Gilding the Pomegranate

Apart from the meeting of Designing Women on Saturday I did nothing textile related over the weekend. The meeting was a good one - there were lots of tassels brought in for the swap and everyone seemed pleased with the one they got. I forgot to take a photo, yet again! Juliet got mine and I got Linda's lovely little flower tassel.


(If anyone is interested, both the cat tassel and the blue one I showed the other day are about 25cm long. Linda's is approx 8cm). Helen demonstrated a mola technique and some lovely pieces were started. Not by me. Kevin has generously given me his cold, and I have not been feeling well.

However today I decided to finish my homework for the Husqvarna meeting tomorrow. The project was to use gold leaf to embellish a textile piece. I had printed a photograph of some pomegranates and stitched into it a little, so I applied some vliesofix, then the gold leaf. It is not the most original or well done project, but it doesn't look too bad when inserted in a shadow box frame.

Tasselling

I decided I needed to make another tassel to use the purple hank of yarn I showed the other day.

Last month Designing Women had a swap of hearts and I ended up with a stitched (machine embroidered) cat's face and a red felt heart. I really couldn't think what I could do with them.



The cat is a design by Laurel Burch and I happen to own that design collection. What if I stitched another face, joined them together and used them as a head cover? So I did.



This is the tassel at the moment - just yarns tied together. I need to tie them off and bind the head, then slip the cat faces over. I don't know which tassel will go in the swap.



And for anyone interested: I did get a doctor's appointment and a script for some stronger eyedrops. I have been using them religiously and my eye feels so much better that I am going to put in my lenses tomorrow. Keep your fingers crossed.

The tassel, finished

I think I got a bit carried away. Not only did I use a bit of every yarn in the hank for the skirt, I also used the designs I digitised at a workshop last week to stitch out some 3D organza flowers and a decorated felt background to make the head.

The Blues

We have a challenge to make a tassel for swapping at Designing Women this month. I was going to use some of the piles of yarn I have when I spotted this hank at Spotlight. This is the purple colour way. It just shouted TASSEL at me.



The yarn is actually 10 yarns, simply tied end to end. This is what I ended up with when I unwound the blue one.


Tassel, here I come.

The next deadline looms . . .

I have done three loads of washing today - some of it is still hanging outside under the verandah because it has been raining most of the day. A lot of the rest of it, dried in the drier, has been put aside for packing on Saturday.

I have finished the outfit for THE wedding and pressed all the seams. I made a covered button for the neck and hemmed the pants. I can't believe it is all done!

There are at least 6 pairs of trousers - mine and Kevin's - awaiting pressing/ironing.

I am well and truly over Bali Time, but I have downloaded some of the photos. Here are a couple of them - flowers from the hotel garden.

Slightly Productive Sunday

Yesterday I finished my contribution to the family blog, was happily writing away on this one, went to publish it and . . . the connection had disappeared and remained down all evening. So that's my excuse for no entry yesterday.

We are reconnected today and I spent hours surfing, looking for information and air fares related to a trip to the States in July for a nephew's wedding. It seems almost too easy to make all the travel arrangements on-line. But since we haven't actually decided on an itinerary it was just information gathering.

This afternoon I played a bit more with ATCs. I now have a pile of a dozen or so. There is a swap being organised to raise money for cancer research and I'd like to be in that one, but the rules say they must be in a series of 6. I am finding it very difficult. I have made series in the past, but never any more than 4 of a kind. I usually make an embellished base fabric, then use a view finder to pick out interesting bits. I thought I had a big enough base piece, but try as I might, I couldn't get more than 5 pieces from it. I will obviously have to make something quite a bit larger for this.

I remembered that I had taken a photo of the flower form of the seed pod pictured the other day, so I did some searching in the files and eventually found it. Isn't it a lovely bunch of tassels?

Natural fibre

This giant tassel is hanging from a tree at North Lake.

The lake is now almost completely dry, but filled with bright green weeds. It was amazing to see a black swan stalking through them like it was swimming in a different kind of water. I don't remember the lake being so low before. This time last year it still had plenty of water in it. We will need lots of winter rain to fill it again. But there are still a lot of water birds around so I guess the weed provides them with good pickings.

This type of tree grows its older leaves into bunches. Usually they resemble balls or birds' nests. This tassel must be a least a couple of metres long. I had never noticed it before, but now I will look out for it.

I finished something!

I decided to use the letter outlines I had customised and reversed yesterday to make a T shirt. I copied them on to vliesofix, delved into my scrap bin and tried to arrange them. They were a tad too large, but there was NO WAY that I was going to repeat the customising exercise. The result is pictured below, finished except for hems. I did the satin stitch manually - much easier than hooping, and I would have had to redo the entire design anyway to stitch it out digitally.

I said yesterday that I was disappointed with the density of the lace in the customised bell. I was going to have another fiddle today, but got a bit carried away with T shirt construction. When I looked at the bell again I saw a tassel head. So that is what the bell became.