Some stitching and some book marks.

 I have been progressing the conversation with the stitching of the brick wall. In small increments!

I took the test piece of linen and transferred the marks back here. I then gathered the threads I had selected and started doing some small split back stitching as outlines of the stones in the wall.

It was interesting that after doing these 6 stones I felt I knew enough to stop testing and begin stitching the length of linen. I determined from the test that the two main colours were going to be the darker grey and lighter brown; with only occasional use of the lighter grey and the darker, rustier brown. 

I think that will make for a coherent look and a little bit of interest here and there. Also the lighter grey pretty much disappears, and the darker rustier brown just dominates too much (plus there aren't many stones in the wall that are that colour).

As ever I just like gathering all the bits together and looking at them!

Packing up is underway - here are all the prepped reels and the linen ready for taking back to Australia.

As I was tidying up my art table in preparation for leaving, I came across a heap of scrap white paper and thought it might be perfect for some book marks. So off I went and cut it into strips and did a few whimsical flower bookmarks.

You can never have too many bookmarks!

Preparing to stitch

 I have begun my conversation with the piece of linen I am working on for my friend who died. 

One of our best ever conversations was sitting with our backs against the stone wall of the cottage, in the sunshine, blethering this way and that. So I am trying to reflect that conversation and I am really not sure  I'll ever be able to do it justice.

At the moment I am very much in the testing and trialling stage. It might take a while to figure out how to do this I think.

But I have begun.

The circular nature of women friends feels strong at the moment. Here at the cottage I have this set of embroidery threads tied onto their card with symbols for whichever pattern they were intended for. These are one of my best friends' mother's threads, and she gave them to me after her mum died - about 20 years ago, and I have used the intermittently. I was very happy that I could pick them up and maybe use some of them for this wee project.

I printed off some photos of the wall and checked if there were threads that might match. I found four and thought that was a good start.

I then set about trying to recreate the wall for stitching.  Because the fabric is so narrow I am not sure how well this will work. But off I go!

I transferred fairly accurate shapes of the stones and the pointing on the wall to my book; then onto a strip of tracing paper.

And then checked to see what it might look like on the linen.

Barry walked in and knew exactly what it was as the moment he saw it. I remain a tad hesitant.

I then used a removable marker to draw onto a test bit of fabric. And that's as far as I got.

The proof will be in the pudding once I start stitching I think.

There is no way I can fill all of the stones in with stitches unless I want this to take forever, so I will have to see if I can somehow 'sketch' them in, or slightly fill them, or indicatively fill them. We shall see!

In the meantime, before we had Sunday's beautiful blue sky, we had some seriously wicked weather. Sometimes even that weather is beautiful...

Tinkering is me

 I have come to accept, and even embrace, the notion that a lot of my creative time here is about tinkering. Or pottering. Or feutering as the Scots could say.

I used to worry that I was being flighty, unsettled, noncommittal or the like. Now I think I can celebrate that I find moments for creativity in most days, take them and make the most of them.

I am beginning an online course (which B purchased for me back in 2023); I am pondering the making of more Conversations with Women Friends work in a couple of directions. I have begun making more pebble forms to take back to Maleny and finish. I am cataloguing images for another piece of work. And so it goes.

I think I am re-framing towards "I am pushing work forward on several different fronts". Sounds impressive!

Pebble forms in the making...

I cut and soldered twelve small pebble forms.

Looking to solder them into stacked pebble earrings on my return to Maleny. I have to wait to get back to Maleny in order to put them through the rolling mill and flatten them, before soldering them together. No rolling mill here in the garden shed workshop!

They get quite discoloured with the soldering flame, so it was back to making some home made pickle to clean them. Each and every time I get delighted when it works!

Part of me is now wondering how things would go if I actually took six of the forms and tried to hammer them flat (rather than wait to roll them smooth through the mill).  I image that textured stacked pebbles might also look good? We shall see if the notion sticks.

In other tinkering I found myself searching for wooden cotton reels. I found a set on eBay and went to purchase them, only to learn that this seller was still an auction seller! It took me back twenty years I reckon where sometimes Barry and I would sit on our computers as the last seconds ticked down and tried to make the bids faster than whoever else wanted the thing we wanted. And we never ever won.

I thought to myself I am not doing that again. I made a reasonable bid and left it. Then After the auction closed I remembered to go and have look and lo and behold I had won. I was chuffed!

I received 20 reels on Saturday. Here are 11 of them.

Their arrival was a real cause for celebration as the delivery company that was being used can be somewhat hmmmm problematic up here? They have been know to wait up to 6 weeks until they have a big enough load to head out west and I worried I may never see them...

These 11 are all unique. All different and I was just so excited to see that. And perfect for what I am hoping to do! The other 9 have double sod these so I have separated them out and will se how I go.

And then there was foraging - we went on a bramble ramble...

And for some reason or another I have got this itch to bake focaccia (never have I baked focaccia) and I simply had to scratch it. Done. But this has only made me want to bake more and I now have three more recipes to try.

We had a stare out with these sheep on an afternoon walk.

And today is a washing day - and as they say a good drying day!

Furthering the conversations

 I have enjoyed my work around Conversations with Women Friends a lot.  It keeps rolling around in my head in different ways, as I  think of new and differing expressions for it.

I keep adding new conversations.

Here is my book and notes from our Biblio sessions at the Store at Bettyhill our nearby village. We head over on Tuesdays and Thursdays (the same pattern we have in Maleny) and have breakfast and coffee and sit quietly writing, reading, pondering our art. One difference is that breakfast in Maleny starts at 7am; here we begin at 9am.

