Plethora in May

There was an abundance of beautiful work on show from our productive members at our May meeting.

First up was Pauline with an explanation and great examples of Faux leather. This fitted in beautifully with our theme of recycling for our May postcards with the possible re-use of all those brown paper bags.

Our other topic for discussion was felting. This arose from the tendency for people to gift me their accidently felted woollens for recycling. There were some lovely examples of needle felting and wet felting.

A dressed Scallywag:

Now onto the finished and in-progress pieces on display.

Firstly the April postcards where the theme was ‘Dancing the night away’ and ‘bling, bling, bling’.

We had some icons appearing for March:

We had book pages and covers from Jill:

We even had a finished May postcard using recycled materials:

Many of our members were inspired after the Velma Bolyard workshop and went home to spin paper and make more shifu:

Wow, you are a talented bunch.

Next meeting is June with our 15 minutes of fame spot with Robyn and a theme of ‘Out of Africa’- sure to bring out the wild side!

 

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February is all boxed up

Our first meeting for the year saw 23 of our 30 members join us to begin our first piece of postcard art. The suggested project for this year is to try out some interesting techniques on a postcard sized piece of art. These will be kept together in a box which many of our members have finished after receiving a bonbon of goodies at our end of 2015 xmas gathering.

Some boxes, finished and in progress:

Texture and maps

 

Beautiful boxes

 

Pauline brought along a box and postcard to show made from gummy silk, embedded synthetic lace, lumiere paints and tyvek:

Silky Box

 

We also had some great results on display from last years shibori experiments:

 

Hopefully we will have some postcards to show at our March meeting based on the theme wings and using the techniques of layering, collage and/or distressing. Perhaps give the technique with the incense sticks a go?

Our March meeting will feature two mini tutorials: Water soluble paper and foiling,  an email will go out about two weeks prior with info.

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Bookbinding, bookmaking and other bookish things

Our November meeting saw a treasure trove of handmade books revealed. Thank you to Kerrie for her knowledgeable chat on the art of bookmaking. A few of the books and covers displayed:

Needleweaving on the coptic binding

 

Detail of Pauleen’s bookcover

 

We are all now working on finishing our technique samplers from each month to put into our individual Book of 2014. Remember to leave the cover until after our December meeting, Kerrie will have a surprise package for all to incorporate.

Our pages will include beautiful creative canvaswork:

Pin needleweaving will make an appearance:

And lots of embellishment and encrustation of stitch:

What an amazingly talented bunch you all are!!

 

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Meandering March

Many meandering books made their appearance at the March meeting, and each one was beautifully different.

 

 

Gillian brought along a couple more variations of the meandering book including a triangular shaped one:

Our 2014 projects for GeeTAG will culminate in a book of samples. Today we looked at making silk and felt pages for our books.

We firstly meandered on to a demo of silk paper making with a quick show and explanation of the different types of silk fibres and products.

 

Next Bronwyn showed some wonderful samples of her felting followed by a quick demo of the felting process.

 

We were intrigued with the method for felting the beads into the page and nice beret modelling Beryl!

 

This cool suction tool was for wetting down the fibres:

Kerrie was a magnificent model also and demo-ed needle felting as another possible technique for making pages:

 

Jill brought some wonderful show and tell:

Hope you all have fun trying out some of these techniques and stitching on your pages.

Next month Pauleen and Pauline will be leading us in encrusting calico, look for the email with materials needed.

 

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For your leftover textile pieces

Just an update. Claudia decided to use one of the spare 5 cm squares to make herself a key tag to attach to her lanyard with her gym card, perhaps some others might like to do the same.

She ironed on pelmet vilene and then vliesofixed some fabric on the back. We poked a whole in the corner and used the hammer to attach an eyelet.

If anyone has any other great ideas just email through some photos.

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