Motor Vehicles

 For the cover of this project I decided to return to my first love of creating unusual fabrics with knit-weaving. It is a medium that I find so satisfying because it seems almost fool proof.
I was able to create the colour of the background  yarn with a variety of different gauges and  colours. These toned in so well with the teabags
I seem to have collected and use to depict various shapes to represent whatever takes my fancy. The weaving- in yarn is a white dull and shiny thread and toned down the ocher and tawney background yarn.

The pick-up truck shapes reminded me of the days we lived on Anlaby sheep station.
As children we used to hop into the covered back of the truck and one of the station people would drive us to the Hampden road where we would board the school bus which had already picked up children from further west. We would then be driven to the Eudunda Area school in time for the nine o'clock start. The first time we topped the road before descending into Eudunda, I remember being astounded and awed by the vast plain which lay north of Eudunda.

 I didn't know then that the River Murray ran through that plain and Morgan was the next town.

The humungous trucks that now thunder along our roads are awesome to behold. The men who manoeuvre these colossal giants and truck goods across vast distances are a special breed to be sure.
Where are our train lines now though, think of the rubber tyres which would be saved.......


My cursor was doing a thing on its own, but we seem to be back on track.
In the 1990ies we became grey nomads and traveled around in our Toyota campervan.
We saw a lot of Australia and Tasmania and Tasmania is especially well remembered for the first time we were there. There were still a lot of old forests and they were truly magic. I have never seen so much water or variety of fungi,
and the ferocious Devils growling and carrying on like pork chops. We camped in out of the way places in Australia and had a joyous time.

Lastly, in case you thought I had been slacking over the summer months, I did knit this butterfly batwing  and put knit-woven cuffs on it with just a plain collar. It is wool but a light weight so it will be nice for the autumn weather.
I also became adventurous and did a Thread-lace top with short sleeves. I just realize I haven't photographed it so I can't show you. Perhaps next time.....

Creativity and Hot Summer Days

 Today and tomorrow are forecast with 40*C temperatures so we are busy trying to keep the water up to some of our plants.February is a sad month for the gardens as most of the plants find the heat too much and disappear under ground.
The seasons are changing quite markedly now and it is drier and drier each summer.
The heat seems to kill any creativity in anything including us humans.
So my little textile/fibre artist booklets are in the doldrums.....

To find something to do, other than housework
or preserving fruit ( I have done 12 kg of sticky figs...and tubs of ratatouille marked as Rat and deep frozen....we won't starve this coming winter....) I thought the pieces of cover I knitted for the booklets and which did not work out, would make little cushions. Purely decorative and useless really, though they could be used to keep jewelry on perhaps, I did enjoy making tassels for them.....

 I forgot to mention the apricots. Last year I wanted Brian to cut the apricot tree down as it had not produced much fruit in its short little life.But he and Anton convinced me to give it another go. So we made a concerted effort to cut and poison all the suckers it was throwing up, watered it and Voila! a bucket full of lovely apricots which I made into some jam (my favorite) and stewed and deep froze the rest.
The tree is a Hunter apricot.

 All this preserving reminded me of a Gypsy saying I found somewhere and which always stayed with me " The winter will tell us what we did last summer".... this could be interpreted in different ways but for me it is to do with food.

This summer the bark and leaf litter of the gumtrees is astounding. I keep on raking it up near the house and putting it elsewhere but it could be done each day, a very contemplative act

We have also had some stunning sunsets this summer but there are only so many you want to record, I wonder what will happen to all the digital photographs we take these days....
The new rose garden has managed to survive so far, we only had one which didn't come out at all
The pond looks awful but the frogs seem happy and the white faced Heron has a lot of trouble seeing the gold fish, we intend to pump it empty when we get the first rains....oh, the first rains.....

Dwellings & Utrecht Psalter

Hello, to another project completed...
It is all still to do with using recycled tea bags which , when dry and emptied, turn into these fascinating and antique looking shapes.
The first lot looked like Medieval tents to me, so imagine my surprise when I started looking on the Web for information on these. They are actually making Medieval tents and pavilions today and there are societies which re enact jousts and other activities of Medieval times.

