Autumn colour

Found these in the car park near our house.

They glowed with the sun on them.

So colourful

My friend Pat gave me this plant - in the begonia family I think. It flowers and flowers and flowers! The colour is wonderful. Even the bits left when the spent flowers have fallen off have an decorative look, so I leave them on til they dry up.

It has lived on the other crowded windowsill while I waited for the amaryllis leaves to dry up. They didn’t, so I have moved them outside. The instructions I found suggest that you can trim the dry leaves in August. You need the leaves to feed the bulbs til then. And after, let them become dormant till you are ready to wake them for winter.
Anyway! With the amaryllis leaves gone, the windowsill needed a new arrangement. Because the begonia was getting bigger and bigger, it was just the thing. And wow! It looks quite amazing there. It might need a different dish to sit in, because it is a bit unsteady in that one. We don’t need it falling in the dog dish and adding even more fear to her anxiety levels.

I like Thankful Thursday

I like the colours of fruit and veg in the autumn.

Every year for quite sometime now I have decorated the tables at the front of the church for our Harvest Service. This year, I wasn't sure how I'd be after the op on my eye. The Harvest Service was less than a week from my op. I didn't know if I could manage bobbing up and down to get bits and pieces out of the bags of produce people had brought for the display.

So, the other ladies did it! As I have been telling them, it is about putting one thing next to another and letting the colours God made do the work!

I really enjoyed seeing how other people put things together this year...(out of the random amount of eyes I could see from!)

(And if these photos are fuzzy, you know why!)

I like making bread, too. So that was my job. Put the stuff in the machine and let it work...only it wasn't that simple. Still, the end results looked good. (See if you can spot them amongst the display.) and then we sliced them up for the meal.

On Saturday, I went to a local SAQA meeting. We had the privilege of having input and guidance from Richard McVitis through a day long presentation and discussion about the professional side of being an artist - things like what you call yourself, marketing yourself, showing work, pricing work etc, etc. Very Good! I remember seeing his work at the Knitting and Stitching Show several years ago. I loved it.

front and back of a teaching sample...but which is which!

Quiet and sedate. But with obvious delight at the process of making stitches.

Richard also spoke about some of the artists he was inspired by. I loved the look of the work by Anne Wilson. There was a whole book about her work, so I snapped a few photos so I could remember it.

 Richard's work is minute - extremely small stitching. Much of it is about time. The visual connect with Anne's work is strong. 

Especially the work she did, at the time of writing the book, using human hair as thread.

Not so many I likes this week, but a lot of what is going on visually for me. ( not just because of my left and right eyesight!)

oh, and a bit of space!

 I gave this away to the ladies who run InStitches...to use with transfer printing. (We met at their studio workshop space for the SAQA meeting.)
Someone was getting rid of it a few years ago and I thought, "I will use it to do stuff with transfer paints!"
But I didn't.
So, I decided that since InStitches teaches that technique, but have been using an iron, they could do more with it than I could. and I have the added benefit of space behind my overlocker to do somethings with that! I had some ideas for Christmas presents. Whether I will do them? we shall see.

I am very thankful for aluminium foil! On Sunday, we came home to a cold oven and grey dust over the food that was meant to be cooking on automatic in the oven. SO glad everything was covered with aluminium foil!
The Thoughtful Man got to work cleaning the oven. (He loves cleaning and sorting! No, you can't have him!) And discovered it was the heating element...again.

So, he went upstairs and came back with a replacement. The heating element seems to go periodically, so last time he ordered 4! I told you he was Thoughtful. 😍
So, dinner was delayed, but the new element worked and the food cooked properly. I guessed it had been about 1/3 of the way through the time it was meant to cook. We ate, enjoyed it and haven't become ill. 😷

Go have a look at LeeAnna's blog where she has links to 'likes' others have posted.

4th Plinth - Forced to Flee - Nowhere to Hide

I have finished! (Last week) The little houses made with my adapted box template are stitched together and done!

Inspired by the Artwork: Model for a Hotel (Hotel for Birds) by Thomas Schutte
click on the link to see a variety of images of the sculpture from different sides.

Reason for choosing the art work as inspiration:
The transparent, overlapping colours and the impracticality attracted me.

Forced to Flee - Nowhere to Hide
I am burdened for refugees – South Sudan, Myanmar, etc.
“Here is a tarp and poles. Make your home.”

Documentaries show us people in their desperation. Focus camera on flimsy tents.
Yes, the story must be told!

So, what about their privacy?

Materials and Techniques:
Plastic Document folders used for colour and transparency. Hand quilting thread, hand stitch through layers of the plastic

Adapted box template to resemble my Ramshackle house series. Flimsy house joined together like refugee camps. Open to the elements, transparent. Hiding nothing, revealing all.

-I also added a piece of foam core under the foundation in order to keep the brilliance of the colours. Otherwise, the colour of tables, cloths and so on show through the transparent foundation.

Thread

In January, when InStitches came to the TVCT meeting, I fell in love with their threads. But I didn't have the money. (not that they are expensive, but there were a lot of things to pay for that month.)

Fast forward to Saturday just past. The SAQA area meeting was being held at InStitches Studio. So, I asked them to make sure the threads were out!
and this is what I came home with.

