools, just for kicks. This is a 70% wool, 30% soy silk mixture, which is beautifully soft to handle and felts rather nicely.

Warning note: make sure you felt wools inside some sort of bag (i.e. a pillowcase) when using the washing machine. Felting sheds fibres and the soy-wool mixture sheds more than most!

A recent studio play session yielded a personal frivolity: an mp3 player case for my personal use. I’ve fitted it with a piece of velcro for an adjustable armband, but one could just as easily make a belt loop.

Did I mention that I made myself a matching coffee cup sleeve?
Nice to have time to fool around with ideas for a change!

http://www.therooms.ca/artgallery/appnl_2006.asp

Please note that for artwork to be considered, artists are required to  submit images of the work in either 35 mm slide format, photographs or   digital files on a clearly labelled CD-ROM. Digital images should be  saved  in JPG or TIF format at a resolution of 150 dpi or higher.

The jury will meet at The Rooms for deliberation on January 29, 30  and 31.
Please note there will be no traveling and no studio  visits.

Please contact Chris Batten  (709) 757-8047  if you have any questions regarding the Provincial Art Procurement Program.

Chris Batten
Collections Management
Provincial Art Gallery – The  Rooms
Tel:  (709) 757-8047
Fax: (709) 757-8041

(As an aside, I actually do read and speak some German, the former more than the latter. French, too, quite fluently, when in practice. I’ve studied varying amounts of Latin, Hebrew, Russian as well as a smidgen of Greek, so I can generally pick out most Romance languages reasonably well and can do essential things like buy a loaf of bread, ask your name, tell you I love you and inquire as to the train schedule in a goodly number of European countries. I’ve never visited any of them, but if I were there, I could identify a red car, buy the last piece of cake and a beer, tell the police that I was a Canadian and find the bathroom. I could even admire the view and find out what a hotel room would cost. What more could you want, really?)

I’m digressing again, though.

I was looking at my web stats, as I’m prone to doing overly-regularly, and noticed a few visitors from Germany (hi Ulla! Ich habe seinen blog gelesen! Wie sagt mann “Blog” im Deutsch?), Brazil (Cecilia, I’m not even going to attempt to write in Portuguese) and Egater, from Estonia. As I was perusing Egater’s blog, I came across a picture that interested me of a Craft and Artisan fair in her area (look under “Muud asjad” on the left side of the page). Following the photo link took my to her Picasa album of the St Martin’s Day Fair (St. Martin’s Day is November 11th) and I spent far too much time marvelling at the talents and creations of this amazing group of people. Their use of colours and graduations therein are so very different from ours here in on the east coast of North America, but at the same time there is a huge overlap in materials and certain patterns. Undoubtedly the similarities in climates and transatlantic trade through the ages has affected both what we use and how we use it. Lots of woolen and wooden items abound in the St. Martin’s Fair, the vast majority of which are made with great skill and by hand. I was seriously impressed.

As I said before, my Estonian is pretty much nil, so I was floundering around trying to find out where in Estonia Egater lived when I bumped into a link to her Technorati profile. Turns out she lives in Hiiumaa. Looking up Hiiumaa, I found a bitsy island in the Baltic sea. It’s just under 1000 square kilometers and looks like a very neat place. I followed the link to the official site and poked around there for a bit. In fact, I had a rollicking good time revisiting the concept of things being distorted in translation. In this case, the old phrase “lost in translation” doesn’t apply, as I think the very idiosyncratic writing of the pages tell us more than a proper translation would. Take the following paragraph, for instance, from the “How to Come?” page

Saaremaa Shipping Company takes passengers onto Rohuküla- Heltermaa, Rohuküla- Sviby and Triigi- Sõru by comfortable ferries Scania and Ofelia with shops, bars and restaurants and other places on board that 1,5 hour trip to go smoothly and quickly. You can choose between the shop, bistro and bar. For little passengers we have nice playing- corners and adults may play with fruit machines.

It took me a second to realise that the “fruit machines” were “slot machines” and not some sort of vending machine packed with apples. Are they written literally as “fruit machines” in Estonian? Very cool.

Then there was the culturally enlightening section on “ice roads”. There are ice roads in Canada, up north, so the concept of driving across a lake is not entirely foreign to me (terrifying, but not foreign) and Newfoundlanders have crossed ice for centuries, both on oceans and ponds, but the vivid way in which going across a portion of ocean was described (for tourists, even!) made truly me want to visit Hiiumaa:

During winter time one experience an unforgettable driving by ice road the existence of which depends on how severe the cold is outside and not of the good will.

