What format?

Do you struggle when you start a new project?  Does indecision make your choice difficult?  I can be pretty hopeless about making decisions about something really simple.  Choosing a journal to use for my word of the year!!!  Or choosing a sketchbook for a project!

In the photo above there are 4 sketchbooks laid out.  The purple one is an 11" square spiral bound sketchbook.

There's an A4 and an A5 concertina sketchbook.

Or there's this Seawhite Octopus sketchbook.

And that doesn't include any of the clothbound standard sketchbooks I could use.

My problem is that there's far too much choice available.  The same applies to food, wallpaper, carpets, clothes - I could go on!  Life was probably easier in the time of Henry Ford when he said "Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants, so long as it is black".

In my last post I mentioned I am about to start a new project.  Unusually for me, I have done some research and I want to record it in a sketchook.

But which one to choose!

Any of the four above would work.  Why do I find it so hard?

If you have to make choices how do you deal with it?

Thanks for joining me today
Bernice

5 pieces

Do you remember I made these two long flowing pieces?

I decided the way I wanted to hang them in an exhibition - if they ever get into an exhibition - wouldn't work.  So I chopped them up, and using the mechanism Roger made me for my first piece, I made three long pieces from the original two.

This is the first piece I made in the canal series

 There are two other pieces.  One I finished in February

And the one I finished last week which could have been Venice but fits better with these canal pieces.  So think aqueducts!

I've been working on one more canal piece.  I decided to take all the leftover bits of fabric from all the other pieces above and make them into one last hanging.

None of the photos are really wonderful.  I don't have anywhere I can hang the pieces of work to photograph them.

I thought I would try mocking up what the pieces might look like as an exhibition.

I rather like it.

I'm going to have a rest from canals now but I shall probably come back to them.

For now I'm going to delve into something different.  And no, not Venice!

Thanks for joining me today
Bernice

What I did next!

Remember this post?  About these fabrics?

Well, I sold the squarish piece on the left. I cut it up and put it in bags with other fabrics.

Then I took the piece across the top and the wide piece in the middle and cut them up into 4.5 inch squares.

I tried laying them out

Then I stitched the squares together in strips.

I joined 3 of the strips together and 2 of the strips together.  And you know me, I cut them up and inserted narrow strips.

I joined the 3 strip piece to the 2 strip piece.  I put the squares onto a piece of calico and a backing cotton.  Then machine quilted - after a fashion.  I trimmed the whole piece and added the binding.

Yesterday I spent the day handstitching the binding whilst listening to podcasts.

Thanks for joining me today.
Bernice

Clouds

It's hard to believe that another month has gone past.  This month's theme for the photography ladies has been clouds.

Here's a selection of the photos I took - mostly from my bedroom window!

The next three were taken about 7.30 in the morning where the sun had come up behind the clouds but the moon was still visible.  The photos sadly don't do justice to the sky.

And these two were from the front window.

Thanks for joining me today
Bernice

More journal spreads

A short post today.

Last month I showed you my pages up to Easter.  Here are the spreads since then.

This has been a special week.  Andy & Naomi's 13th wedding anniversary on May 9th and our 39th wedding anniversary today.  Naomi chose purple as the colour scheme for their wedding and I wore a purple dress to our wedding's evening party.  So of course I chose purple for these pages.

Thanks for joining me today
Bernice

The rest of the squares

There were 46 of the 10cm squares I mentioned in my Exploding Books post.  I used 26 of them in the exploding books.

There were 10 that were a similar colour scheme so I put them into a Khadi paper zigzag book.

The rest were put in my workbook but not necessarily in the right order!

I also had some 12 cm squares cut from the fabric we put a masking tape grid on.  I used some of these as the back of a zigzag book.

The front was made from strips of fabric I had made over the last few sessions including the batik ones.

I made a few other small books during the session but I'll save those for another day.

Thanks for joining me today
Bernice

Getting stuck!

Well having finished the two exploding books, I was stuck.  I didn't know what to do next.  So I read some books on Kindle Unlimited and played Solitaire.  Not really very creative!

However in the back of mind was always 'What shall I do with this?' This being several pieces of cotton fabric that I had used breakdown printing to print on.

I put the photo on my Facebook page and asked the question there.  One of the suggestions was to cut it up and sell it.  I did so with the squarish piece bottom left.

I'm really not fond of the green and one of the other suggestions was to overdye the fabrics.  I still might try that.

The thing is - do I look at the fabric and say 'aqueducts and canals' or do I look at it and say 'Venice architecture'.

I decided I'd play with the latter idea first.  I got out my Venice colours of fabric paint.

I cut the right hand piece off the wide fabric.

I used the paint through some Thermofax screens but the paint was a bit too runny an splurged too much.

I printed onto repair tissue instead.

Then I tore pieces of the printed tissue and using gel medium, glued it to the fabric.

I certainly had more control with the repair tissue.  But the fabric is still too green for Venice.

Back to the drawing board!

Thanks for joining me today
Bernice

Exploding books

If you've been following along with my Textile Explorations posts you'll know that I have been making 10cm square samples of different techniques.  I ended up with 40+ squares.

You may have been wondering what I was going to do with them.  Or maybe you haven't but I'm going to tell you anyway.  I used 26 of them to make two exploding books!

First I cut squares of heavy duty Lutradur.  For the first book I melted the edges of the squares before painting them.  Then I folded them.

They fit together like this so that the whole thing can be closed up and explode!

I tried out the squares in different places

And finally settled on this combination

I painted the second set of lutradur squares with copper coloured acrylic paint.

As with the other set I cut 8 of the squares down to 9cm square and then cut them in half diagonally.

I assembled the whole thing with doublesided tape.

And what have I done with the remaining squares?

Well, that's for another day.

Thanks for joining me today
Bernice