Big Jump

Please don't ask me how I'm feeling - reluctance has caught me again. As always before an important project comes to life. I'm not talking about crafts... my PhD thesis needs to be finally written and the labour pains are awful.
I console myself with these beauties from the charity shop: vintage jewellery and a Lomonosow (!!) coffee set. Everything for less than 10 €. And a new shawl to knit.
May the BIG project come to life. Soon.

Summer feeling!

A princess teaparty! I just had to share these heartwarming pics from Teaprincess from the other hemisphere. A lot of inspiration and dreaming for rainy winter days in this part of the world.
Happy 2012 to all my dear readers!

Picture credits here.

Work in Progress: Boro Inspired Denim Cloth

Here you see the whole project: A Boro inspired cloth with (very simple) Sashiko stitches all over.
The Japanese craft form called "boro" is a method to reuse worn and torn clothes by adding pieces of leftover fabric, often combined with "sashiko", a traditional technique used to reinforce points of wear, or to repair worn places or tears with patches, using a simple running stitch.

It began with a pair of jeans of my little one that I did not dare to throw - too many sweet memories - so I decided to incorporate it into a cloth project. The idea of a boro jeans bag with cute little pockets for a cell phone - or anything small - was born.

 Everything attached with simple running stitches for stability and structure. Now the cloth is in the washing machine for nicely frayed edges - and because somebody wiped her chocolate stained mouth with it :-D

Finished! Freeform Crochet Handbag

 Finally! It took me ages but now it's finished :-) I tried to incorporate a colour range between pink, lilac and orange to catch the various tonalities of sunlight all over the day. Then the freeform crochet pieces were attatched to an already existing handbag with many practical pockets.

And here are a few details.

Garden, plant dye and a surprise

Probably like many of you I was totally excited when I discovered the wonderful work of India Flint - what an inspiring person!  The beauty of her books is amazing and I still soak it in whenever I feel empty or dissatisfied.

So one sunny day I rushed into the garden, harvested all my woad and started, after having searched for long an easy recipe for this medieval technique without fermentation and having to use strange ingredients like human urine. But I failed... probably in the last step. The dye did.not.turn.blue.at.all.

Sigh.
In the meantime I gathered some walnut leaves and rolled it to a bundle, where I had hidden the last woad leaves (in the picture below) put it into al glass filled with water and boiled it for a while.

What a surprise when I opened it - at least some blue stains are visible, together with the brown of the walnut leaves the form a pretty structure.

Colour Palette for Freeform Project

It is so rainy these days and so I felt like mixing very bright colours ... psychedelic colours ... for my next freeform crochet project. Because of the flamboyant nature of the material I think the patterns should be as simple as possible and mostly flat. We will see how it turns out.
Here are the first pieces:

The Art of Recycling: Evelyn Roth

Since I discovered how many ways there are to recycle and upcycle any kind of fabric and a lot more stuff which is commonly regarded as trash I have started to collect a lot of things, mostly textiles and I enjoy turning them into pieces of Wearable Art or any kind of useful thing. I thought initially this was a quite recent phenomenon born out of a new awareness of the absurdity of consumerism, but of course there is nothing new under the sun if you look at the work of Evelyn Roth in the seventies. She has published a book on several recycling techniques for textiles and even more unusual materials like leather, fur and feathers.



More than fascinating I found the section on crocheting with discarded videotape.
Videotape is a very fascinating material, absolutely sturdy and it looks very elegant as it is shimmering and black. I have tons of old VHS cassettes, but the material seems to be highly toxic and so I will probably throw them away with a heavy heart.

Evelyn Roth's Work is very inspiring. She looks at clothing as a kind of scupture which was very forward thinking for that time.



Stunningly beautiful are the Wearable Edibles and other works of art. Look at them here.