One minute it’s Christmas, then you look at the calendar and we are half way through January. How does that happen?
A lot of excitement has been going on here since my last blog – the major event being the launch of WOWbook 3. It was so amazingly busy with sales that I didn’t even get time to blog about it. Every time we say that we won’t be so busy this time – I’m glad to say that once again, we were wrong. The mix of book and ongoing online workshops seems to have great appeal. This pic from the Inspirations section is Party Lurcher by Mrs Bertimus.
We are already seeing the results of the workshop tutors’ inspirational instructions and the Facebook page has been very busy. You can see some of the results on our Gallery page at www.wowbook.d4daisy.com. Just look for the gallery on the top menu – you don’t have to be member to view it. If you’ve bought the book and you would like us to include your work in the Gallery just send a pic to us fiona@nulld4daisy.com The Gallery pic below is a lovely shot of eco-dyed fabrics from Jane Rouse.
The Facebook page is such fun – lots of our members say that it’s the friendliest group on the web and, as it is a closed group, we don’t get any spammy stuff. I love to see the work that results from our online members’ club articles, as well as the book stuff. You may remember that, in a recent article, I wrote about my experiments with turning Brusho paintings into stitch and here is Wendy Burgess’ take on that process.
My last blog was about transferring paper designs to stitch – some techniques, like Brusho, only work well on paper. I’m expanding that to watercolours as part of a workshop I’m writing about Jane Betteridge’s new book. Dynamic Watercolours has some great ideas and not only covers watercolour but techniques such as stamping into your watercolour, using tissue paper and so on, that we use in our stitched work.
We have a fun deal going with Search Press where we pick a book to review and expand it with an interview with the author and then I have a bash with one or two techniques from the book. Now I know I can transfer the results to fabric, I’m even more keen. I used some masking fluid that I thought was the peel-off version and was so disappointed when it was non removable. However I then decided to draw into the painting and found that the mask that I’d splattered over the paper was great when I doodled into it – another technique to be printed on the inkjet fabric. Hooray.
I’ve also used the drawing to fabric technique for transferring some of my ‘Ancient Faces’ drawings to a more forgiving medium. The top one here has been transferred to Craft Vilene by ironing paper onto Bondaweb and then rubbing the top layer away.I am making these for the Ramster Exhibition. More info here www.ramsterevents.com
If you are in the south-west of England, do come and see us at C4C (Craft4Crafters) in Exeter. I’ll be demonstrating my Brusho and watercolour ‘splat’ techniques as well as the embellisher machine. In addition, Amo House will be showing some exciting methods of image transfer. Fiona will be keeping us in order (some hope). It would be lovely to see you there.
