Textile Tales

I am finding my screen printing on textiles class quite challenging. It’s not that I don’t look forward to getting into the studio and messing around with screens and designs and lengths of fabrics, but I am finding it frustrating to be learning a new skill and working in an unfamiliar way. I want to spend more time than I have working away until I have it mastered.

When it comes to my work, I am very used to coming up with a sketch or an idea and sitting down with my trusty wacom tablet and my copy of Photoshop and working away at an illustration until it’s pretty much exactly how I want it to look. Not unlike the effect this has had on my drawing skills, in screen printing class I have found that I come up with an idea and start working on it and half way through the project I might discover that it really doesn’t look as good as I had imagined and there’s no going back (limited time in class etc). I am having a great deal of trouble mixing colours. This is something that used to come pretty naturally (I thought) to me but now that I am used to opening a palette on my screen and clicking on a chosen colour and maybe using little sliders to adjust it until it’s just perfect it seems that I have lost the knack of doing it with pigments.

This is very, very annoying as it can take ten to fifteen minutes in total to first have to wait to get to the scales to weigh out the binder and then add in little delicate dribbles of pigment – only to discover when mixing it all together that I haven’t created a gorgeous, dusky, rosey pink that I had hoped for but instead something that remotely resembles khaki but is more like an entirely new colour called “blah” (perhaps also known in some circles as “baby poo brown” or “yuck – is that a stain?”).

Anyway – I come home from class feeling lost and sad and like chucking it in but luckily I always manage to be enthused again by the next class and keep at it. It’s an interesting exercise in letting go of all the usual control I have over my work. It’s probably a great way to get back into doing some really free and inspired work – eventually – once I get past the stage of struggling and throwing out masses of misjudged colours.

In knitting news, I finally got around to taking some wip photos of the cardigan I am working on. As I have already mentioned, it’s nothing terribly exciting but I am considering it a kind of boot camp exercise for more amazing garments in the future.

My Rowan Junior book arrived which I have been drooling over excessively. I went out and splurged on a couple of balls of Rowan Kid Classic yesterday ready to knit up into a beanie for Amelia (side note: just looking at the colour “cherish” on the Rowan website compared to what it actually looks like in my hand — it would be worth ordering a swatch card before forking out for a huge lot of this wool online!).

And this is will be the beanie – the pattern is called “Isla”:

Call for assistance

A friend of mine is writing a gardening book for publication early next year. She has written to me to ask if I know of anyone who might make an interesting profile. She wants to “show youngish people doing their own thing with limited resources. I’m looking for people who are doing interesting, creative and/or d.i.y things… so working with junk, making their own stuff, finding ways to cut costs and being creative. They should also be working with small spaces, difficult spaces, urban environments etc.”. Specifically she wants to be able to include:
1. An unusual or creative garden (as described above. Fairly open-ended)
2. A container garden
3. Food grown in a limited or difficult space (rooftops etc)
4. A southern climate garden
5. An unusual design concept

If you fit any of these ideas and especially if you are from Australia or New Zealand, send me an email so I can send on your details.

Also — for me — A call to any mums or dads of young kids in the Blackburn / Box Hill / Forest Hill area… I need to get some inside stories on what the kindergartens and schools are like in the area… if you are out there can you please email me and say hello?

Sleepless sniffing and afternoon knitting

Mito’s Bento boxes. Mmm. Inspiration for little lunches. (thanks Ben)

What a week. This cold really knocked me for six. Day 9 and my voice is still hoarse but at least I have some energy back, enough energy to dash out to Forest Hill to try and find some allegedly really cheap bamboo knitting needles, only to find a tag advertising the amazing sale price on an empty rack. OH WOE!

I was chatting with Ben and Suzette about colds on the weekend while we stood sniffing and coughing in the playground watching our little kids run around attempting to defy gravity on various bits of equipment. We agreed that in the good old days (“before you were born dude, and life was great, you are the burden of my generation, I sure do love you – let’s get that straight” – ahh Paul Simon… this song pops into my mind an awful lot these days) if you got a cold you could kick it in a couple of days with a good night’s sleep or two and a couple of long afternoon naps. Long afternoon naps and good night sleeps are a near impossibility when the small children in your house are also suffering from colds. I think Amelia has gotten used to nocturnal cuddles after last week when she was really suffering and cries out for us every hour or so. So you get to live with your cold for a lot longer and you get to know it very, very well.

