Easter and Monoprinting

I hope everyone had a good Easter. I accompanied my husband to an airshow in Temora. While he salivated over the latest in small aircraft I happily sat in the sun and made kumihimo braids. There were a number of men wanting to know what I was making. When I explained that the Japanese braiding I was doing is used by NASA to make extremely strong ropes which are used by the astronauts in space they seemed very impressed! Everyone was happy, while Michel, my husband did not return with an airplane, I did return with some more kumihimo cords to add to my collection. Heres one made up on my faux turquoise piece I created in our workshop on faux turquoise. I also loved the way I could make the hours pass by very quickly in the car with my kumihimo disk. Of course I was not driving!

Last Thursday, I spent a wicked day learning to monoprint at Jean Collyers studio. Jean is an amazing Southern Highlands textile artisan whose work I have admired for many years. I had to wait for almost two years to become a student of Jeans. Jean runs workshops each month, with many of her students having attended for 10 years now. As Jean decided to start another class, I was very fortunate to take up one of these places. My first workshop with Jean was learning the art of monoprinting. Monoprinting is a form of printing where images can only be made once. We took acrylic paints and applied these onto a glass surface. While the paint is wet we pressed paper and material onto our glass surface to make an image transfer. Here are some of my images. Watch this space as I will be embellishing these with stitching and other forms of textile embellishment to create my masterpieces.At each class , Jean teaches us a number of hand embroidered stitches. There is something very meditative about handstitching. I love it!

He's Back!

The talented , wonderful Hector Vera, and a good friend of mine, returned recently to Studio Amara and taught a workshop in making faux polymer turquoise. Ive always steered away from making faux stones in polymer as I thought " Why would you? "Now, those of you who know me or have attended my classes know Im a polymer addict, its one of my favourite mediums for creating so this might be difficult to understand my thinking. I suppose I thought that the real stones are just so beautiful and one should not try to mess with this however I 'm happy to say Hector has changed my life! Being able to make your own stones gives you the opportunity to have a piece of jewellery with the stones, stones exactly the shape , size and color you want rather than making do with what you can source. Being a control freak this is a nice option to have.
In the class , we used another kitchen tool. This time it was the food processor. I was extremely happy as I had just bought another one from our local Reviva store. My preloved Breville Whiz set me back the large sum of $ 8.00. These days, I almost have as many kitchen gadgets in my studio as I do my kitchen.
With the room looking like a cooking class as we all busily chopped our clay into tiny pieces which were then shaped into gorgeous stones. Here are pictures of what our students made that day.

Thank you Hector and all who attended that day. Hector will return later this year to teach a complex caning class. Apologies that my finished piece is not shown yet! Im working on this at the moment. I will post once completed.Promise.