Map making

This is a textile map of my childhood home. 

I used sheer fabrics and small scraps of recycled fabric and layered them. Some of the sheer fabrics I painted with  ecoline paint (which was fun to do and gave me lots of ideas!). 

I also added embroidery and some woolen thread.

This piece is inspired by the work of Valerie S. Goodwin, who makes the most wonderful cartographic art quilts.

To me this is a great way to capture memories. I quite like wandering through the past in a visual way like this.

playing with paint:

 

Tiny houses

In an earlier post I mentioned that I joined some speedcrafting sessions, hosted by Helen Robertson. One of the projects we did was knitting these tiny houses (or as they say on Shetland: peerie mootie hooses)

I truly fell in love with this project and ended up knitting 10 of them! 3 I filled with a match box so they can easily stand on their own and make a tiny village. The other seven I filled with some yarn scraps to give them some body and turned into broches. To the façade of each of the brooche-houses I added an embroidered flowering climbing plant.

I used the yarn Helen sent for the project and also some HotButterYarns colour mini balls DK. This is beautiful , locally sourced British wool. I bought them at Tribe Yarns in Richmond-upon-Thames, a truly lovely shop with great customer service!

This is by the way also a lovely way to use up any leftover yarn! 

Herb Garden Shawl

I had some skeins of Garthenor Organic number 3 in my stash, including 10 mini skeins. I could make a fairly big project with this. Lots of different natural colours require a simple and pure pattern, I think, and so I searched for something with a lot of garter stitch (which I love!). I chose the Herb Garden Shawl pattern (very easy and free pattern on Ravelry). I could already see myself strolling around in the garden, warmed by this shawl and a cup op tea...

It was lot of knitting, but with this DK yarn things went on fairly quickly and all the different colours made the project interesting.

Garthenor is a small Welsh company that has been producing breed specific organic yarn for over 20 years. Their customer service is great and there is such a positive energetic vibe around them!  I found the yarn great to work with, it is sturdy and soft at the same time. The natural colours are lovely and work well together.

I ran out of yarn and still wanted the shawl to be a bit bigger, but instead of ordering more yarn, I decided to look through my stash (However much I love to support Garthenor and other sustainable businesses, I also try to use up my stash where possible, which also contributes to sustainability) and found this skein of Bleetingbecka Derbyshire Lopi, a very rustic wool from Derbyshire Gritstone (they don't have their own website, but you can find them on Facebook). This is the white top edge of the shawl.

It turned out to be the lovely warm big shawl I imagined, so let's go for a walk!

me, cosy and warm

the shawl, almost finished:

the lovely (and interesting!) card I got with my order from Garthenor:

the Bleetingbecka yarn:

Abstract Mountains

I love Sabine Kaner's work and was delighted to hear she was hosting a workshop on TextileArtist.org.

She designed this great and simple technique to create an abstract composition, using a crumpled piece of paper. You base your design on the lines that arise on the paper and transfer this onto fabric. With appliqué and emroidery you can then create a unique composition.

This is what I made of it, not a totally abstract piece, since I never quite can suppress my love for a narrative of some kind. My abstract became a mountain scenery. I chose muted colours, with one lively exception, a green segment on the bottom.

The piece is framed with a loosely cut piece of corduroy from an old shirt.