Daily Diary

Some of you may have been following this thread on Facebook but I thought that I'd reproduce it here so that I could go into more detail. It started on Saturday with a horrid streaming cold so I made a still life of it - box of tissues, Lemsip, Obus lozenges - you know the kind of thing. As I posted it on Facebook I thought about making a pic every day to turn into a stitched book - the diary of a week in the life, kind of thing.

So I printed it on ordinary printer paper,  crumpled it gently in my hands and then oiled it, using two teaspoons of olive oil. Then crumpled well again. Placed on felt and hand stitched. I used Transfoil on the felt underneath so was able to cut shapes from the paper to show this. need to stitch the edges of the shapes.

 I was quite pleased and made some little Lemsip packs to decorate the edge.

Then  I made a couple of borders for the top and bottom.

The original idea was to make these very quicky, as the photos were taken , but I decided that it would be more satisfying to take longer, as long as the images reflected each day.

 

The next day I staggered out for a walk and took a pic of some late (or possibly early) gorse flowesr with a stand of birch in the background. 

Played around on this with the Phototouch app on my galaxy Tab, mostly using the Layers function. Here's the result.

I plan to transfer this to fabric by ironing Bondaweb to felt, ironing on the image, print side down and rubbing away the paper to reveal the image.  This should give me a slightly faded, abstracted version over which I will apply the trees, printed on Jacquard's printable silk.

Monday was a solid work day so lunch was the bright spot for the diary.  Here is a still life with quiche.

Not terribly exciting but the colours were good, with the dark worktop giving a good balance of tones. I like the effect of my glass apples.

It was even better when I used a photo of my washing line as a displacement map. There is a tutorial on Displacement Maps somewhere on this blog if you are interested. Check out the labels at the side.

I'm not sure how I will use this one - I'd like to combine both the images, somehow. Experiments are called for and I want to get some yext into them to recall the context.

Yesterday I had a great excitement when a huge book appeared for me to review in Workshop on the Web. Textiles by Mary Schoeser is amazing. Very expensive but with a massive amount of inspiration within the covers. There are over 1000 pics of textile artist's work, together with lovely photos of historic pieces, and it was these that made me think of a drawing I made some time ago, based on a fresco.  I scanned this in, ready to print on water soluble paper. 

I want to transfer this fresco  to fabric in a way that makes it look old and worn. So far it consists of printed water soluble paper, pulped onto vanishing muslin with a resist in some areas to preserve the printing. I have tried some hand stitching and I am about to add machine stitch and then zap it. Back soon to show results.

I hope to show some results in the next blog. meanwhile I am off to find today's pic.