When I got up this morning …

I knew that there were four things I had to do, in addition to al the usual chores:

1. Make some soup
2. Empty the waste paper bins
3. Get my hair cut.
4. Go to Holland and Barratt for some stuff.

So after the usual chores I emptied my workroom bin – and then got distracted into tidying the room a bit more. In the process I came across the materials I’d gathered to try something from Lois Walpole’s book – and got distracted into making a useful pot to put things in.

If you think it looks as if it’s made from a plastic bottle and a plastic bag – you’d be right.

Walpole uses coloured plastic bags, but we don’t have many of those, so I used a transparent one – and I like the result. However, I think she also uses bigger bottles, and this one [1 litre] was really too small to work properly. You bend the uprights back down under the weaving, and they needed to be longer to stay in place.

Then it was lunchtime – and I remembered about the soup. Reach for the can opener…

After lunch I went upstairs to get ready to go to the hairdressers – and fell over the bins I’d put on the landing for emptying and forgotten about.

And on the way down town I realised that I’d forgotten the shopping list.

I did remember to get my hair cut – and I went into H&B and got what I thought I needed – luckily I was right – and I did the bins when I got home. Still cross about the soup, though – canned is not the same as home made.

Of course, I haven’t forgotten to play with Sumopaint in the evenings.

This is the usual blurred and smudged gradient – very moody

 

 

 

 

 

- with two more layers stamped with brushes -

 

 

 

 

 

- and different filters added – like Sphere Designer here, on the second layer. I love this one, it is very – er - spacy.

 

 

 

Just for fun, I tried applying the same filter – Kaleidoscope – to each layer in turn – this is the last layer I added -

 

 

 

 

the middle layer – [‘doyleys in space’?]

 

 

 

 

the background -

 

 

 

 

 

 

and all three merged together – definitely the least interesting.

 

 

 

 

 

But this one is my favourite - Wave Lab applied to the background to make wonderful flowers.

I think it would make a great starting point for a [restrained] touch of embroidery.

And yet more.

Tidying, that is. I hope you are suitably impressed – it’s not something I do very often!

I decided it was time to tackle the scrap box – I have far too many scraps for a mere bag. I hauled it out from the bottom of the cupboard [I knew all that upper body work at the gym had a purpose] and threw out all the small, ugly or boring scraps. I now have a bin bag full to be thrown away – and the scrap box looks no emptier than it did before.

Something productive did come from it however – I sewed all the larger bits of navy fabric, together at random [a.k.a ‘liberated patchwork’], quilted the result, added the unfinished embroidery I found during the last spate of tidying, and finished - and made a cover for my contextualisation file [i.e. the place where I shove all the interesting arty bits I come across but can’t find a better home for].

I wish now I’d used more interesting thread to apply the embroidery, but I had forgotten that the quilting would shrink the fabric and I was convinced it wasn’t going to be big enough so I did it in a bit of a rush. Sort of like knitting quicker because you think the wool is going to run out.

Apart from that – I’ve been playing with Sumopaint. Again.

My plan is to get confident with Sumo, then go back to GIMP, which has more bells and whistles, and then when I am more confident with that – try Paint Shop Pro, which I have had for ages and which confuses me utterly. I did open it by mistake the other day – in the course of making this [bet you can’t guess who it is for] but closed it very quickly. As I say every time I use Word 2010 – it is possible to have too many choices…

But I digress. With Sumo I think I am beginning to get the beginnings of an inkling of a sort-of-understanding of layers.

I started with a gradient and attacked it with the blur and smudge tools so it went all – er - blurry and smudged.

 

 

 

New Layer!

I added some blobs with the Custom Shape tool, set to Smoothing mode and a highish mode value [50+]. The shape tools all fill in the shape they make with a gradient, so you can make them tone with the background.

 

New Layer!

I added more blobs with the Polygon tool, setting it to 8 sides, and with ‘Shape Trails’ ticked. If you swirl the cursor round and round and in and out, you get these shapes. I’m not saying what Wensleydale said about them.

