Tree Towels

I was just having a browse around the Finders Keepers blog and saw these little 
gems amongst their top picks for textiles... tree towels! Cute, don't you think?





They are by London-based graphic design duo, Pui Lee and Gemma Stanton, 
who produce goodies like these under the label Our Workshop. They have a 
graphic design business under the same label called Our Work and then a retail 
outlet called Our Shop.





Profits from their shop are put back into product development, which they call 
"a continual labour of love".





Well, I love them :)





They have many fab things in their shop... 
but the tree towels, you can find them here.

Tea towel love

Loving these new tea towels from Harvest Textile Studio in Melbourne. They've just opened their online store too :)

I know I'm not going to be able to resist these :)

The Old-Fashioned

I'm working on some new fabric designs. For some reason, this always feels better working off a tea towel ;) I don't think this one is going anywhere in it's current form, but it's given me a lot of ideas as to what works etc. Anyway, I've called it "The Old-Fashioned' in my mind because it reminds me of some strange 1940s design with a 1950s twist... maybe I should have called it 'the confused'? ;) Have a great weekend!

Tea pots & tea towels :)

I've had a bit of spoiling lately and I'm long overdue in saying my thank-yous. Firstly, to the super lovely Bex over at Stuffed Nonsense who went to her local charity shop to get this 50s tea pot just for me and then posted it all the way from the UK. I'm still totally in awe of someone being that gorgeous and kind - thank you Bex :)

And then there's this wonderful phenomenon which has had much airplay on the crafty blogisphere, the famous tea towel swap. Look at my beautiful collection of tea towels. I hope the photo enlarges when you click on it so you can see them in more detail. The effort that everyone has gone to is just so amazing. So, big thanks as well to Suzie at Soozs, Ellen at Really Turning Japanese, Leah at Puggle Logic, Rachel at Waiting in the Capital, and Tanya at Apple and Tangerine :))

Ta-da!

Well, the tea towels are done and I'll be sending them off this week. Thanks for all your great suggestions of how to fix my cut-in-half problem with the design. I ended up doing a couple of different things to them because they were actually all different, being hand printed. Two of them just had a threesome of birds added here and there (above)... and two of them had a grid of lines wrapped around the middle print (below)...

I decided to wash them before sending and discovered that on one of the grid Ts I mustn't have sealed the fabric paint as well as I'd thought, as you can see below... I'm still debating with the perfectionist in myself about whether to try and fix it somehow but the Mr says it adds character (he also said I'm in grave danger of far too much over-working on these pieces which was actually the comment that really hit home!).

So, what happened with the fifth tea towel? Well, of course I went totally overboard... or maybe not. I'm still not sure. I decided to do something radically different and screenprinted my retro star pattern over the top of one lino print. It wasn't quite right and so the over-working happened again... and now it looks a bit like one of those 50s clocks I think. (It's a pity I didn't think about this beforehand and make it three o'clock). Anyway, it was all fun and I did learn a lot about patterning and colour in these experiments :)

I've received 3 of my 5 tea towel swaps already. I'll show them once they all arrive I think. Thank goodness others are as late as I am! ;)

My Creative Space - Teatowels (again)

Still on the tea towels I'm afraid... These are for the tea towel swap and are supposed to be in the post this week. Something about the design is bugging me though, and I think the above photo shows it up... the design is split in the middle. I need to think of something that joins the two halves. Time for some light sewing perhaps. My apologies to my swap partners... it will get to you eventually! And for MCS people, hopefully this will be the last time I bug you with my tea towel malarky... isn't that a most fine Australian word? ;)

Visit Kirsty's over at Kootoyoo for more creative spaces or to join along yourself.

Eureka!

Thank you so much for all of your encouraging comments and suggestions about the tea towel. At the moment I'm *quietly* very happy with how this tea towel has turned out... "quietly" because it feels so strange that such a small addition can make me go from 'binner' to 'keeper' ;) My friend Sally came over - she's an amazing artist and her impeccable eye can zero in on the precise problem with any piece like a heat-guided missile! I get ribbed a lot around here for starting sentences with "my friend Sally"... it usually heralds a chorus of parotting voices as if they've heard it a million times... Well, what can I say - she's pretty good :)

Anyway Ms Sal said that the yellow had faded into the background and all it needed was a touch of the darker grey in the centre of the yellow to bring it forward into the piece without being too heavy. I didn't want to take any more chances with screenprinting so I got out some embroidery floss and started stitching. At first, I intended to do a stem stitch circle as seen in Kirsty's tutorial and then I just found myself adding little sticky-outy bits echoing the screenprinted florettes in the design. Funny, isn't it, that such a small thing can make such a difference?

Thanks again for all the help. I think it was The Shopping Sherpa who said something very similar too :)

My Creative Space - Fools Rush In

I'm playing along with Kirsty's Creative Space meme today. To see some more or play along yourself, visit Kootoyoo.

So, this week I thought I'd let you know what has happened to my tea towel... well, basically I've totally fluffed it.

You'd think after all these years I'd remember a few basics about screenprinting and even about standard principles of colour... but apparently not. Yep, I mixed a colour and just plonked it on without doing a colour check. Yep, it was way too dark and threw the whole composition. And yep, I then tried to fix it by screenprinting over it in another layer without checking that colour and now it's too heavy (colour) and too thick (consistency) and overall just too dominant for the whole design... This one is definitely not going to the Pool Room ;)

Anyway, I am a big fan of trial and error and it's been a good exercise reminding me of a few things. This piece won't go to waste - I'll find some use for bits and pieces in a collage or something...

Back to the drawing board for me. Isn't it funny though how, taken in isolation, the 'bad' bits can actually be the most interesting bits? I'm really loving the dark shadow under the grey :)

It's a visual thing

It seems I just need to jump in and do it rather than wait for my brain to actually make a decision... and do you know I rather like working this way. I've printed up one of the tea towels with a block I carved a few months ago. Then I taped it up to the window and tried out all these different combinations of other screens I'd cut out... and I think I've finally found a design I'm happy with :)

... and this was all done during recovery mode from our very first teenager birthday pool party! They had a great time and I'm pleased to say I really like my daughter's friends :)

Doodles

I've been madly trying to think of a design for my tea towel swap. After weeks of staring at a blank page I finally decided to take the advice of a very wise woman and 'design for the bin'. So, here are my bin liners ;) None of them are quite 'right' so I'm still doodling on. Maybe I will use them one day for something, but mostly they are random patterns that I've pushed onto the page just to get myself moving...