Tonight I intended to make a quick and dirty art quilt.  Instead I watched a documentary about Nick Cave, shared a bottle of wine with Riscy and made a pin cushion:

Ugly, Isn't it?  The top fabric is screen printed with an image derived from photo of bare tree branches in winter.  I would vow to make a prettier one from the rest of the printed fabric, but I know I'll never be bothered, mainly because stuffing the bloody thing was such a pain.

Regardless of its ordinary aesthetics I do like its size so I suspect it will be part of my sewing life for a long time to come.

I have been browsing the net with a little less enthusiasm than last week but still found some great sites out there:

Lotu's Flickr has photos of her wonderful textile art which incorporates photographs transfered to fabric. 

Poppalina is a textile art blog based in Melbourne.  She has just returned from India with an amazing stash of crochet silks, so I'm watching her blog with great anticipation.

Steve MacDonald is an embroidery artist who lives in San Fanscisco - fascinating embroidered landscapes which would be great to see in real life.

I just pushed all the pins right down into the pin cushion and it looks quite nice with the pin heads twinkling in amongs the 'branches'.  I think I just got why people like to embellish stuff with beads. Doh!

Plastic Bag 

Remember those magic eye pictures where you had to zone your eyes in and out of focus 'til you got to the magic point where a 3D image was revealed?

I was never very successful at it but, from the few times I succeeded, I remember the weird feeling it gave me, sort of like a buzz in the head and sort of trance like.

The feeling I get when I am in the 'zone' taking photographs is very similar.  I find I can't just, say, go out and find a great view and take some photos.  I always get distracted and start taking shots of details, the way the branches on trees meet, sunshine on a car, peeling paint etc.  I get suckered in and all of a sudden I find hundreds of interesting details which I would have otherwise passed over.

Old Paint

This has lead to a very rich bank of imagery which then feeds directly into my primary art medium of applique quilts.  The other day Jude - from Sprit Cloth left a comment wondering about my applique technique and I thought I would link back to a little pic-tutorial I did last year which shows how I get my images into fabric form.  Step 1: the imagery and Step 2: the applique.

Well, today we recieved an amazon shipment and I now have alot of info to absorb.  I had forgotton what I had ordered so it was like Christmas :-)  I have a book on Shibori, a book on rendering drawings using pen and a book on how to make patterns (for garments).   I'll blog about them more as I have a chance to live with them a little.  We are expecting another shipment very soon so I will have plenty of reading material and inspiration (distractions!) over the coming months.

Sometimes I feel like I don't have any ideas and I will never have another idea for the rest of my life and sometimes I am brimming, my head is spinnning and I don't know what to start creating first.  So I have created an 'Ideas Book' to capture the ideas when they are bountiful:

It was only recently that I realised that my creativity is cyclic.  This can give me alot of stress as I often think I should be working on my quilting and yet all I am doing is knitting, or I think I should be spinning, but all I am doing is reading trashy romances.   I am coming to the realisation that there are periods when I just have to recharge and sometimes I have to create in a whirlwind and othertimes I can have balance in all things (ok that one is rare...).

So, on the weekend, my friends Lynne and Roger came to stay with us.  It was great to catch up and relax together.  On Saturday we went down to the Traralgon Farmers Market and bought heaps of goodies then spent the rest of the day cooking up a feast.  Lynne mentored me with my breadmaking and I am very pleased with the results.  Lynne and Roger made Gazpacho, Riscy made asparagus, chicken and lemon rissotto and I made rhubarb and apple crumble which we ate very late after a fruitless attempt at viewing the comet.

I managed to capture an idea in my ideas book.  I wanted to make an apron after getting myself covered in flour, so I wrote it in my ideas book.  I also gave myself some design pointers (which I ignored in the end).

So yesterday after Lynne and Roger left, I retreated to my workroom and made an apron.  It is taylored with darts which I fitted to myself in front of a mirror, it is hard to get things symmetrical this way, but I did manage.

I made this apron to keep me clean while baking bread