Then I started playing with the Filters, which is when it dawned on me that, provided you haven’t merged the layers, the filters only work on the layer you have open, not all of them. [I’m sure you know this, but I didn’t.]

Suddenly, the filters in the 3D Effects group,which I had thought were boring – weren’t.

Like Reflection -

 

 

and Cylinder Designer

 

 

 

 

 

 

and Perspective Tiling.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Of course I didn’t stop there.

This is one of the Wave Lab settings – I can't remember which.

 

 

 

 

 

This is [I think] Pixelate – Pixelate – but I could be wrong.

 

 

 

 

 

This is Pixelate – Mosaic – Cube. If I still did patchwork, I think this would look great in hand dyed fabric.

 

 

 

I made several more, but I think I have delighted you long enough.

I think the reason these work so well [well, for me they do!] is partly because of the background, and partly because the layer I applied the filters to has gaps in it. Oh, and they are purple.

This is Pixelate – Mosaic – Cube applied to the whole image. OK, but no banana.

 

There’s nothing on the telly tonight, so guess what I’ll be doing?

Two in a week…

must be a record.

Sound installations, that is – although strictly speaking, this one is a sound and light installation.

A week later than originally planned, as plumbing and 3d artefact making were finished [and in the later case, handed in :>)], we decided it was time for an art day out in Salisbury.

We started at Salisbury Arts Centre, where we looked at the UK Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef. I’d seen it before – or a close relative – Wensleydale hadn’t. I think he was somewhat underwhelmed – and there was definitely too much acrylic for me.

After an enjoyable lunch in the Arts Centre’s excellent cafe, we made our way to the Cathedral, to see Bruce Munro's ‘Water Towers’. Looking at that link, I notice that it now says that it is best viewed after dark – which is what everyone we spoke to told us– and we are intending to go back one evening. However, we enjoyed looking at the way the lights changed in response to the music - more beautiful church music, although more recent that the Tallis we listened to on Saturday.

You may think Munro’s use of several hundred plastic bottles is odd – but for me, their shape references the wonderful columns in the cloister. He has another piece in the Cathedral, ‘Light Shower’, although I found that less moving.

After wandering round the Cathedral, admiring the font, the Whistler glass prism and the textiles, we indulged in a couple of scones and tea in the cafe, and a little retail therapy in the shop, including a leaflet on the aforementioned textiles.

This was  our first visit to Salisbury since Wensleydale’s knee problem/sciatica started, and the first time we have not parked on the outskirts, and walked in. Although there is good disabled parking provision, the complexities of Salisbury’s one way system encouraged us to use the park-and-ride next time!

The Little Red Book…

of Chairman Cheshire.  [And if you don’t get that reference it is because you are too young!]

Ages ago, I started playing around with embroidering on Colour Catchers, with the intention of making a book  – which I don’t appear to have blogged about, or if I did, I can’t find where.

Then life happened, I got a bit fed up with it, and all the bits got shoved in a box.

today, I was tidying [!] the work room [my usual post-completion clear up, but a bit more energetic than usual] and I found the box – and realised :

1. the pages looked better than I remembered
2. it wouldn't take much time to assemble the book – I had even finished the covers - much more interesting than tidying.

The covers are plastic canvas, of which I have an embarrassing amount, worked in half cross stitch with tapestry wool and torn up left over shirt fabric. I left the ends showing because at the time I was into showing the workings [oh, shades of maths exams].

The same principle applies to the pages, I left the backs visible.

The binding is 4-needle Coptic Stitch – although I’ve done it before I can never remember how, so this time I followed the instructions in Alisa Golden’s ‘new’ book, ‘Making Handmade Books’.

I’m a fan of Golden, so I bought the book sight unseen, but my heart sank when it arrived, because she describes it as a combination of two previous books - ‘Creating Handmade Books’ [which I have'] and ‘Unique Handmade Books’ [which I don’t]. I needn’t have worried – the new-to-me bits far outweigh the repetition, there are her usual plentiful and inspiring illustrations and her description of 4-needle Coptic is the clearest I’ve read by far.

