I will try to promise that this is the last blog change in my life but I don't know if I can keep the promise because I know me...!
I will really try hard.
The reason is that most people keep the link to my first blog and it is too complicated for me to figure out another possibility at the moment.
The new look is:
PLEASE GO HERE TO GET THERE.
Ich beende diesen Blog, da ich wieder den Alten in Betrieb genommen habe. Wird auch wieder auf Deutsch sein!
Bitte HIER drücken.
...and things change too.
This is the piece I began yesterday.
The unbelievable thing is that the blue colour you see under the arches was achieved with hollyhock tea. The one I use to usually get pink. This time it got a color as intense as the dyed fabric to the middle left of the piece!
You can also see I'm playing with the small amount of material I have. I use everything at hand and see if I can get contrast and definition with plain techniques.
Well... here I am again. I took the needle in the hand and began something.
There is much thinking going on. Even a work philosophy. When you have time you think more and you put things into perspective.
You discover slow once more.
You begin to play once more.
You reconcile yourself with your little people and accept that they are a part of what you are.
Using what you have and thinking about romanic art...
What do you do if you need storage for your stuff and are in a rented apartment abroad without your normal possibilities?
This is what I did:
Storage for embroidery threads using yoghurt cups hanging from a ribbon.
Storage for your crochet needles inside a nice plastic salt shaker.
Storage for many things using water bottles cut in the middle.
and even bigger ones...
...a crochet bowl made of plastic bag strips...
...and small metall tins for the jewelry.
There is another kind of nanos. The nanos in Alicante are these:
but today there was a feast at our park near our building and they were letting children and their mothers do some "nanos" for a parade that was going to take place today.
I couldn't resist doing one and I gave it to a little girl who didn't have one of her own:
We used finger paint for doing them and I felt like a child making it!
I'm really enjoying Spain.
My daughter visited some days ago and she worked with material from my stash.
I found so many wonderful fabrics and materials I keep forever and decided to use some of them for doing a piece without wool.
This little girl found her place on the side and she wanted to have a new dress, she didn't want to look too vintage...
This Jouy man decided to bring her flowers. They were enormously growing in the greenhouse and he was already a little bit afraid of them.
The little girl has such an air of determination about her that he didn't think they could do any harm...
Just look at her feet! She isn't afraid of anything.
In the middle of the piece I was happy to do an appliqué that has much meaning for me.
I bought some of the materials I used in my recent trip to Sweden and was enchanted to find old lace, needles, buttons and embroidered initials in an antique shop.
The buttons were sewn to a cardboard that had something written by hand on the back. It is something that made me think about the value of all sewing material at that time. The fact that somebody wrote a description of some kind to the buttons made me think about our throwaway society...
I will be doing the "unexpected" soon. Vintage, yes - too brave, not...
I also did this in the Sweden workshop. It is a little book for my brooches, the ones I also do with the embellisher.
I intend to write a new tutorial about this piece because it incorporates some new techniques I'm using now. I will put it to sell in my blog soon.
I also like very much the technique I use for the spine, I will be using it in Spain for my work there.
Because I won't take the embellisher and the sewing machine with me I am finding ways to do new techniques that can be used for hand sewing.
Here are some impressions of my Sweden trip.
I gave 3 workshops at Leufsta Quilt
I visited Östhammar.
This was a nice coffee place.
I want to apologize because I haven't wrote for one month on my blog.
I wasn't at home but visiting family and friends. I think I'm becoming a kind of nomand and this is not very good for my art. Or perhaps I need once more to have a time out to get focused once more...
I will be leaving Austria for 10 months and this is something I look forward both with great expectations and skepticism. I will accompany my youngest daughter to Alicante during her year of study and I want to do this for two reasons. One is for reviving my Spanish past (I was born in Argentina and I had lots of Spanish people around me) and the other one is for doing a thing you do seldom when you are my age (and happily married with a husband who is an angel and can cope with Skyping all that time) and you won't have this opportunity again. Well, actually I intend to make a second dream happen and the next school year of Sophie I will accompany her for a year to Bangor/Wales taking my car with me so that I can visit all the textile exhibitions and shows in Great Britain because I will have mi car with me!!
You can imagine that my work will change according to the materials I have in hand because I can't take my studio with me. I will have to work with simple techniques and materials at hand.
One of the persons I visited this month is my friend Regina Stieger and she was doing some tea dyeing on fabric with hollyhock and rooibos. She gave me a piece she did and I did also some dyeing at home.
This is the one she did and her husband made a stitchery for me of a motive I drew. He has two wonderful digital stitching machines, a small and a big one.
This is the stitchery:
I was very inspired by Swedish wall painting. I love them because they have something familiar, like Romanic wall painting somehow, very naive. This is what I mean (taken from the book I bought at the Nordiska Museum in Stockholm "Dalmaleri" I Dalarnas Museum":
I suppose I liked them because, yes, they have many faces on them... I have to find a way of working with faces in a reduced stash and now I'm drawing and stitching them.
I'd like to share the process.
All very simple and a real slow cloth technique. I can imagine doing this in Spain.
Esta vez me dirijo a mis lectore/as españolas, y especialmente a las que viven en la zona cercana a Alicante.
Resulta que mi hija Sophie tiene que ir a estudiar un año en la Universidad de Alicante y yo la pienso acompañar y quedarme con ella 9 meses a partir del 1° de Septiembre 2010.
Tengo añoranzas de la lengua española y quiero aprovechar la oportunidad para hacer una experiencia que no se me dará más en la vida.
Ya que la última vez que estuve en España fue a los 15 años, y esto solamente por unos días, no tuve oportunidad de conocer bien el país de mis antepasados.
Claro que 9 meses pueden ser largos si no se conoce a nadie y uno está desconectado. Por eso me gustaría que si alguien vive por ahí, que me mande una email (está en mi perfil) y así podría hacer unas preguntas acerca de unas cosas que me interesaría saber, y quizás pueda organizar algún workshop en España, ya que pienso llevar el auto.
A la espera de algún eco...!!!!
I'm back from Sweden and also very happy with the success of the exhibition.
The weather was like on the photo the first day but then we had wonderful sunny spring days.
Here is a photo of Monica Danielsson and me during the exhibition.
Monica has the most beautiful damask fabrics dyed in Africa and I couldn't resist buying a piece each of the whole palette. You are going to see them in my future work.
I will combine them with African printed fabric I bought in Stockholm.
it's in Sweden, just in case you happen to be there!
I am having an exhibition at Leufsta Quilt from the 2nd to the 5th of April.
Perhaps if you are in Sweden you would like to visit.
I will be there every day.
I will also be giving workshops there in August.
I found a first communion card of my grandmother from 1895
I thought I could do something similar because I like very much the technique I used in my pattern "The World Around Me"
I decided to use paper in it because the original is a paper one.
It isn't finished yet because I'm working very much on the surface with very fine stitches and a very fine self dyed thread.
I also want it to stand by itself.
I combined using the embellisher with hand and machine stitching. I really like machine stitching for defining backgrounds.
It got an interesting surface as you can see on the last picture.
I have opened a new Shop on this site.
This shop is for original work.
You can also buy my book in case you live in the USA, Canada, Australia or somewhere else than the European Union!
For the opening I put in one of my new original works for sale!
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