Thursday, October 23, 2008

brooch making

This past week has been productive, its a wonderful feeling to be well again and living in a new space. I like the simple pleasures, noticing a pretty shadow cast by the fretwork above the door or tinted shades on the walls from the sun shining through the patterned coloured glass windows.

In the next few months I have some great things to look forward to. A trip to Victoria, my brothers wedding in the beautiful Dandenongs to attend, a mini break on the gold coast and lots of new and interesting projects to work on.
I am presently creating some vintage fabric coasters and coffee pot warmers for a fairtrade coffee shop a friend of mine is opening in the heart of West End in Novemeber...
here's a sampler of some....

In other cafe related news some of my brooches have hitched a ride into a store and gallery cafe. The Bleeding Hearts cafe and gallery is located on Ann street Brisbane and has great coffee and a cool collection of aboriginal art and social enterprise products. Little brooches, including these 2 feature on a new line of biddy bag clutches, which are quirky and bright. I will post up a photo soon as I can, I think the display is brilliant and it gives me a warm fuzzy feeling to see my little brooches getting about...and I encourage anyone to grab thier coffee in there, the staff are so sweet.






My new house has shelves and spaces for my crockery and I do love to decorate...the boxes of plates and tea cups were one of the first things unpacked partly because I just wanted to play around with displaying them. Also as a wannabe nanna or nanna in training drinking huge amounts of tea is critically important!





While slurping down cup after cup of Vanilla roobois tea I made simple flat brooches, using retro images of children as subjects. I have been experimenting with acrylic 'felt'...ugh, the acrylic sheets are so flat and stiff, the colours, like the pretty green below, are great, but I can't get around the fact that the material itself is just so awful!

So handmade felt from old woolen garments is my material of choice, there is no contest. Recycling old garments into felt takes more time and effort but in the end who wants easy, hard and fake, give me warm, fuzzy and real everytime....

xdash







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