Besides just loving the colours and 'variagatedness', I do have plans for these.
But for a bit I will let them sit and glow at me.

Colours

This Tuesday is brought to you by purple and orange.

Something on Saturday

Caught my eye in the kitchen.
Swede and Leeks
Sometimes I intentionally do contrast bowls like for tomatoes and cukes.
This time it happened unintentionally.

Reminds me of the colours going on in my studio.

Harvest

The last few days I have been baking bread...all shapes and types. Oat bread, French bread, Rye bread, Buckwheat, Seeded, and A few French bread rolls.

And with those and fruit and veg brought in by friends to church yesterday, they made a lovely display.

I forgot the camera, but this photo was taken by my friend Pat. My friend Jan made the wonderful arrangement on the right.


I love how the different colours when put together become even more glorious! It makes you appreciate how much we actually have.

We have been collecting to help some of the people who have chosen to continue to live in Syria and Iraq in spite of what they have been through. Staying to help the ones who don't have the money or ability to flee.

We saw a clip of them and how grateful for what they do have, in spite of being in a bombed out building or having to source food and water in risky conditions.

I wish I could collect the lot on the table above and take to them...

Running man

One (among many things this spring and summer!) of the delays on this piece was that I was not quite happy with the selection of browns I had to choose from. I wanted to cut a silhouette of a running Abebe Bikila to place on the larger green piece. I thought brown would help to reference the "1st African Gold Medal winner" part of things.

Lighter brown/tan would be more like the natural skin of an Ethiopian.* And was almost but not quite the colour of the lion. But it was too pale and insignificant against the bright colours of the rest of the piece. Very dark brown was not good either. So, the option was a slightly reddish brown. I hadn't much of it, but I thought I could manage to cut the figure from it.

When I was at the Festival of Quilts, I saw that Doughty's had a wide range of solid colours for good prices. It wasn't just about green - which I also was looking for - or brown, but which green or brown! And then a reddish brown kept catching my eye.

AND...

Wow. just right.
Okay, not very obviously reddish here.
But, it is more of a darker shade of the brown of the lion. And, more crucially, if you look close in the pattern of the background, you can see it is just the right colour of brown as in the background.

The selection of browns.

Two dark browns, the tan brown, the first reddish brown and then on the right, the just right brown!

So, the running man was duly cut from fused fabric using my freezer paper template.

And here is the finished top.

Now this will go on hold to finish the sandwich and quilting later in the autumn. (Because the Stretching Art Exhibition will be at a different show in the spring.)

I am thinking that when it is done with the exhibition, I might give it to my friend who works in Ethiopia. She can hang it in the school to urge on future Ethiopian long distance runners! Which is one of the reasons why this particular event in 1960 stood out for me. Already, one of the blind girls at the children's village has been scouted for a runner in the Ethiopian Paralympics and Ethiopian Athletics have begun training her!

Basically, I could finish this piece now, but I need to get on with the next project that has been pushed back. In theory, it should go quickly because it is a technique I use a lot, but you never know till you get started.

Unfortunately, I can't show it for a quite a long time yet. If it works and fits the plan, it may be in a book!
************


*Did you know there is a creation fable in some parts of Ethiopia to explain their skin colour? Or so I read in a National Geographic Magazine some time ago. It is said that when God made people, the first batch came out not done enough, so He threw them to the North. The second batch was done too much and He threw them to the South. The third batch was just right and they became Ethiopians!

purples

Oxalis - I love these leaves. They will have pink flowers coming up.

Rhododendron - a new shrub for us.

Reds

Holly in the front garden

Weigela in the back garden

Pinks and purples - Clematis

Pink Clematis growing through the apple tree

Purple Clematis growing in the hedgey bit of the front garden

Some pinks/purples and more touches of red

As you might have guessed, the piece of work is not being done. I am a bit all over the place. So I have been doing some research for an upcoming work due late in the summer.

I might start on the other piece, but wait for a different show. I have it laid out in the thinking stage on my table.
I could enter it, but I would need to enter the details, etc, but at the moment I can't decide about size and all. and I will need to be working on the Fashion show gown straight out when I come back at the end of next week. So, no need to add more pressure.
This was going to be a testing the waters sort of thing and I think will develop into a subseries of one of my themes. If I wait till I have a clearer head, I can think through which of the ideas to use in this piece and which ideas are better to reserve for a subsequent work.

Anyway, playing with flower photos on the computer is also a reasonable use of time in the situation.


Blush on apples

a bit of blush on new growth on a Eucalyptus

blush on a yellow rose bud

Escallonia (I think) buds

allium starting to blossom

star allium starting to blossom

azalea - new bush for us

and a few kiwi plant shoots

even the little hairs on the leaves have a red tinge

A few more reds in the garden

On Sunday a group of us from church went for a walk at California Country Park in Wokingham. Yesterday then, was a recovery day. Come to think of it, so is today!

Anyway a few more reds in the garden.

New leaves on the Mahonia plant in the front garden.

Some Astilbe flowers coming

Rose shoots

slightly purple leaves of one of our Acers which we hope will do better in the new position.

And the Acer by the back gate.

So lovely to look out the back door and see it against the fence.

We have another in the front garden, but it has been overtaken by some of the other plants there. So it needs a new chance at life.