Getelds

The shapes on the first page look like tents which were called "Getelds" which originated in the  North of Europe. Pictures of these can be found in early illustrated manuscripts dating back as far as 840 AD in the Psalter of Utrecht. I found it rather intriguing that the University of Utrecht which is in the Netherlands and somewhat North east of The Hague, the city where I was born, has the largest collection of early illustrated manuscripts anywhere. Utrecht evidently was a very Protestant city from the word go, well, I guess since Luther split off from the Roman Catholic church in the early 15 hundreds.
The Psalter of 840 AD is an illustrated book of Psalms and were done by monks in Reims. Somehow the Psalter finished up in the Utrecht University. Apparently the illustrations are very lively and  not unlike the depictions by Hieroniemus Bosch of a later time.

On the second page the arrangement is that of a suburban landscape. Again there is a Society for
Philosophy and Geography which investigates the experiences and meaning of urban and suburban landscapes. This is so amazing I find,what will the human race do to keep itself occupied and interested in the way we all live.....
A lot of people love living in close proximity to each other of course and are quite lost when faced with open spaces, large open spaces especially.....

If the cursor has behaved itself (and so far it hasn't, placing itself somewhere without my permission) the page on the right is a take on a sampler my sister-in-law had hanging in her guest room in Sunnyside lodge at Beaumont.
It basically said the" The road to a friends place is never long" and that saying has stayed with me  the rest of my life, it is such a lovely thought. I do wonder what has happened to that sampler.
I have run out of denim to back the pages and so am using some heavy cotton a sewing friend gave me, but it is not as kind as old denim I find.

The back cover is a little different to the front as I forgot to turn the pattern around.
 The little base player is there to keep the book open at the right pages to photograph
He is made of steel rods and nuts and bolts, a friend sent it to me and he lives in the Studio.....

Kimonos and Haikus Textile/Fibre Art Book

Summer is here with a vengeance and fierce fires have been roaring through parts of the Adelaide hills. We are hoping for a change in the weather and for some rain especially in the hills so as to give the Firies a break and for people to be able to go back to their properties and deal with the damage they will find. Luckily so far no lives have been lost but a lot of stock and pets have died or had to be put down because they were too badly burnt.
Meanwhile we have been fortunate enough to be able to be in the cool inside.....

 My latest effort in making books has given me interesting challenges.I started off using the recycled tea bags which seem to collect and sit around getting that lovely antique patina on them.
Started with cutting some up and found this rather interesting shape of Kimonos. Then decided to applique them onto the already tea dyed cotton sheeting which is also being recycled...
( Oh dear, does that sound rather virtuous ?)
There are very interesting stitches on my Bernina sewing machine which I have had great pleasure in exploring and find
that repeating the same stitch gives great opportunities for further decoration with the Colonial knot.
Colonial knots are my passion at the moment because you can do them sitting in front of TV or any spare moment you might have and they save you from being bored....

Because I seem to have run out of old denim, the other option to back the signatures was using the rose pink velvet.
Someone gave me a whole roll of this material and so it is a good way to use it up.
Velvet is not an easy fabric to deal with as the pile is inclined to want to do its own thing and does not like to be on top of itself.
So putting the flanges together to bind them into a book form
they will move about and it was quite tricky to keep them level
and together.
The other challenge was to edge each page with cording or an interesting fancy yarn with fibers and bits of chenille with a cording foot that came with the machine. In the end it worked a treat......
The little Haikus were not true Haikus to start with, well, written in English they are really just little bits of poetry trying to imitate
the lovely Japanese form ....

To begin with I got the sequence wrong, thinking it was five syllables, then three and then five again.....then I found out they consist of seventeen syllables organized as five, seven, five
and mostly to do with nature....
you may be able to read some of them by clicking on the photos...

Below is a photo of three rainbow lorikeets  which were sitting on the birdbath this morning looking like a group of little old men wondering where the water had gone, I dutifully filled it up for them as the day was a scorcher so early in the morning.......

The Facinating Flinders Ranges

What am I doing organizing this on Christmas
Eve.....not a care in the world have I...
Yet it bothers me that I have created this textile fibre book about the Flinders Ranges and want to convey how fascinating these ancient , eroded
and strikingly beautiful mountains are...
how they were invaded by a people two centuries ago, who were frankly not the least bit interested in the people who were already making a living there without destroying their habitat.

