The Mermaid Project.

Well as promised I'm back with the photo's of today's endevour. My drawing hand behaved itself and I was able to get the idea of what I wanted down in pencil on the fabric....but I'm rushing.....
First I stretched the fabric slightly, sticking it down onto a piece of hardboard I have for water colours. Then I started drawing...because the fabric was nice and tight it was easy for me to do the drawing.

Blank Fabric..well just the face...

The complete drawing....

 Yes I almost forgot to take a photo of the fabric just after I'd stuck it down...I have hundreds of shells on the boat, from various beaches around the world, so I dug through them and chose a few to draw into this idea.....

The shells....

The shells used around her head..

Shells in the bottom corner..

I remembered that I had a card that I was sure had a mermaid on it...I found it and yes it does..but this one is very different...  I like to stamp my own story when I create. :-) Once I'd finished the drawing I sat with my paints and decided on the various shades. Teri wants greens, kind of sage to olive...so how to incorporate that was a challenge. I took a deep breath and started...

All the backgrounds done and starting on the finer things..

I'm happy with it so far...

Well on it's way now..

I stopped when the light started to fade. But I'm pleased with this. it's been fun so far. And tomorrow I'll finish it...just in time I think :-D...as it's the 24th of December tomorrow.....ha ha ...

See you then with the completed effort... :-D

The Mermaid is finished..

Sorry about yesterday, I didn't finish the painting till late afternoon and then had to dash off to an outing. A whole bunch of us got together and had a great evening.
Anyway as promised here is the finished article...

The Finished Item..

I took some close-up shots ...here they are :

She's a pretty Mermaid..

Her tail and some other sea life :-)...

I loved having the shells in my hand so as to get things right...I really enjoyed doing it...

The sea horse that Teri requested... :-)

We are sailing today to a place called Yelapa. It is supposed to be a lovely fairly secluded place with a forest and a few waterfalls for us to go walking in.....tomorrow's plan. On the sail over I'll be roasting a chicken with all the trimmings for our Christmas Supper. I'm not sure if we will have  internet connection or not, but don't despair I'll be back!

Chat

Hi,
I've been really busy lately. Didn't someone say that it's Christmas? I shouldn't be working...oh well :-) no peace for the creative...ha ha....I just wanted to let you know that tomorrow morning I'm going to be starting a new little project and so I'll be taking photo's as I go on with it. At the end of the day I'll post my progress along with some pictures. To whet your appetite I'll tell you a little bit about it. A friend of mine, Teri, said to me...Sylvie I want you to paint me a picture of a really pretty mermaid for my bathroom, on fabric of course...hmmm ... my thinking cap jumped up and settled on my head. I wore it all day and then bingo! I hit on an idea. You see I also do beading, for relaxation you know, (it gives me a break from painting,) and Teri is doing this wonderful necklace with beads and shells...it's absolutely gorgeous...

Sea Scape Necklace.

It's not a very good picture, but it's the best I can do. If you want to see a better picture go to http://www.beadandbutton.com/Projects/Free Projects/2009/10/Seascape necklace peyote stitch and fringe.aspx
They have it there...that's where Teri found it. Anyway it started me on an idea of a Mermaid with shells woven into her hair and the sun streaming down through the water and other fish and a seahorse and her tail made to look like it's made of fan coral and seaweed......well the mind just boggles...and so I hope my drawing hand will behave itself tomorrow and produce what's in my head.

I will be seeing you all tomorrow then?......good. :-)

To add to my African quilt...

I know.......oars! what the heck have oars got to do with quilting...ha ha the answer is , nothing! I just thought you might like to see what else I've been up to. Anyway here are some photo's of what I was talking about last time with my African quilt. So if you didn't read the previous blog you'll have to do that now :-)

Giraffe drinking.

Elephant.

Wart Hogs with their tails in the air.

Hippo.

Lion.

Zebra.

Cheater.

Little huts.

Different animals.

Pots.

Crackle and chevron type design.

Main Panel, hand painted.

Another main panel.

Hand painted Panel.

Another panel.

I don't know how my Mom managed it, she didn't have a lot of time to get this done and get it sent down to Cape Town to me before I left to sail across the Atlantic... I got such a huge surprise when it arrived..I wasn't expecting it at all.....!! I've taken this wonderful gift around the world with me, crammed into my baggage, on all the different boats I've sailed. it sure has done some mileage. I stopped counting the mileage at 30,000 miles :-). I love this quilt so very much.

Other things I have made ....

This is a quilt I made...

