Dancing the Happy Dance

I received wonderful news last week - an art gallery in Durban has offered to exhibit some of my fabric landscapes and fabric postcards as part of the 8th Annual Affordable Art Show at the Artspace Gallery in Durban.. I am so excited that I can' find the words to describe it. In a funny kind of way, this is a nice counter to feeling my work is not quite good enough!

Here are some photos of the work that is being exhibited:

Shweshwe landscapes

The end of the school year has sneaked  up on us and it's time to make gifts for the teachers who have given so much of their time and energy educating our children. What gifts shall we give? Fortunately, it is fairly simple to whip up a couple of fabric landscapes. I might have mentioned before that the manufacturers of Shweshwe fabric introduced a new range of bright almost luminous colours this year. It's a stunning range. I LOVE working with it and have made the following 2 fabric landscapes as gifts for 2 of the teachers - they are similar but slightly different:

Crab Apples

In my travels round KZN recently, I saw a Crab Apple tree in blossom trained onto a wire frame against a wall. It was sooooo beautiful. The blossoms were a delicate pink and white. These photographs are my first attempts at putting together an abstract landscape - my impressions of what I saw. Needless to say, the first attempt was not very successful. The background (first photo) is ok but the wheels fell off the bus when I tried to cut curves in brown fabric to represent the tree (2nd photo). All I can say (embarrassed grin) is "watch this space" for the next version. Hopefully it will improve....

My FIrst Landscape

I am in the process of making a framed landscape. It is about the size of an A4 page and is a gift for a friend (for her birthday) who loves Africa as much as I do. The African tribal dog in the landscape is a photo of her beloved dog that died from liver complications when she was 2 years old. I took a photo of the dog, printed it on fabric and cut it out. The mountains in the background are the beloved Drakensberg mountains. It's the view from my son Ben's school in the mountains. This mountain is called the Rolls Royce because it looks like a car. I added the Aloe in (again a photo printed onto fabric and cut the aloe out) just for the winter effect. The aloes are in full bloom at the moment. The photo below is the fabric put together - I still have to fuse and stitch the pieces together and then frame it.