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:: November 28, 2005 Button Lottery
Here are the pictures of the buttons I alluded to before. posted by in Buttons :: Comments (7) :: link :: November 18, 2005 Fabric Friday: Tammis Keefe
posted by in Fabric Friday :: Comments (8) :: link :: November 17, 2005 Back-Tack Deux and Birthday
My Back-Tack II package arrived from Zhinka Dinka Doo Amanda! Umm, circa November 1. I am SO sorry I haven't posted about it till now. My lateness has only to do with my own inertia: daylight savings time change = never home during daylight for decent shots, + weekends away. Amanda answered not one but two of my craft longings, spinning and polymer clay. The bag is incredible. I love the shape (round-bottom -- how do you do that?) and the fabrics. The solid is nice and velour-y. Above it's adding some brightness to the decaying fall garden (along with the garden gnome I painted at Gnome Gnight a while ago!)
Here is the whole haul: instruction books, roving, a drop spindle, another little bag with a variety pack of Fimo. There was also a box of Godiva chocolates, which is not pictured here for some reason.
I am excited to sit down with the books and start spinning and be a My Paper Crane poser. Nor can I wait to start on the road to Amyville poser-dom with the polymer clay. This round of Back-Tack was just perfect. Hooray for Amanda! (And profuse apologies again.) Hooray for Nicole and Alison!
But-wait-there's-more ... It was my 33rd birthday yesterday! In the morning, Bryan presented me with this ...
! EEEEEEEE! I dropped hints about a Print Gocco but he went one better. In the evening we went to Madras Pavillion for the best Indian feasting around, then I watched my stories on the TV, sated on coconut rice and palak paneer. So now I have three new endeavors. Where do you start? posted by in _____-Alongs :: Comments (8) :: link :: November 11, 2005 Fabric Friday: Lucienne Day
Starting in the early 50s, Lucienne Day brought abstract design to fabric. She and her husband Robin were a mid-century design power duo, often referred to as the British Eameses (only I think her textiles are far more interesting than those of her Yankee counterparts). Her designs were so groundbreaking and enduring that people still refer to them by name.
The most famous "Calyx" Lucienne Day talks about Calyx here. An excerpt: Robin used it in his section and it was so popular that Heal's entered it for an award in New York that year. Calyx won, so the Festival of Britain was the beginning of my career. Suddenly one could produce designs and firms would be able to produce them because their looms would no longer be dedicated to making blackout material. They were set up again for producing things designers wanted to make. There was a feeling that the years of the war were behind us and that it would be a rosy future. And some notes on Day's design genius, from this site: Creating repeat patterns for textiles is a laborious process, but Lucienne's designs convey an impression of effortless spontaneity. "It is not enough to 'choose a motif', nor enough to 'have ideas' and be able to draw," she observed. "There must also be the ability to weld the single units into a homogenous whole, so that the pattern seems to be part of the cloth." Visually stimulating, but not over-insistent, her patterns are sophisticated and multi-layered, with cleverly balanced assertive and recessive elements, thereby working both from a distance and close up. Day's textiles are being reproduced by The Centre for Advanced Textiles at the Glasgow School of Art, but the cost is extremely prohibitive. Still, we can dream.
The other two are here and here. posted by in Fabric Friday :: Comments (8) :: link :: November 1, 2005 Scooped!
Thanks to a speedy delivery by our friends at the U.S. Post Office, my Back-Tack II partner, Bertha, scooped me! Despite my best efforts, it even got to her by the deadline. Well, here are some pictures taken at my house anyway.
(You can see why I had polka dots on the brain earlier.) Bertha's new craft was knitting so I made a bag and needle roll. The bag is fastener-free to prevent yarn snags, wooden handles for fast picking up and going, big enough for an average project but not too swimmingly big. The needle roll fits unless you're going for vertical. The apple print is vintage -- the apples are almost like iron-ons, they have a velvet-poster texture compared to the lineny background. The polka dots and lining is new.
I put thick interfacing in the needle roll because I wanted the option to fold it in three or roll it up. Given that, I was kind of confused about how to make a closure (any ideas?) so I just sewed a ribbon into one side. I sent along a small sample of needles in different sizes and materials, and some smaller accessories. Bertha has more comprehensive pictures of those things.
This kind of pocket is so easy to make, I don't know where it's been all my life. My pattern (Simplicity 5541) showed me how ...
And what is an intro to knitting package without yarn? Bertha is allergic to hardcore wool so these guys have little to no wool content. She already had a good start on knitting and didn't seem to need instruction books, and I couldn't bring myself to get a pattern book because that's such a personal thing, so I picked the new Yarn Harlot book. It turns out she was close to getting it for herself, so, yay! posted by in Finished Projects , _____-Alongs :: Comments (10) :: link
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for my birthday. The most prolific and well-known designer in the handkerchief world appears to be Tammis Keefe. I couldn't find out much about her, except that she died too young, at age 40. She also designed other linens and maybe some fabric too. She sometimes went under the pseudonym Peg Thomas, but I don't know why -- maybe to flout some contractual obligations.