A couple of new ones took form without needing to edit or re-write. They simply appeared. Others have plenty of gaps and strike throughs and reorganising marks! Also notes to self to remind me that I am doing the writing work in this book; and the thoughts about what to do with the words are over in my Art Journal number 12.

In a weird turn of events, having written more, I set about reducing the first ten to a single word each.  All of this thinking happened over in AJ12. Grin.

I thought of another expression, which was to work with the single word, and then possibly two images to support it, or to create a sense of it. I daresay this will not be an easy task in terms of finding photographs, doing the layout and printing etc etc, but my first challenge was to see if I could make a book with the fold outs I was imagining.

So I set to work with some sheets of used A4 paper. Along the way I changed the working title from short to brief conversations.

I liked the notion of a wrapper to enclose and envelope them. With a band apparently, in case I forget.

I mentioned it won't be easy to get the layout right (for the likes of me) and sure enough here I have added more text on the first unfold of the wrapper. We shall see down the track if any of this becomes possible!

I have determined it will need to be a coptic bound book; with separate hard covers. I think. I am not a fan of the accordion format too much, which would have offered another way of reading this book, but I will test it this way first.

Along the side view the different sections to rebound. Pondering five versus ten of the first conversations. Five is more intimate; ten has more gravitas. Ten also has a sense of completeness given the first round has ten conversations. Maybe this becomes volume I?

How I envisage (at this stage) one of the brief conversations looking. The single word appears as you turn a page; then you unfurl the page to the right and two images appear.

The first conversation reads:

caring for

caring about

chicken soup

So I have selected the main word for me from the conversation which is caring. I now need to go through each of the conversations, selecting their key word and then listing thoughts about possible images that might support or represent the word/conversation. 

My first instinct here is to have a photo of a bowl of steaming soup on the right hand and a photo of one hand holding another on the left. Another image could be the knocker on a door and then the soup. I can see I could spend a lot of time working my way through this, but I kind of like the idea and think it has value.

Of course it could mean trawling through my existing images for hours looking for possible photos; or it might mean taking specific photos with purpose. In amongst all of this is the fun! I have a project to keep in mind as I do things.

Finishing

 I managed to finish my last pin through the week.

I oftentimes find that how I see something being worn, isn't always the way that others do; so I felt I should probably make one for myself, so that I could wear it and let people see how it might work. And so it came to pass that I made another pebble pin/brooch.

I don't tend to wear brooches/pins up on my lapels so much. Rather I tend to wear them along my hem line. Like this. Apologies for the background lighting - who knew it would be so sunny! Plus I took the shot using my watch connected to my phone which is a first for me, so I got what I got!

Barry also took a photo of me wearing one of the long thing bar ones - which I think looks best vertically, so I might have to wear one like that too. I am however wearing this one on a lapel type thing on a great winter cardigan.

Enough of the modelling. I also finished off a final pice of calligraphy using the five lovely S words. This one is purple on black, and I now have five pieces that can be popped into frames. I trimmed them all yesterday, signed them and put them in a bag for transporting. Finishing, finishing.

So I think that has brought me to the end of production and making for the Pop Up in Scotland. The job now is to inventory, price and pack. Always so many associated tasks.

Including writing some explanatory notes about my Conversations with Women Friends and the Glimpses book-ets. I sometimes think my work and its purpose can be a bit obtuse or opaque, yet I find people grasp it if I tell them a story about it. Of course, I can't speak to everybody all the time, so I thought maybe a few notes here and there might allow people to pause and read and understand a bit of where I am coming from. Maybe.

And then to inventorying and packing. I put out all the jewellery in my stash and worked out which pieces I would take. I decided on 10 pairs of earrings, 7 pendants and 4 brooches/pins. Fingers are crossed.

Two of these will stay in Maleny

Two pairs of earrings will stay in Maleny.

As you can imagine, our suitcases will be full of arty things! Fortunately we keep most of the clothes we need in Scotland the cottage. We are edging closer...

Conversations with Women Friends cards

I have popped all the cards into their packets/pouches and will see if I get any more made before we head to Scotland; but for now I have enough stock to got with in preparation for the Pop Up in Armadale in late August.

Women Friends are so important in our lives, and  I felt I wanted to honour those relationships somehow - recognise and celebrate them.

I ended up sequencing them - calling them CWWF I, II, II, IV etc all the way up to X.  I thought it would help people choosing, but also I wanted to think my way through sequencing them for a book I might print with them all.

CWWF I is a smily one - simple. We can often say so much with a delivery of chicken soup. Or a friend just delivers it without even talking about it and you know all the love and care that is in it.

Sometimes the conversation is pretty much one where one person does the listening as it's a hard, tough, sad, soul-destroying experience that needs to be shared and heard; not solved. CWWF II.

CWWF III - so often this is my answer to "how did it go?" Whenever I think back over all the topics we touched on - the health, the books, the politics, the friends, the work, the weather... so many things!

This one is powerful, and potent, and didn't need a red thread of conversation between us... CWWF IV

CWWF V - oh my this is cracker! Those moments when a shared experienced is captured in one word and you both just burst out laughing! The stitching line tries to capture that explosive burst somehow.

CWWF VI - this one captures those special friends you have known for decades, where your conversations cover so much territory. Over decades we have seen the ups, the downs and the round abouts...

Sometimes our conversations with friends are texts, chats, messages, emails and oh the bliss of a written letter. CWWF VII

Nothing beats sitting side by side and blethering whilst the road unfurls before you. CWWF VIII

CWWF IX - so true! Somehow time disappears and you take a breath and look around your and realise its been hours...

CWWF X. This one. The special ways of knowing and understanding, of sharing, connecting and checking in... is like no other relationship.

And yes, they still look glorious in a bundle!