Autumn in South Africa

Africa is never without vibrant colour contrasts, no matter what the season. The photo below is of yet another fabric landscape I made, my first with a fabric border. Note to self.... learn how to make decent mitred corners on the binding. Practise makes perfect they say....

Fabric Postcards and Landscapes

After a long break I signed up for another postcard exchange. They are fun to make and even more fun to receive. This postcard came from Ireland.

I also made an autumn landscape yesterday.

Hot Sunny Day

It's a hot sunny day today - a perfect time for a bit of fabric dyeing fun. The self imposed brief was to dye fun funky colours.....as you can see it didn't quite work out but I'm happy I still have 8 new pieces of fabric to play with.

The first 2 photos are of the fabrica incubating in the dye in the sun.

The end result:

Very Long Time no post......

It's amazing how life always throws us curved balls to deal with. The latest curved ball in my family's life is taking a while to sort out. We are taking things one day at a time. Needless to say, I have been totally swamped and overwhelmed and haven't had the mental energy to be creative.

We went to the Game Farm last sunday and I managed to take some photos of a group of Aloes. It was a beautiful sunny, albeit cold day.

Preview

On the way up to the Game Farm we saw lots of snow on the Drakensberg Mountains. This photo was taken just outside a town called Escort. The snow is on the mountains in the background.

Creativity and huge learning curves

As you might have noticed, I haven't spent much time being creative this month - big mistake.....Being creative feeds my soul and helps me face the challenges of the real world.

On a lighter note....

I have completed 3 more exercises for my quilting course. The first photo is of my 2nd attempt at bias binding applique. The first one had too many pointy bits so was correctly deemed substandard. The second photo is my Curved Piecing exercise. This is always fun.

The following photo is of my Drunkard's Path exercise. This has been the most difficult exercise to date. I cut out the template without adding in seam allowances - not a good idea for me.  Guessing the seam allowance afterwards was not successful at all. I am going to have another shot at making a template but this time I'll add in the seam allowance to the template

Playing with lines

Playing with Bias binding or bias strip is fun. The task is to take an image or a line drawing and create a linear design using thin strips of bias binding. I LOVE stain glass windows so.....off to Google Images and the following image caught my eye.

 

This is the result...It is almost complete - I need to stitch the strips to the backing fabric either by hand or using the blind hem stitch on my machine (Help?). Would you believe it? I don't have any black thread.

Landscape Series

 These fabric landscapes were made as a wedding gift and the theme was burnt orange. It was my first commission (embarrassed blush). I think I am still rather overwhelmed by the fact that people like and want my work hanging on their walls.

The bridal couple own a lodge on the northern coast of Mozambique (I think) and are passionate about the Mozambique coast hence the inspiration was the Mozambique coast. Fortunately I have been to Mozambique twice on holiday now so had many photos to work from.

All the fabric in this photo were hand dyed by me - my first forays into the wonderful world of dyeing my own fabric

In the third photo I used a combination of my own dyed fabric with some Shweshwe (the bright orange) and some other hand dyed fabric I have.