Little Fish Creations

This photo doesn’t show my quilting very well, but I decided to use medium stipple as a background for the branches. I will outline the branches in a darker colour and I will probably also outline the river (which is totally lost in this photo), so they stand out more.

I decided I want the branches to stand out in the circle of the river, so I choose to use a very light thread which blended into the fabric.

What I love about stippling is the wonderful texture that appears on the surface of the quilt. It is almost impossible to capture with flash photography.

A close up of the stippling.

I’ll take some decent, natural light photos at some stage.

NOW…. I owe huge apologies to people who have tried to leave anonymous comments on my blog, I realised this morning that my anti-spam software has been deleting them. Riscy is going to upgrade the software so the problem will hopefully be fixed soon.

Comments by people who fill in all the fields seem to be showing up, so don’t stop commenting.

I have been responding to comments in the comments section rather than emailling the commenter back. I’m a bit unsure of the protocol though. I seldom check back to comments I’ve left on other sites… I’m thinking emailling is a better way, but then dialog is lost from my blog. Any thoughts on the matter would be appreciated.

Other activities this weekend can be summed up as follows:
Appliance shopping in Melbourne, knitting, hand carding some wool, blog maintenance, bike ride, appliance shopping in Traralgon, paper mache(!!), new blog banner, quilting, blogging.

And now sleep.

Not the effect I was looking for. I found this quilting too dense and it distracted attention away from the branches.

So I spent a good hour unpicking.

Next Quilting Move:

I’m going to try outlining the branches in dark brown and then quiling ‘scudding’ clouds behind the branches, nothing too dense. This is a large quilt and I want to finish it this lifetime!

Renovation News:

We met a potential builder today and realised that our life will be a mess for a couple of months starting May. Today someone at work told me that renovating was right up there with ‘death in the family’ for stressful experiences. Great!

Sinus News:

I’ve been suffering in the sinuses. Yesterday we were scoping works on a particularly windy mountainous road and in addition to the usual car sickness, my head was getting stuffier and stuffier and my ears felt blocked.

So I tried to unblock my ears by holding my nose and gently blowing. But stuff bubbled out of my right eye… my EYE!!

Euwww!!! But to make matters worst I woke up this morning and that eye was all puffy underneath, so I had to go to work looking ugly. Boo Hoo.

I give now give up all resistance to taking drugs for this stuff, even if the tablets taste icky.

The real quilting has commenced – this is the river diversion section

Morwell River has recently been diverted for the 5th time for the continuing expansion of Hazelwood Coal mine. It partly runs underground through pipes, I can imagine the water flowing and rushing along underground, in the dark. The fish must really wonder what the hell is going on!

Riscy and I didn’t go for a bike ride today, instead we went appliance shopping. I think we are going to blow the budget on the kitchen. We are talking about sacrificing our ski trip to NZ so we can afford a Miele dishwasher… how sad is that!!

Riscy also has an aversion to appliances with the name Smeg so I don’t know what we are going to do there since I really like their gas cook tops.

I have been chugging down the Vitamin C and drinking lots of water in an effort to stave off the dreaded cold. Riscy has been hawking like an old smoker for the last 3 days, I don’t want what he’s having!

Taken before I got into the groove.

I’ve used light blue taylors chalk to mark guide lines on my quilt… could be a mistake considering I don’t intend to wash it. I tried the soap sliver technique but it didn’t show up on the light coloured fabric.

I’m almost done outline stitching all the truss shapes. The thread I’m using is a good match so slight wobbles here and there don’t interfere at all with the image. There really was no way around this exercise as there are lots of long skinny bias bits in this quilt and if the glue ever came unstuck I’d have an unsightly mess.

I will lock myself away in my workroom tommorow so I can sew up a storm. This is a long weekend (labour Day) and my old high school friend Lynne and her partner Roger are coming to stay on Sunday night, so I’ll have other things to distract me from the quilt.

Riscy is keen to go for a bike ride tommorow too… so, as I have a revived interest in improving my fitness and figure, I will make the time for a ride (even if there is a big hill involved). I had my first gym session today, I feel pretty good.

In renovation news…. the cabinet maker is booked in and our architect has found a builder … we will meet him on Wednesday. Riscy has done a heap of research on kitchen appliances so I think it is now just a matter of finding the right price. YAY!!

So this will be a quick post

I started quilting the Big Dredger Quilt:

The start of stitching

As I mentioned yesterday, I needed to take the step of setting up my sewing machine and doing some stitching, even outlining the truss shapes would get me started. It worked. While sewing away, which is a meditative activity even with a sewing machine, I could really turn my mind to my plans for stitching this piece.

My ideas started to become tangible. My stress abated a little, I am STARTED!!

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Well the server let me down and I couldn’t post the blog this morning, so here is more for tonight.

A note from Fulvia got me thinking this morning, what is it about the dredger ‘that moved me in the first place’. So I wrote a reply to Fulvia and thought I’d share some of it with you:

I was out an about that day with a specific purpose. A mission to capture images of the power industry, I had wanted to include some imagery of cooling towers in some etching/collographs (which so far have not eventuated, but I think I will revisit).

I grew up in another place, on an island. It wasn’t until I left that place that I became aware of how my surroundings were a part of me. Everyday I saw the sea, it would give me clues about the weather, I would dream about what was over the horizon, and I could always tell which way was north, because that was where the sea was.

There were so many other things, I could go on all day.

I moved here, to the mainland. There was no familiarity. An alien landscape. It took me 4-5 years to even really acknowledge I was living here, to become involved in the community to start looking at my surroundings… and that is even with the fact that I travel all over the road network it this region for my job.

So I started thinking about the Latrobe Valley where I live, I was looking for some sort of icon. The power stations are obvious. I started noticing how often I could see a powerstation no matter where I was in the Valley. Cooling towers, smoke stacks… the shapes of the plumes of steam actually give me some clues to the weather like the ocean used to do. The colour/shadows on the cooling towers change depending on the light on the day.

What an exciting discovery. Here was that landscape anchor I needed.

So I was out that day looking for interesting and new views of powerstations, and powerstation related artefacts in the landscape. The dredger was my first stop, it sits beside the freeway, but I’d never stopped to look at it before.

Once I started taking photos, I got on a roll. The enormity of the dredger, the interesting trusses, the old signage even the rust and shadows. I became really interested in the nitty gritty of the dredger.

That was in October last year. The image I am using for the Dredger Quilt wasn’t touched again until I was desperately looking for something to use for the photo screenprinting workshop last month. But I new straight away that I wanted to make a quilt from it!

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I’m joining the gym tonight, I want to lose a bit of girth and gain a lot of fitness.

Riscy was meant to come along but he has got a terrible cold, poor thing… just hope I don’t get it.