Textile Art Festival

Here is a collage of a small selection of the altered cloth swap.  I will post more photos tomorrow, but I am trying to learn Picasa so that I can make a slide show or video clip or more collages to show you more of the many many photos I took.  I am not very good at any of it yet.
We had an absolutely fabulous weekend, the weather was quite okay for what we were doing - I missed the really miserable weather in Brisbane and left it behind in Mackay - how good was that.
There was so much to see and do, we ran out of time through sheer exhaustion, my credit card took a beating - Dale will be happy!  The Thread Studio saw quite a bit of my money.

We had fun watching Dale and Jacinta at play in the Artists at work area, found many stalls with products we had never seen or heard of before, met up with Shirley and her friend Dianne, which was great fun, attended a couple of classes, and even ventured into the scrapbooking hall next door - too many people and too hard to find anything which interested us - the textile hall was much more fun.

I am going back to learn more about Picasa so I can post some photos of the wonderful Circus Berserkus Art U Wear competition.  Kirry Toose won with a very bright  exciting costume, but the lass who came second was only 14 when she made her entry.  She is very talented and will go far I suspect.  More tomorrow (I hope).

More swaps

Only a very quick and short post tonight. This is the page I have sent Ati for the Fibre Fever swap for June.  Her theme was an impression of our favourite painter.  I am not sure that Sir Sydney Nolan is necessarily my favourite painter, though I do like many of his works, other than the Ned Kelly series which don't inspire me at all. 

This is the painting I was using as my page.

This is a birthday card I have sent to Helina, which she has now received and likes.  I am using up some of my old samples and adding a bit extra to them - much better than letting them languish in a drawer.

Not much time for blogging just now, I need to write up some minutes of a meeting to send out tomorrow, then a book delivery for the library and then pack!

I am off to Brisbane on Friday, yippee.  Should have lots of pictures to show you next week of lots of goodies at the Textile Fair.  Some of the pictures I have seen of the Art U Wear competition for this year look spectacular, can't wait to see them.

Good news, and maybe!

At long last my opthalmologist can see a bit of improvement in my left eye - after 22 injections!!  I shall continue to have them in the hope there will be much more improvement.   Meanwhile I have bought a new daylight magnifyinf light for using with my machine, as well as a magnifier to attach to it.  Brilliant.  I can see to thread the needle and I have also realised I can now see the computer screen on my other machine with the light!!  there will be no stopping me soon - I shall have to get the manual out to learn how to program the stitches a bit better.

All of that will have to wait till after the long weekend in June.  I am going to the Textile Art Festival in Brisbane and the program looks very exciting.  I just hope I can walk and stand.  My knee is still a bother, and the jury is out on what is the cause, apart from the sever osteo-arthritis.  My orthapod ordered blood tests to rule out gout, but my chiropractor doesn't think gout is the answer as I didn't yell when he touched my knee the day it happened.  Apparently with gout you can't bear even the slightest touch.  Oh well, the blood tests may come back negative.  I have had a cortisone injection which is supposed to have miraculous effects till after the Festival.  The jury is still out on that too, it is good sometimes and horrible others!

Meantime I have managed to make another couple of glasses cases using slightly different techniques this time, and using up samples I have made for other things.  This is silk paper from silk hankies in the top one.

This one has a base of painted brown paper with some Nepalese silk threads tesed out on top, then a maroon piece of net applied over the top and stitching.  I think this may be a bit more durable for all the handling a glasses case gets.

I have made a couple of other things yet, but can't show them till the recipients tell me they have received them.

Busy, busy, busy

What a week this has been - after a busy week last week as well!  I have been sewing madly as nearly all my souvenirs sold at the Botanic Gardens last weekend and we needed more for a stall at the Palm & Cycad Fete today!  Then I managed to do something to my knee on Tuesday so that I not only could not walk, it was agonising even to move my leg in any direction - and this was less than an hour before I was due for another injection in my eye!  Thank goodness for my mother's walking stick to use as a crutch with Bill on the other side.  We made it for the injection, then off to the chiropractor, three times in 24 hours and he had me walking again.  I hope it never returns.

I had fun making the handmade felt brooches, not sure if they will sell or not, but worth a try for something different.

Glasses cases are always popular and I love the way you can make the finished article look completely different even when you start with exactly the same base.  The top one has a green chiffon scarf over it, the bottom one a red.

I am trying out some sunshade too, which people seemed to like this morning.

And this is what we were setting up for this morning - I was out there by 5.45am, in the dark and very cold!  Winter has come in with a bang here, I realise it is not cold to the southerners, but 8 degrees is definitely cold to us in the tropics - especially when coupled with a very sneaky breeze.

This is a huge affair and several thousand people come to purchas all the goodies on offer - especially some beautiful bromeliads.  My knee was still too sore to go walking far, but the stall next to us had some lovely lemons and limes so I have a supply to make some marmalade - more busy times ahead!

Birthday cards and fabric pages

I belong to a birthday card swap within the Fibre-fever group and these cards were sent off to Ulla and Angelique a couple of weeks ago.

And this one went to Janny.  I have been using up bits of old samples and I am having trouble remembering just what I initially did with some of them - that will teach me to take better notes and keep them all together!

Blogger is not co-operating again tonight, but at least I have finally managed to upload the photos, I couldn't get anything to load yesterday.

The fabric page above I sent to Anne, whose theme is Oriental - Persian of Indian.  I was casting around for an idea when I saw an Indian cushion looking very similar to this page.

My page from Peggy is another good one to add to my collection with the theme of blue/green.  I chose a very easy theme, but this month I have to make one linking to my favourite painter!  I am not quite sure who that is yet, I change my mind depending on how I feel - and I think for this exercise my favourite painter will be someone whose work I can depict reasonably easily!

A hard life to take to take

blogger is not co-operating very well this afternoon, perhaps not wanting to show what a perfect day the partners had on Thursday.  The annual Sugar Cane Technologists conference has just finished and the partners enjoyed a wonderful day having lunch at Coral Sea Resort at Airlie Beach.  We had a barbecue on the jetty and just look at the wonderful weather and the view!!!!!

There were tables set up under a canopy on the jetty, I forgot to take any photos of the chefs barbecuing steak and fish etc for us.

The sea really is that colour.

Here are some of the desserts on offer - dieting is starting today.

I tried to make a slide show to let you see some more of what happened, but I am not very successful at that either, I think I need another couple of hours which I don't have to spare, to maybe manage to learn the technique - another time perhaps.

We son't do the 'tourist things' in our local area unless we have visitors with us, I really enjoyed visiting some of the local attractions and all the visiting partners had a fantastic time - that is the best advertising the tourist industry could possible have.  So many people still think the whole of Queensland has been destroyed by the floods or cyclone, they simply are not visiting.  Our highly valued dollar is sending them all oveerseas instead.  Look what they are missing.  I will show a bit more tomorrow maybe.

That weddding and another

My sisiter and I were talking about that wedding last night, which prompted Barb to mention our mother's lovely lace wedding dress, and she reminded me that I have the top which was made up from the lace after the wedding.  I wish I knew what happened to the rest of the lace.  This top looks pretty special, I would never have fitted into it unfortunately.  The lace is still in pretty good condition ( the wedding was 1936), but has yellowed a bit over time.  I shall take a bit more care with this lace now I have remembered I have it.  I didn't even have it wrapped in tissue, just shoved in a storage box - how bad is that!

Photo does not do this justice, but was the best I could get.