On a brighter, less phlegmy note I have started the cardigan for Amelia and have finished the back panel. I am using a pattern from Patons Classic Baby Knits and a Bendigo Woollen Mills yarn (Rustic 8ply ‘Green Opal’). I am very pleased with my knitting – it looks pretty neat with only one row looking a little odd and bumpy. This cardigan isn’t going to be the world’s most beautiful cardigan (although I really like how the wool is knitting up – will definitely order the Rustic again) as the pattern is pretty dull, but I wanted a basic piece to prove to myself that I could get through a whole garment before moving on to (and buying yarn for) some more sophisticated pieces from a Rowan book that I have ordered.

While I was out hunting elusive bamboo knitting needles this morning at Big W, I found some nice Panda yarn – a fluffy mohair blend and a novelty yarn that has bobbles and fluff without looking too tacky. I wish there was better light around today so I could take some photos. I think I might turn them into some snake scarves from Knitting Pretty (thanks Erin!). After having made a couple of these for some small friends I can tell you that they were road tested at Hays Paddock and are very good for scaring off pigeons who are trying to get into the chocolate cake.

Pumpkin time

More colds, sleepless nights and grizzly days and it’s not even winter yet. Amelia J has today with Nan-nan while I have to do some designs for some screen prints for Thursday but all I really want to do is to curl up under the covers with a cup of coffee and a good book.

Speaking of winter and wintry things, when I was in grade 7 an American girl attended my school for a year or so and we became good friends. I went home to her place for dinner one cold June night and her father had made Pumpkin Pie – a dish that is totally foreign to me and this country. I tasted it with trepidation but it was so delicious that I can remember it very clearly – the colour, the consistency and the taste almost 20 years later (20 years?? sheesh). A few years back on my first trip to Canada to meet Big-P’s family and experience a Northern Hemisphere Christmas, Big-P’s Mum (Mom) baked a pumpkin pie and it was as amazing as I remembered. Smooth and silky and delicious with a huge blob of whipped cream.

I have always thought it might be something that I would like to try and bake at home so that Amelia J can have a little taste of some of her cultural heritage – what a brilliant excuse for total indulgence! So this weekend, being cold and wintry and perfect pumpkin pie weather, I boiled up some pumpkin (no such thing as canned pumpkin around here) and made the Moosewood filling and poured it into Stephanie’s delicious short crust, although, I cheated and mixed it in the blender rather than by hand. This was kind of a practice run as Amelia is still on her no-dairy diet but it was so incredibly successful that I am keen to make it every weekend for the entire Autumn / Winter 2004. Actually, the filling was really easy but I was more impressed with the pastry. You can see that it looks pretty uneven and will take me a while to get the hang of, but being able to make pastry opens up a whole world of pies and tarts and delicious things that all seemed too hard before.

Patchy

Thank you so much to those who took the time to fill in the survey. It is much appreciated and Lena is thinking about posting the results so those who are interested can take a look.

In craft news, I am still working slowly on the secret present project which is turning out to be much trickier than I originally thought. Paul and Lara – if you are reading this and want to keep this a surprise, please stop reading now. Here’s a little picture for you both to look at instead: click!

The present is a small baby quilt for Alice’s little brother or sister who will be arriving some time this month. I got the idea and the general direction from Caroline Zoob’s book Childhood Treasures: Handmade Gifts for Babies and Children. This is a book I borrowed from the library and after my initial hesitation about it (thinking it wasn’t quite my style), it has turned out to be a really great source of inspiration combined with tips and tricks. I have just ordered it from amazon to have permanently sitting on my shelf as I have referred to it so much in the past six weeks. Anyway… the patchworking of the quilt went very well. I did it all on the machine and made a very simple checkerboard pattern. It only took me an afternoon to get it all together. The small amount of patchwork I have done before has been done by hand has taken forever. Little did I realise that this was the very easy bit.

On this quilt I decided that I would teach myself how to machine appliqué which was probably a mistake – I really should have taught myself how to machine appliqué on some scraps or something not terribly important like a hanky or a pillowslip, but as is my want I leapt in feet first and started attaching shapes of various kinds to the actual quilt. The idea is to decorate the quilt in various animals and objects that will probably make up some of the baby’s first words (words like bird, cup, duck etc).

** Side note: have a look at the “Talking Quilts” exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum – interesting stuff along a similar idea. I particularly like the “Teaching Quilt” by Elizabeth Hamilton. Imagine the work in that!**

I used some very cool iron on adhesive stuff which made my little shapes stick fast to the fabric but then the machine stitching around each shape left a lot to be desired. Some worked out ok like the heart at the centre of the quilt:

But other shapes like the moon:

look pretty (really) awful. The key seems to be to keep the machine moving at an even speed and try not to deviate too much from a smooth and consistent line. Easier said than done. It was then my idea to go back and embroider some details in (below) and add new shapes in some of the empty squares as well as words and messages for the small new child to read and discover as it gets older. This is going to be the time consuming bit and might be limited by the arrival of the recipient.