First I dyed the fabric, then I stenciled onto it, all sorts of different things like....chevrons, paw prints,  sketches of African huts, sketches of eating bowls. I also drew and painted six panels to be the main parts of the quilt. My Mother sewed it together for me in record time. She must have worked really hard to get it done so fast...Thanks Mom!

A close-up of a section of the quilt...

 

 

 

In the Small gold squares at the join of all the bigger pieces, is a little silhouette of a giraffe drinking, or an elephant or some wart hogs walking with their tails in the air....I then covered it with a gold gauzy fabric to create the effect of a dusty golden evening. It worked well.

This is a scatter cushion cover...

 This cushion cover was made the crazy patch way...Fun and relatively easy. I dyed the fabric of the center piece only. The rest of the fabric is store bought. I stenciled and painted the Sea Horses.

A bit of fun with our oars.

We wanted our oars to be easily spotted and unique, so I cut out pictures from a magazine and glued them onto the oars with varnish. it worked OK. The only thing was that the print on the back of the picture came through...so if I do it again, I'd scan and print the pictures out onto regular paper and use those instead. The varnish will penetrate much better too.

The other side of the oars...

Yes, well I got a bit carried away with all the pictures I'd cut out. They got rather busy. *grin*. I have done others since, but I haven't taken any photo's yet..I may surprise you all with some photo's of those in the future...


I am going to have to start doing a post once a week,  instead of every day....and even then that might be erratic, because when we sail we don't always have internet connection AND if we do have a connection we can't always upload photo's...so bear with me please and keep checking for new posts... I'll try and keep you entertained.....

OK so see you soon... :-D

The results of the Class.

The Class was a lot of fun....As I said I had to do another one a week later. I created nine birds that time. Unfortunately for some reason I don't have any photo's. I'll get hold of my students and ask them to send some, then I'll post them on the blog. I'll call it ...the long lost class... :-D

Anyway here are the photo's of the last class:

Pelican eating lunch.

Egret.

Dolphin Playing.

Shells and Sea Stars...

My Favourite The Turtle..

Some fish, a clam and a Paper Nautilus..

Seals...

Some jellies....

Two pelicans checking each other out :-)...

I sewed them together...

I still have to put some batting and a back onto it and then quilt it of course. It will make a great baby quilt. I have some lovely soft cream fleece that will be the backing fabric, lovely and soft and warm. I'll do the outer binding in a soft satin fabric, maybe a Turquoise colour....I'm not sure yet. Then I'll have to find someone to give it to...or keep it for a lap quilt for when I'm old .... :-D

I really would appreciate your comments.

A new project....

Back in February 2010 I held a class on fabric painting. Instead of just doing one picture I hand drew Nine Blocks on one piece of fabric per student ...can't remember how many students I had. I think there were 10 or 12 and then I had to schedule another class because I had another lot wanting to learn how to do this. For this class we did sea creatures...Here's a picture....

Here it is...with  some resist painted on it.

So I drew them out with a seam allowance around them. They were 9" squares. The first step was to paint resist on it wherever we wanted white to remain...so some thought had to go into that process... :-)

An absolutely gorgeous place to hold a class.

Concentration......                                            

Mucho concentracion!

Yes all is quiet.. :-) Margret hard at work.

Sue..hard at it :-)

There they were all working hard, convinced that they were no good at this..ha ha...they were in for a surprise..... :-)
They have become good friends and we have had all sorts of creative fun.


after they had finished painting on the resist...the pieces were put out into the sun to dry.

Out in the hot Mexican sun.

Shirlene making sure they don't blow away.

Starting to paint in the colours..

Getting along now...

Joanne, Natalie and Rita are getting into it. They swore that they weren't artists..but here they are...excelling! What fun!

Karen didn't want to do the next stage....

Joanne said..what the heck, lets go for it..

Ha ha...shame they were so nervous about this next step....don't blame them though...sometimes it just doesn't work..but when it does...woohooo! ;-)

Hers she goes...rubbing resist all over her careful artwork...

Yup, enough to make anyone shudder in apprehension....it gets worse...

When the resist is dry.....we scrunch it..

Then you paint it like this.....oooeeer!

When they saw that they would have to do this step...quite a few opted out...I don't blame them really it is rather scary to completely obliterate all your hard work.

Then you bake it in the oven...get the oven to 350 deg F or 180 C....turn the oven off, fold and wrap your work into some foil  and put it into the oven......allow the oven to cool....Then soak the work in water..

I float it in the water for a days or so...

I let it drag behind the boat.. ha ha the current does help...
You can put it into the washing machine now or just spend some time rubbing by hand to flake off the resist.

The resist starts to come off.

Looking good!

It looks like it will be a winner......
Come and see the results tomorrow....