Work.

One thing about this course at SWTAFE is the amount of work involved.  I think the designers of the course must have known my old great - aunt Bridget who was full of sayings; one of her favourites was, "the devil makes work for idle hands".  He certainly misses out on me as I am never idle. Since doing the designs for our major assignment this year, the Large Tapestry, there have been 2 other tapestry assignments as well as 2 design assignments.  The tapestry ass. were  a commission and the other working with themes.  The commission took me forever as I over thought the subject matter I chose which was  a tapestry for a chapel based on the history of a particular order of Sisters.  We were required to weave a sample of the design and mine is 15 cm square.

 
The next assignment was about working with themes and as I had done a drawing of the black and white tree trunks that line the driveway into a vineyard in NE Vic I decided to do tree trunks.  Why? because it was nearly August and I hadn't started the Large Tapestry yet and I was slightly panicked.  We had to do 4 drawings and choose one of these to weave yet another sample.  The drawing I chose was one of a tree in Adelaide near Captain Light's lookout whose branches bear the scars of people's stupidity in the names and marks that have been cut into it.

 

If you look carefully at the right hand side of the sample you can where I have made a monumental error.  I have never done this before in my weaving life.  The good news is that yesterday I actually started my large tapestry and have done a little of it.  I will blog about this soon.  I have worked out it will take me 200  to 250 hours to weave.  I had better get started.

Violets and Potatoes

Winter in Melbourne has been very cold, wet and grey and I know why people go travelling north.
However, if there is no Winter, there is no Spring and my husband says we need the rain for the flowers (the same one who makes money trees). I wandered out into the backyard last week when we had a nice sunny period and made some discoveries.  The violets under the plum tree are blooming away and I picked a bunch and took them inside.  Violets remind me of my grandmother and when my sister got married, we carried posies of violets which inhindsight were amazing.

The colour purple

I noticed that most of the peas and snow peas are up; I will fill in the holes when we get some sun.  The coriander and the self - sown dill are starting to move and the broad beans are doing well.  We are lucky with the dill as it grows wild.  I usually have a huge crop of self sown parsley too but it seems to be having a holiday this year; maybe it will appear when it warms up a little.  The cumquat tree is on strike as I have not had a crop for the last two seasons probably because I fed it; never again.  However the big suprise was the self sown potatoes.  We must have left a few potatoes in the round last year and they sprouted so I left them be. The frost damaged the plants so we dug them up and got quite a few Nicolas (my favourite potato) and some Royal Blue ones.  What a winter feast!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

More purple.

Tapestry Exhibition

Today the RMIT online tapestry weavers group hosted the showing of the AuNZ Tapestry Challenge at the Spinners and Weavers Guild in Carlton. AuNZ Tapestry Weavers group hosts a challenge each year and this year the task was titled Circles and Squares.  The size of the tapestries is to be no bigger than 20 cm square. It is not a competition and all entries are accepted. Some of us put the exhibition up during the week and we were blown away with the tapestries.  They are beautiful and so diverse.  The quality of the weaving was amazing and they are so colourful. I will upload the flyer which has 4 tapestries from people who are members of both online groups.  I would love to show others but that would infringe intellectual property.

Shifu

A while back I saw that Beautiful silks in Fitzroy were having a Natural Dye Symposium and that one of the workshops was called Shifu and making miniature books. As I very inerested in things miniature, I enrolled without having investigated what Shifu is. Shifu involves cutting very fine paper, lokta, into strips like a paper lantern, then cutting it to have a continuous strip then spinning this to make a paper thread with which you weave to make Shifu.

A ball of spun paper

My first attempt.

As you can see , my first  attempt is not very even due to the fact that paper under strain breaks and I broke several warps.  However for a first attempt I thought it not too bad.  There were 9 in the class and I am very glad I did it as 2 of the other participants were also tutors at the Symposium. The tutor was Velma Bolyard and this was her first trip to Australia from  the USA and the students came from the eastern states of Australia and NZ.  We also made miniature book structures including one called a flag book which when you use different cououred papers is eally interesting.

Diligent  workers.

It was a very intense class and most people would baulk at the thought of spinning paper (it takes hours).
Velma had some gorgeous shifu books and one day (?) I hope to have 1 too. I have put  a link to her blog in my links.

Petites: Some of the Pieces

As I said in my last post, there were 12 or so pieces from ex RMIT tutors and students.

I am posting work from some of those I was able to photograph. The  photograph of one of my friend's pieces was terrible, both of them, but you can see her tapestry at her blog  marymac. in June, under the heading Recording my progress - to music.

Cresside

Esmae

Julie, sorry about the flash; her weaving including seaweed.

Marina

Mine has been  shown.  I have a few more but as I haven't asked permisssion, I had better not show them.

Enjoy

Petites 2012

Last weekend it was the opening of the Petites Exhibition in Wangaratta which they hold on the alternate year to the Wangaratta Contemporary  Textile Award. There were about 120 pieces exhibited  and RMIT ex students were well represented with about 12 of them in the exhibition - including me. The standard of the work was very high and I was chuffed to be in such good company. The tapestry was one I did last year for one of my assignments.  The design for the tapestry came from a photograph I took at the Australian Garden at Cranbourne that I played with in Photoshop and Illustrator; it was called "Water From the Desert". But the best thing was that someone bought my piece of tapestry.  I did a workshop over the weekend about making miniature books and on the Sunday when it was quiet we went into the gallery where I saw the red spot under my  tapestry.  I couldn't believe my eyes; whoever bought my work made me very happy.

The workshop was really  interesting and practical and I made 2 miniatures and started a third which isn't finished; maybe one day when I don't have any homework.

I got into an awful mess making the second one; luckily all the media were water soluable.
I had fun.

Tim's Tapestry FINISHED - nearly

I have finally finished weaving Tim's Tapestry after many months and all I have to do is take it off the loom and make the finishing touches, work for this weekend.   I have kept a record of the  time it has taken and so far have racked up 93 hours.  I used the ATW rule of thumb for costing tapestries and worked out that it would have cost $3, 650 (rounded down) as Tim is family, however it is payment for the loom. That,s motherly love for you; or stupidity. I have been very impressed with the solidity of the loom; it is nice to weave on and the warp maintains it's tension.  I didn't touch the tapestry for about 2 months  and hardly had to change the tension which is very different from my other looms. It is also useful that I can raise or lower the frame with the removable pieces that fit into the base. I wondered about outlining the leaves with embroidery but have so much work to do for my course that I decided against it as it would never be finished.

Thanks for the loom Tim., it works well.