Yet the intrepid white people, with a philosophy
of needing to settle the land and make it productive, did an amazing job of exploring and
recording what they found.
Their  attitudes two centuries ago were so different to our present day of being aware of the delicate country side they were in. Of the delicate balance that keeps the ancient Australian eco systems from being destroyed....

The Ediacara ranges have revealed the most ancient and unusual fossils dating back to the pre Cambrian times....
In lake Callabonna in 1892, Fred Ragless found an amazing amount of scattered skeleton bones which proved to be a Diprotodon , the largest of the Marsupials and was mounted as a complete skeleton in the South Australian museum.

The Flinders Ranges were also explored for copper but none of the mines ever produced a great deal of copper and the arduous trek by bullock wagons didn't make it a worth while effort and so most of the mines which may have been started could not go on.
Still, the Flinders has the most poetic of name places ,Angorichina.. Wirrealpa..Umberatina..
Ical Icala..Moolooloo..Oratunga..Witchelina..
Wertaloona..Oraparinna..Hollowiliena..
Ediacara...
Here is my Christmas gift to you...I hope you will enjoy the spirit of it all.....

Textile/Fibre Artist book on Words

Words... We all use them, write them,
speak them, whisper them, shout them,
draw them, think them, imagine them,
invent them, organize them, forget them
dream them and wonder who on earth started them...... at least I do, wonder who was the first person to say something in words rather than
grunts
and who was the first person to draw a picture to represent a detail of the surroundings and objects they lived with...

What were the earliest hieroglyphs ever used?
A little bit of research on the web and you are inundated with information about the history
of the alphabet and how it can be linked back
to before the end of the 4th millennium BCE.
The Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian
hieroglyphs.
By 2700 BC the Egyptians had developed the
hieroglyphic writing system. The logogram
represents a word denoting an object pictorially
depicted by a hieroglyph.

The phonogram represent the sound of a word.
The thing is though, that human kind drew images of the animals they were hunting on rock walls in caves before they could write. It was their way of letting others know that hunting was good in this area.
I was intrigued to find that the oldest rock art is in India at the Auditorium cave and this is very similar to the Acheulian rock art in the Kalahari desert in South Africa.

Our indigenous Australian aboriginal rock art is a little later at approximately 25 to 30 thousand years old.
I was given a book years ago, on the Lascaux Cave paintings which has wonderfully lively paintings of bulls and other animals which go back to the Palaeolithic era when Homo Sapiens was living and hunting in these areas of France.
It is fascinating to think how writing evolved from these early depictions.

The subject is really too huge to condense into a few sentences here and I am in no way qualified to do so anyway, but it is intriguing all the same.
Remember to click on the photos if you want a closer view. It contains a few sentences written in my mother tongue, relating a few of the sayings with which our parents would quote at times when we needed to think about what we were doing......
The covers are again knitted to fit, in mixed cotton yarns using a fair isle pattern....

November Sunday Soiree

 We had a great afternoon last Sunday, playing music for a small gathering of friends and family in our Studio.
The weather wasn't crash hot, well, it was humid and warm at times which is inclined to play havoc with string instruments as they are inclined to go flat...
But we managed and played our pieces with aplomb if not always in tune or in time...the audience was kind ,bless them....

 We played "The arrival of the Queen of Sheba"
at a sedate pace as a warm up.
Next we played Bourree by J S Bach in which we left out  the repeats as that would have sent the audience to sleep.
Then Three Trios by Haydn which Ken had
re-organized for us so we only played the charming bits.
Bach's Prelude 22 is quite tricky as we all play different parts and the timing needs to be spot on

 However we all finished together in the end....
Relief , relief...
After a bit of a breather, my cello teacher Catherine Finnis played the duet part of  Willem de Fesch's Sonata op.8 Nr 3 with me as I have been studying this piece for quite a while...bless her, she supported me in all the right places and I managed to complete it without too disastrous a
result. Catherine does a brilliant job in keeping me enthused and motivated....

The highlight of the afternoon though, was Catherine and her husband John Gray playing the only Duet for Cello and Double Bass ever written by Rossini, it was just fabulous . Catherine has played her cello all over the world and John played the double bass  in the Academy of St Martin in the Field for many years but he also played in all the film music for the
James Bond series.....how is that for fame.....
but as we know, fame is a fleeting thing and here they are playing in our humble Studio...what an afternoon..... We finished celebrating with a few reds and coffees......and everyone went home happy