Little Fish Creations

I’ve been thinking a lot about patterns and shapes and I’m very happy to have found the textile designs of Mina Perhonen (via ah-yi).  Lots of inspiration for my first ‘week-long creative project’, which I’ll firm up over the next week and probably start the week after.

One proviso being that I’m getting enough sleep by then. Hopefully the pain of teaching Jasper to sleep is a long distant memory by then.  We are currently ‘in the process of’ and my heart is feeling very raw.

How cool is this little woodstack shack?   One day I’d like a crazy little retreat down the end of the garden.  Though I have a feeling I’m going to be house oriented for many years to come.

Onto more pressing dreams, I’ve been thinking about how I can make this place more functional for us.  I’d like to create a space that allows me to create while Jasper is awake or asleep (my current space doesn’t work in either situation!)

We’ve been home for a week, but I’ve had trouble getting my act together to post.  You know how it is after a holiday, it takes a little while to get back into ‘real life’.

I overestimated the time and energy I would have during our travels to devote to my little doodle drawings.  But I did chip away at it here and there.  I think I have a 1/4 of the little book filled now.

I started doing whole page ‘designs’ rather than exploring a particular idea multiple times on one page.  But I think I’ll try to go back to the messier explorations which quickly push ideas in lots of different directions.

I hope I’ll have a couple of hours this weekend to do some tea towel stencilling.  I’m itching to get them done now so I can move on to other projects.

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!

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).

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!

2009 was a BIG year for us.  We moved to a new town, Chris started a challenging role at work and Jasper arrived in style!

I think we’ve done pretty well adjusting to all the changes and the demands of parenthood – sure there have been difficult times (breast infection anyone!) but we’ve got through them with (mostly) good humour.  Things are only going to get even better now that we are working on getting Jasper to sleep through the night without feeds (YAY!!)

Creatively, things have been ticking along.  I’ve been learning to sew garments, but didn’t do as much pattern making/adjusting as I would have liked.  I did more hand embroidery and put together lots of little items for the linen closet.

So, on to the future!  2010 I want to extract as much joy out of it as possible.

We want to travel this year – We’re headed home to Tasmania in January and we would also like to go on a skiing holiday (possibly New Zealand), and we’d also like to spend some time in Bali or Singapore this year (both very easy travel destinations for us here).

My creativity will continue on as usual, a bit of sewing, a bit of embroidery, a few new pattern drafting/adjusting skills. Maybe a few quilts.  Whereever my nose leads me 🙂

Thank you for visiting and reading this blog.  Your support, encouragement and interest is important to me.  I’ve been blogging here for 5 years and it has provided SO many connections to wonderful, creative people all over the place. Happy New Year to you all!

I’ve been stitching

A little travel blanket, only two layers with the other side being a soft flannelette.

My hand ‘quilting’ is crude, but I think it looks pretty good with the thick thread I’m using.  I’m probably going to bind this with a fairly wide binding in a contrasty colour. I’ll have to dig around in my craftroom to find something suitable.

We had a lovely Christmas watching Jasper zooming around.  He pulled the tree over three times before we finally put it away.  He’s so full of energy and is curious about everything.

There’s a little production line going on here!

Today operations moved out to the living room.  Jasper started crawling last week and it is no longer safe to have him in my workroom since he is facinated with electrical cords, powerboards and my iron.

These bunnies are inspired by the softies made by Lynne Roberts of Molly Chicken.  The ears are taken from this pattern from Fiona at Hop, Skip and Jump (I can’t wait to make this adorable rabbit… after Christmas).

I found these wonderful crafters by googling ‘rabbit softies’ or something similar.  Isn’t the internet a wonderful thing 🙂

I’ve raided my scraps bin and there are at least another four bunnies to come.  It’s a bit addictive and I’m glad I bought a bag of stuffing last time I was in Darwin 🙂

Lack of sleep is seriously affecting my ability to think straight this week.  But I thought I’d check in to say

1) I’ve had a big clean out of my craftroom, lots of things boxed up to go to other crafty people locally

2) I finished Jasper’s christmas stocking! and

3) can’t think of a number 3… that’s how mushy my brain is right now.

I’ve been linocutting! 

I’m really chuffed with these snowflake Christmas tree ornaments, I also printed some on dark brown paper and they are all happily hanging together on our little plastic tree… it’s starting to feel festive around here now!

I also made a christmas tree linocut, but it’s impossible to photograph my printed versions of silver on blue. They’re being used as gift tags :-).

Would you believe that Jasper turned 7 months old this week?  He’s into EVERYTHING and has developed a scream that would wake the dead.  Still feeding 2-3 times a night – so I’m feeling pretty tired right at this minute; don’t mention the prospect of a second baby to me right now, I just might rip your head off.