We can grow beards, if we want to...

Since it's been Movember and everyone has grown moustaches, I felt a little left out being unable to grow a face-warming friend. So I decided that we should have our own day where we drew moustaches on ourselves, proving that we girlies can grow beards if we want to.
We were looked at a little strange in lectures though...

(Kudos to The Spooky Men's Chorale for the inspiration for the awesome title!)

We all had a play with dyes too and thought we looked ridiculous so I thought I'd share the laughter... :)

First of the Final Embroidery Pieces!

Woooooh!!

People who can read what I've sewn can have a cookie, but people who can read it and knows what they mean can have 2 cookies! (The random numbers and letters mean nothing, just so as you know, they were just there to make it more sciency :P)

Applique and whatnots :)

We've been doing some applique which was quite fun but also quite stressful when we were doing reverse and shadow applique and I had to cut stuff away, aaah! I was so worried that I was going to cut through my stitching when I was doing that.

The first pic is normal applique and reverse applique, and the second pic is shadow applique. I really liked that one cos I used a sparkly silver thread and it looks all Christmassy! It doesn't really look it in the pic but it makes me smile :)

We also had a play with dyes. The top row are calico samples that I dyed and the bottom are silks that I dyed. Believe it or not but the corresponding samples have actually been dyed the same colours...

And, I found a nice new stitch - the cloud stitch, oooh...

Hand Embroidery

Friday was Hand Embroidery Day for us! We learnt loads of stitches (the bullion knots still confuse me) and had to create a masterpiece using them, here's mine...

There was more of it but it was just branch and I didn't think you'd want to see that cos it's pretty boring, so you have a close up of a section instead so you can admire my beautiful work :)

It was a weekends worth of work but I went back home and had a catch up with some friends (Hi Kiera, Rob and Bec!) so I did as much as I could on the train, so Hi to anyone who saw me on the Thornaby-Leeds train too!

Machine Stitches

We started our Embellished Surfaces project today and I got to play with free motion stitches on the machines, I was quite excited!

This is just a free motion stitch on Calico using an embriodery hoop. I quite like how sketchy it looks as I was copying from a drawing.

This one is machine couching - you use embroidery thread at the bottom so you have to mess with the tension - and it makes this lovely raised, wrapped effect.

Finally, we have normal free motion stitches but this time in colour. This has been sewn with Stitch and Tear behind it so the Calico doesn't pucker. I decided to leave some areas just with the veins sewn in so the detail wasn't lost and I think this is my fave piece from today :)

More Sketchbook and other things

Heres some more delights for you all, enjoy!


We're starting with my slight obsession with roses...

 This is a tapestry from Bowes Museum that I copied onto my page, dyed the page with red dye and painted the lines with bleach to leak the colour out. I actually really like this technique, but there are a few areas where I put too much bleach on, whops!

My seaside drawing set, all the stuff I collected was covered in sand which got all over my work bay - delightful to work in...

Sketchbook and other things

I finally got some pics of my work for you beautiful people!
This project was Visual Language (drawing) and we started with foliage...

Then we got to play with different drawing techniques - screen wash, mono printing and tracing etc... (If you can see, I've christened the purple flower the FUDC flower since it was from a bunch of purple and yellow flowers and they were the FUDC colours. If anyone know Sam or anyone from Funked Up tell them Jen says Hi and I'll see them at Christmas :) )

Possibly my fave page - my swirly stick ships! (All lyrics are part of The Darwin Song Project and not mine, but I do recommend listening to it)

 And a vase from the flea market for a drawing set of decorative objects

Pics

Me working in the studio on a sea side drawing set. I got so much sand everywhere today it's unreal!

New Blog :)

Woooh, just made this blog for part of my Professional Studies lecture, so lets see how it goes!