Monthly Archives: January 2010

Instead of agonising over my swap tea towels any further… I decided to start!

This may be the only one I do before I have to start packing for our holiday… but at least I now know my stencilling idea will work so I can relax about it.

A few things I’ve learnt from this one:

1) leave more room at the bottom … I don’t want to truncate the solid semi-circles. As a result the hems on this towel will be thinner than I would like.

2) remember offset the ‘repeat’.  The solid shapes aren’t meant to line up in a row like that but I think it looks pretty good anyway. 

3) be careful when lifting the stencil otherwise the ink will smudge.  It happened in a few places and isn’t disasterous… but I can do better.

4) my intensive drawing project has already been useful since this design comes straight from one of the pages I did a few days ago 🙂

5) I need to find some thread that matches this fabric so I can hem them by machine.  I have linen embroidery thread which is an ok match, but I don’t want to hem by hand.  I’ve just finished hemming some teatowels for my sister by hand and they take me a couple of day each.  Eeeek!  No, I must find that thread!

6) I love this fabric!

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I’m attracted to the concept of committing to ‘doing something’ everyday for a whole year.  You know, like taking a photo or drawing or painting or something. 

But I couldn’t decide what I’d like to do for a whole entire year AND I know I’d lose interest about two weeks into the project (you’ve got to know yourself sometimes). 

However, I’ve come up with a plan!  A week or two here and there exploring ideas and techniques in an intensive kind of way.

So I’m starting the year with this little gridded notebook.  In that book I’m exploring shape and pattern and I want to fill it by the time we return from our trip (end of January). 

I won’t be blogging while we are away, but I promise to report back when we return!  (we don’t go until the end of the week, so I’ll try and keep you up to date until then).

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I love gridded paper!

This notebook is fancier (black moleskine – la de da) than the ones I first used when I studied in Vietnam in the mid 90’s…  I remember one of my exercise books had Sailor Moon cartoons all over the cover … nice!

It’s rather soggy here at the moment.  A cyclone is brewing west of Darwin and I hope it peters out or heads to Western Australia so  it doesn’t interferre with our holiday plans. 

We fly to Melbourne on Saturday!

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