And the new book was cheaper than a second hand copy of ‘Unique Handmade Books’. Bargain.    

After finishing that, I had time to do more tidying – you can see much more of the floor and the work top than you could before – and find another UFO to, though this will need a bit more work.

Thanks to quirkyartist for her recommendation of the fractal program Apophysis – another wonderful opportunity to waste time playing make art – I just wish I could work out how to save my efforts in a format Irfanview recognises!

Just have to make do with the rather less ethereal fractal liquid waves effect from Sumopaint – in case you don’t recognise it, it’s the front cover of the little red book…

 

 

 

And this is the image above, after applying my favourite filter – kaleidoscope – and decreasing the transparency value

 

 

 

 

 

or maybe the triangle pattern with decreased transparency is my favourite – it’s so hard to stop playing!

 

 

 

 

 

And finally – we’ve had some very good news – Babybel will have a little brother or sister in August. We are delighted, of course!

Finished!

Well, nearly.

We were going to go to Salisbury yesterday to see this, but it was windy and Wensleydale wanted to get on with his plumbing, so we stayed at home.

I decided it was time to stop farting about and finish my journal/evaluation. I'd half written it, so it would only take a morning, right?

Wrong.

It took all day, and I only finished it today – because I wanted to add  a photo of the chest on mum’s mat, and first I had to wash and iron it – and even starch it - the mat, not the chest. Obviously.

But the journal and evaluation is now written, checked by my trusty editor, and printed, despite the printer having a hiccup and printing the first two pages twice, and clipped into a folder.

Flushed with success, I added beads to my red balls, and put them in the string drawer – though you may not be able to see them… I have few more notes to add to the workbook, and then I really will be finished!

To make sure we got our weekly dose of culture, we went to this, today, as it’s a bit nearer home. [YouTube versions here, from other installations]

We  found it incredibly moving. You can sit in the middle and listen to the music move round the individual voices, like sitting in the sea with waves breaking round you. Alternatively you can move round the speakers and hear the individual voices.

The only other sound installation I've experienced is Susan Phillipsz Turner Prize entry – and  I much prefer Janet Cardiff’s work. To be fair, Spem in Alium is probably my favourite piece of music ever – and the ambience and acoustic of the Great Hall did the Cardiff piece much greater service than Tate Britain did Phillipsz. It also made you appreciate how brilliant Tallis was, to be able to write a piece of music which works so superbly in a stone walled building, and utilises the echoes so brilliantly.

We will be going back before it closes at the end of March.

Not ‘make hay while the sun shines’…

but ‘play with photo-editing programs while sensible people are asleep’.

I had a mega-insomniac night, so rather than play computer games, which is what I usually do, I played with a photo-editing program.

Long term readers may remember a series of posts I made about various on-line [and downloadable] free programs which I tried out in the days before I had a degree to worry about. I  had great fun and other people seemed to enjoy it too.

If you want to know more, look in August and September 2009 on  the blog. [I notice several mentions of insomnia there too…] As I’ve changed the design of my blog, the lay-out of earlier posts seems to be buggered up. Please forgive me if I don’t go back and sort it!

One of the programs I particularly liked was ‘Sumo Paint’ – not Japanese as you might think, but Finnish – and as you may have realised, I have a bit of a thing about things from Scandinavia.

However, since then I took a course on GIMP with Sharon Boggon, I rather neglected the other programs I looked at. But in the middle of the night I decided to revisit some of them, and started with Sumo. And never left it.

I tried the paint tools, rather than just the filters, which is what I used before.

The first discovery was the star tools, in the ‘Tools’ menu on the left when you open the program. They change shape depending on the direction in which you move the cursor, and if you check the ‘Shape Trails’ box top right, and keep the line diameter [top left] low, you will get these wonderful Spirograph like shapes. [The non-Spirograph ones have ‘Shape Trails’ unchecked.] There are other shape tools to try as well.

If you change the gradient you use for the stars, to avoid odd colour combinations you also need to change the foreground colour box [bottom left]which determines the line [border] colour. I used the eyedropper tool to select a colour from a star, although you will then need to undo that star and start again if you want them all to have the same colour border.

