Rescued

Time for another blog.
I have been keeping in touch with my family in Florida via the webcam. It is so amazing to be able to see and talk with them when we are so far apart. My GS had his day swimming with the dolphins which he enjoyed telling me about today. They also swam with and fed the rays. he had a wonderful day.

I finally decided what to do with the prints I made. The first one I chose to do was a small quilted panel. I began with the image of Queen Nefertiti which I isolated from its background.

I took the image into Photoshop and played with some of the filters. I eventually settled on this effect with a graduated background.

I soaked some cream Thai silk in Bubble Jet so that I could put it through an inkjet printer. The silk was 505'd to a sheet of A4 printer paper which acted as a carrier for the silk as it passed through the printer. It was well smoothed and was flat on the paper.
Unfortunately, even though the silk was very flat and smooth when it entered the printer, it did form a wrinkle as it passed through and so it caught the black print nozzle and there was a black streak across the face in the worst possible place - the mouth.
Me being me, I had to salvage this disaster so I decided to paint over the fault. I mixed some copper and bronze acrylic paint to match the colour on the print and painted out the fault. I also dry brushed some blue metallic paint over the headdress as the blue wasn't as strong as it should have been. It worked.

Now I could do the stitching. I put a layer of white lining fleece behind the print to give a gentle quilt surface. Then I used a selection of seed, Delica and bugle beads to create the collar and couched metallic twist around the collar and to pick out the design on the headdress. I used different rayon threads to vermicelli fill the background. Finally the printed piece was outlined with another gentle variegated metallic twist.
It is a very stylised piece and OK but nothing more than that.

I have also been working on the woven text and it is now a box which I will post on the next blog.

Yesterday I went to visit a friend with whom I occasionally have play days and I took my Cloth Paper Scissors magazines and did a temporary swap for her Quilting Arts magazine. This way we buy one each but can read both. However, I am thinking of not renewing my Cloth Paper Scissors mag when the subscription runs out as I do not like much of what it covers any more. They seem to be going in a very strange direction. Not my taste at all.
I was out in the garden very early this morning doing some macro photography which I am going to look at now. The sun wasn't exactly where I wanted it to be so my OH had to direct the sunlight with a reflector. They do have their uses!! I will miss him though - he is off to the Isle of Man for four days crewing for a rally team for which he has been crew engineer for a number of years. This means I will be completely alone to do whatever I like for four days!!!! What mixed feelings.

I love the colours of this new growth on the Berberis.