Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Summer sanity

Here is where I have been this summer, or at least part of the summer, felt jewellery, and felted vests and nuno shawls and now harvest and stopping to eat peaches and dry them....the markets are almost over and I have  a few orders to fill and now back to work for three days a week.The pictures are of a few of the neckpieces I sold this summer, and the top piece was inspired by work of several artists, and hopefully I did something original with the piece...I have several pieces of these lichen/sea anenomes and they are turning into the neckpieces and look great..I made several before I knew what I was going to do with it...I just loved the process and now it is paying off with new ideas, so I was thrilled...I showed them at a local gallery and they were much commented on and that was before I made them into jewellery.   the other two were pieces made earlier, the shibori indigo beads which has a definitely japanese flavour to it, in my mind, and the multi coloured fun piece was quickly sold.....it was a wonderful summer, not hot, rainy enough to keep the garden happy and fruitful, and enough people at the market enjoying my work to keep me satisfied, not to mention selling work which allowed me to buy more supplies...like some lovely silk, and some fine merino rovings...so I am busy dyeing and doing some eco printing and then felting into it, and some gathering of dyeing supplies.  Fall is an amazingly busy time, and it sneaks up on me every year.  I love the fall and I hope we get a long indian summer and then lots of rain for the mushrooms, that would be perfect.  I have been doing indigo dyeing and mordanting like crazy and even did a cochinel dye bath, and it is still giving me colour.  Have done some ragweed, and some oregon grape dyeing as well and will have photos shortly.   People really appreciated the felting at the galleries, and you can see that it is more generally recognized, and so the felting world is definitely expanding.   I can see people are really seeing the felt work and appreciating it.  Also the natural dyeing, although I don't exclusively do that, I mostly do it with a dash of synthetic every once in awhile...and this week the synthetics were in teal and deep rusty ochre, and I really like this combo....so back to the workbench and more fun and obsession...hope everyone is enjoying their end of summer and looking forward to a long and fruitful fall.

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