This one started with red borders selected from the gradient, but I clicked on a border by accident when I was adding the background, and liked the effect.

 

 

For this one I started with a gradient and added the stars on top [I love gradients].

The gradient is ‘Sunset 3’ with saturation decreased and lightness increased, for both background and stars.

You can play around with the gradients to your heart’s content by moving sliders, and if you click on the arrow at the bottom of the gradients drop down menu, you get even more choice.

Of course, I couldn’t just stop there – these programs are a calorie free version of Pringles.

The ‘Adjustments’ heading allows you to play around with the colour in different ways. This is tweaked using ‘Curves’,

 

 

 

But as a negative, with increased brightness, it’s a bit Japanese.

 

 

 

 

 

This is ‘Threshold’, which I think looks better rotated.

And all this is just a start – I haven’t begun to look at what the filters can do with some of these.

 

 

 

 

 

So what can an embroiderer do with all this? Search me – although I am tempted to print some of them out on fabric and try adding a bit of stitch – or playing around with them in other ways. This black and white version would be interesting interwoven with plain black or white fabric, – or red.

I find it always helps…

to read the Module Handbook. Preferably at the beginning of the module. Then you realise in good time that you need to ‘maintain a journal detailing evidence of design ideas … stitch thoughts’ [not much stitch!] and ‘ongoing evaluation’.

A journal has been maintained, patchily, but it certainly has little of the above. Just samples, and a few odd notes – oh, and ‘evidence of historical and contemporary contextualisation’. [Sigh of relief.] [I.e. pictures of other people’s work. And some stumpwork caskets.]

So guess what I’ve been doing over the last few days? Sitting in the corner with the laptop, grunting and swearing, and trying to remember why I decided to do what I decided to do.

I do now have most of it written down, apart from the evaluation  - oh, and I have to ‘select an appropriate way of presenting the artefact’ and evaluate that too.

It’s a scruffy looking box. What's the best way to present a scruffy looking box? I’m tempted to fish out one of mum’s lace trimmed mats [not often used in this house, you have to wash them if you do, and iron them properly], and present it on that – although if they ask me why, the answer will be ‘it seemed like a good idea at the time’…

Anyone got any bright ideas on how best to present a dirty cardboard box?

So while I thought, I went in to the work room with the intention of tidying up the aftermath of two months of creative endeavour, and Wensleydale’s blind erection – er, perhaps I’d better rephrase that, -Wensleydale putting up the blind.

But the first thing I came across was the boring book I made earlier in the week, which needed sewing, because the staples failed.

It’s only a single section book, which normally I would use pamphlet stitch for, but this time I looked at Keith Smith’s ‘1 2 & 3 Section Sewings’, and found lots of suggestions which are far more interesting.

I chose the one on the left, which Smith likens to a machine stitch, but which I would describe as couching.

And then decided to whip it.

 

Still a fairly boring book, but a bit more interesting.

Knotting the thread ends on the outside is my idea, you mustn’t blame Smith for the tatty tassels.

 

 

 

Then  I came across the beads I bought at Walford Mill last Friday – and realised that the little spherical ones I’d bought at one end of the room at the Pick’n’Mix stall, went with the sort-of-Oriental ones I'd bought later at the other end of the room.

And they all sort-of-went with the sort-of-fish from the same stall.

So I made some jewellery.

 

And then, because it was getting late and Wensleydale had gone out, I did something I had intended to do when he went out. No pictures of what I made, it’s a secret, but it is red and white and involves hearts.

College tomorrow, Babybel on Thursday [Monday and Thursday mornings are the new Tuesdays], probably a trip on Friday – so I may get back to the tidying on Saturday. Procrastinate, moi?

No mention of any work on the tatty box itself, you’ll notice. It is pretty well finished, apart from the continuing question of the string drawer, which I hope to tackle in college tomorrow – although I keep saying that and somehow it doesn’t happen … Procrastinate, moi?