Lampshade hurrah

Finally turned my efforts at textile printing into a lovely lampshade!

dyeing for a microwave

I have so much fun on my dyeing to print course run by http://www.portandlemon.com/. They are enthusiastic and generous teachers making everyone feel relaxed and able to explore.

Ready to microwave dye using procian dyes. It was so exciting to see the deep luscious colours and treat of all treats, be able to slosh them onto fabric with gay abandon! You never know excatly what you will find after microwaving but that adds to the excitement.
How to do it!
We put small amounts of procian dye into a beaker and added about 1 cm of water with urea mixture in. Then we dipped the fabric into a mix of water and soda ash for a few seconds to prepare the fabric to receive the dye.

Put into a microwaveable tub( chinese take away container) and zap for 1 minute. Open lid and release steam, then close again. Zap for a further 50 secs. Voila! Take out and rinse in plain water and hang on the line top dry.

Unfortunalty my hands became the victim of overzealous dying ready for my lampshade kit. I have done a sample stencil to try out. The lampshade should look similar to this. I'm so excited to be making my vey own printed lampshade. How cool is that!

The lower picture might be used as a double image in a lighter blue. I'm not quite sure yet. Watch this space.You can see my very own stencil heat pen here. I love buying new tools don't you?  http://www.squarehen.com/ are a fab online store and they do instruction sheets too!

craftaganza

I have made some horizontal beach huts as you can see in this photo. Not sure if they will sell or not but I like them.

new designs

New coaster designs. These were popular and I have almost sold out! I need to make some more before the end of half term.

book fever

I loved the wrought ironwork on the balcony. I had a chance to nip to the shops and I bought 3 old plates and a couple of fabulous books. I have almost read this book! It has hundreds of tips to get you through the working day in a more creative way. I shall certainly try out a few.
Here is my other lovely book. It makes my mouth water just looking at it!

I've been doing a textile printmaking mini course with www.portandlemon.com and it has been fantastic. Today I made myself a simple stamp print and decided to use it to go on the top of my display board on my stall. It is not perfect and probably never will be, but I had fun making it.

I hope it improves my stall and adds to the overall impression I want to give. At the moment each flag is slightly different, not originally by design because I was trying out different ideas, but it seems fine. My husband said no one would notice! He hasn't quite got the hang of it really!!

an interesting view from the throne

I had so much fun at craftaganza this weekend. So many new friends and lots of ideas to work on. It was great to stay in a hotel for the night but quite disconcerting when using the bathroom! It had floor to ceiling windows and although there were voile cutrtains, you could see the beach and everyone on it while sitting on the throne! Weird or what!

two at once

I took these pictures with the ipad camera. They came out better than I imagined they would. The middle one is slightly distorted but I put it down to the angle I held the ipad at.

This is a typical scene, always more than one thing going on at a time! I nearly spilt lemon icing on the white paper! We all need more than one life to do everything that is exciting and wonderful in the world.

It is all very well promising oneself that you will spend more time being creative but that doesn't take into account life and paid work!! I feel as if I have been wandering around with my head down and can finally look up for a few days before climbing back on the carousel! I was key to send some pictures of my work to a gallery and realised that I hadn't made anything new for ages. Depressing! Anyway here are some old pics that I haven't shown you before. Maybe I can get back to making tomorrow.Opps I am writing on my new toy and don't know how to add pictures from my iPad. I will have to swop to my laptop. There must be a way though surely?