An ice road is a different one for you can pass the ferries and you have to drive at quite a high speed with your safety belts open. The speed is reduced only while approuching the cracks that one have to cross over the boards fixed on the cracks. It takes approximately 20 minutes to cover the distance in case of favourable conditions.

At least the Hiiumaa inhabitants hope that such kind of traffik will not be remain only in the memories of our fathers-mothers and grandfathers-grandmothers.

When the ice was thin the rope was tide to the tail and running noose around the neck of a horse. The horse that sank through the ice waited patiently to be helped. Usually the running noose was tightened around the neck and while gasping for breath the animal took a deep breath and was said to become lighter in the water. With mutual efforts the horse was often pulled out of water. In case of favourable conditions the trip from Heltermaa to Rohuküla took around two hours.

John and I have always toalked about visiting Scandinavia and were enthusiastic about the possibility of seeing Iceland, but I think Hiiumaa is now near the top of the list. It looks like a very cool place (both climatically and culturally) and I would love to visit that St. Martin’s Day Fair (really, the photos are worth a look. Use the slideshow feature so that they’re big enough to see properly). I think I’ll take the ferry, though. A body can only take so much excitement.

As an aside, the horse incident was incredibly reminiscent of similar Newfoundland stories immortalised in the song Tickle Cove Pond. Funny how cultures in similar latitudes coincide….

Anyway, what I have actually been picking at is exploring different ways of felting with a plan (however vague) to incorporate woolen elements into the borders of some of my landscape pieces. I also intend to fiddle with rug hooking. My hope is that I’ll be able to add texture and depth to the borders by physically and visually building them out somewhat from the main image.

The first and most basic felted piece was a simple knitted swatch, washed in the machine. It worked fabulously and would be excellent as the foundation for borders. Stitching (with very short stitches, by machine) the outline of the piece to be cut and then cutting just outside the stitching should prevent fraying. I really like the results.

The piece was knitted in Lion Brand Wool (colourway Majestic Mountain) using 5mm needles. 72 stitches across and I simply knit until I had used up two balls of wool. The resulting felted piece is roughly 15″ x 18″. After washing, I blocked it (pinned it to a board) to dry, thereby flattening it and evening out the distortion. It worked great. I’m knitting a second piece now with the same number of stitches cast on and will use up the same two balls of wool. The width of the unfelted second piece is 18″, so it looks like there’s about 17% shrinkage with one washing (hot wash, cold rinse, liquid detergent). You can see the contrast below:

I also picked up a set of needle-punch felting stuff (punch, needles, wool) and am hoping to have a go at that in the next week or so. In and around the heapin’ pile ‘o paperwork and proposals and pieces to finish for immanent deadlines. And thank yous to write. And a mailing list to update. Again. It never ends, does it?

I’m not sure I can bring myself to do anything with it besides quilt it….. (maybe with irridescent and metallic threads, possibly couched with silver cording here and there….?) I love it just as it is and am fearful of overdoing it.

More than one person must have my number, though, as I received a whole passel of fibre-related things this year. John gave me an mp3 player (to listen to music and books on tape), new scissors, a new rotary cutter, pins (good ones) and safety pins. My sister-in-law Heather renewed my subscription for Quilting Arts magazine, hence earning my eternal gratitude and bumping herself way up the list of “people who will get my hand-made stuff”. Mom and Dad gave me a 2007 copy of my personal organisation system, without which I would forget absolutely everything including my postal code. Katherine, with incredible care and though, decided to forestall her mother’s approaching early-mid-life crisis by presenting me with a Mercedes. Pocket-sized, even. A girl can dream.

Yes sir! When you already have more projects than can reasonably be accomplished before the 25th, add one more!

These mug holders are taken from D’Arcy-Jean Milne’s article in the most recent edition of Quilting Arts (Winter 2006, Issue 24, pages 68-70) and are a rather fun way to use up some scraps. I’m also finding them a great exercise in testing out various aspects of the new machine. My template for these mug holders was taken directly from one of the cardboard ones distributed with a disposable cup.

Dunno what I’ll actually DO with these, but they’re fast and fun to make. I used scraps from the log cabin quilt I’m making for my daughter for Christmas to construct these.