Annies Crazy World

But not just any cot sheet… As a follow up to the Australian Government’s 2009 National Apology to Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants,  The National Museum Australia has mounted an Exhibition “Inside: Life in Children’s Homes and Institutions” http://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/inside/

The Exhibtion designers took the many stories that had been collected and set about working out how they could be displayed for the exhibition…They envisioned one story written on a cot sheet, they found an old metal hospital cot, chose cursive script and I was recommended to them for the job of embroidering the story onto the sheet.

First task was to find a white cotton sheet that could be embroidered, most sheets are so tightly woven that I would not have been able to push the needle through them, my fingers where saved by a friend who had a much worn, soft cotton sheet that was lovely to work on.

I embroidered the cursive script with stem stitch using 3 strands of DMC in an old blue ink colour. When the embroidered sheet was put into the cot it made for a very poignant display.

ABC TV 7.30 ACT vidio review

Below is the text embroidered on the sheet

Febuary was a buzy month when I got a few things done to the house…when I sat down with Sharon to work out which events I would include on my sampler, I started with a written list on a small piece of paper (see image below), when Sharon interpretted pink insulation bats as pink Bats I drew a roof with bats flying around in it and before I knew it we had incorperated all the events on the list into a cartoon style drawing of the cross section of a house…I am still working out how to interpret some of the drawing but am posting the detail in progress so that I can keep the sequence of the sampler in order but still go on posting the TAST II stitch before the next one is out. I will add the finished detail and point back to it when I have it finished.

1969 was my first year at high school, the year that I learnt to use a sewing machine, the year I learnt to sew and one of my first non school sewing projects was to make ‘quilted’ pencil cases for my self, brothers and sister…My eldest brother looks after his things, he used his for the next 25 odd years and when he did retire it he kept it still and now 39 years after giving it to him he has given it back to me, it was a real blast from the past when I opened the package that the postman delivered.

Now that Easter is over I have got time to record Easter on my Sampler or st least get it started…I started by drawing 2 eggs and outlineing them in black stem stitch, the black looked to severe so I overstitched it with a fine varigated matalic thread which has softened the edges.

These are our 2008 Painted Easter Eggs and below are detailed images of a few of them.

Lily used her cat, Tiger, as inspiration for this egg, In past years I have given her assistance cutting and glueing the ears and extra bits to her eggs, this year age 11 she did the entire thing herself. I love the cat’s tail, it is a piece of one of the skewers that we put the eggs on when painting them.

Lauren has used her life at uni for her inspiration dividing her egg into halves, one half for the series study at the Australian National University, the other half for the social life.

For her inspiration my sister used the same image of our mum that I used on mum’s memory quilt, under the Mango tree.

I also used mum’s memory quilt for inspiration (and continued a theme that has run through my work)…I Painted a cloths line on my egg…I put a post on either side of the egg and ran a line around each side, when I saw the magnified image I could see that it is not very well painted but at egg size it looks good…When you can hold the egg and spin it the design works well but it is the hardest yet to photograph.

Well I have taken Photos of our painted Easter eggs and have them ready to upload but every time I try and upload them I am getting an error message, that I don’t understand…I will try again in the morning and fingers crossed that it will fix itself overnight.

We have had a lovely afternoon painting eggs…I will wait till tomorrow, when I will have daylight, to take photos of the eggs.

It has become tradition for the Canberra branch of the family to paint eggs at easter..The following links explain how the the tradition got started, the eggs we have painted in past years and other eggy stories.

Scrambled Eggs for Breaksfast, Lunch or Tea

Painting Eggs – Its become a Family Tradition

A Rare Sight

Our 2007 Painted Eggs

Humpty Dumpty is sitting on the wall

I am not quite as organized this year as I was last year and still have to blow and undercoat more eggs but everything else is ready to go.

Now that I have got a gist of the concept, the next thing that I need to do is decide on the format that I am going to use…The main criteria for my format is that it be of a small size so that doing one per month is an achievable goal…another criteria is that I want to use the same format for all the designs so that I can display them together.

I am opting not to use crazy quilting for these designs, I think that on one hand, my experience would make it to easy, on the other hand the crazy quilting would take over and distract me from the designing and I think that crazy would restrict the variety of ideas that I could explore.

I considered doing Altered Book pages, they are small enough but again I think that the actual altered book techniques could distract me from the process of exploring the design.

My other option is to do Post Card sized pieces…Post Cards give me a blank canvas with no distrations…so Post cards it is…and the postcards will be stitched or tied together so that they hang one under the other or concentinaed into a book for storage.

At this stage I plan to use fabric collage techniques to interperet my Designs but will remain flexable and let my designs dictate what techniques I do use.

Back to My Visual Journal I drew around a post card and started writing words down the left hand side and in a larger font I wrote the words for the questions I was answering…

At this point I was trying to sus out what information I wanted to include as well as possabilities for layout…For the layout I am looking for an element that I can run through all the postcards that will link them together when displayed one under the other, as and example of what I mean see sketch on the left side of page, imagine my curved lines as quilting lines that I do as continues lines through the cards after I join them, The 2 parallel lines on the left side of the main card are another idea, without knowing what is to come in the future months it is hard to know what can be kept the same…more thought required on this one…

In the meantime I started to link the words that I had written with Arrows and then adding offshoot thoughts…sketching down the right hand side I started distilling the thoughts down till I got to the single important word being “Friends”…I then question does a single word constitute a design?….I haven’t answered that question yet but do remind myself that design does not mean complex!!!

I have had a bit of difficulty describing my thoughts that went into this visual journal page because I was jumping from one thing to another and back again, in the end I just wrote it as it came because the jumping around is how my brain works when I am exploring ideas…

Make My Day Award Update…More Make My Day tags…Thank you fellow bloggers.

Maureen and Ira

Following on from my first thoughts for this challenge, My next step in trying to get my head around what it ‘is’ that I am designing, was to take the Dictionary to bed, together with my visual journal where I wrote the words and key words from their definition as I looked them up in the dictionary.

Refering to dictionary has confirmed that admire means what I thought it did…and it has given me a list of words to work with.