Full of brite ideas, I am..

Oh god I'm on a roll..

Voat fur mah lol!

Clik teh pik..

Hungry for the caterpillar!

Who didn't love this little guy? Usually the gastronomical predilectations of Lepidopteran larvae are cause for concern, especially for the avid gardeners amongst us; yet I challenge anyone to pick up a copy of Eric Carle's utter classic and to flip through those beautifully illustrated and irregularly cut [okay, chomped] pages and to do so without even the slightest hint of a smile growing upon your lips. Go on. Dare ya.

Anyway, as you've probably discerned I'm something of a cater'phile, so imagine my delight upon discovering Very Hungry Caterpillar fabric during my browser window shopping expedition today!

Even better - I have a nephew-to-be due in October, and hence a somewhat more valid reason as an adult to buy and use this stuff than to simply thrust an amount of it under someone's nose and exclaim, "but look at it.. it's that caterpillar, the Very Hungry One, on fabric!!!"

Yup, I'm gonna be an Auntie-times-two, and will use this stuff to make the little fellow a cot quilt, deadline October. I can't wait!

A Joyful Soul Fabrics

This is the most wonderful thing I've ever found on ebay - pre-cut fabric for quilting! And not just nana fabric either, but neat stuff, like Amy Butler and Heather Bailey. Joy sends her fabric out beautifully packaged and tied with a ribbon, and the pieces are all cut perfectly. I bought the entire Amy Butler "Daisy Chain" line in 2.5" strips and in 5" squares, and honestly to have cut all those out myself would have cost me many hours, sore hands, and I'd have enough money in my swear jar to clear the national debt.

Instead, I've been able to get on with what quilters want to get on with - quilting! Well, patchworking so far, this one's humungous and I'll probably send it away to be professionally quilted by a long-arm machine rather than attempt do it myself with poor little Jenny Janome. The border will be from Amy Butler's 'Nigella' line, more of those grey pieces you see sitting sideways in the middle of the strippy blocks there, and the reverse will also be from that Nigella line, though a different colourway. That fabric is decor weight, so heavier, and I thought that'd make it more durable to have it bound on the outside with a border of that, and to have it on the reverse too.

I have a thread on tPF that I'm updating as I go with this one - right now I'm about to start piecing those long pieces together of square lines and strippy lines, and then I can start organising the back and the border!

Carolina Patchworks @ Etsy

Want an heirloom-worthy quilt but have no skill/time/inclination/patience to make one yourself? You're in luck..

Leatherworker Forums

Lookit this - a whole forum dedicated to working with leather - this is gonna be my new online home!

I've long wanted to get into creating my own small leather goods and handbags, and as per an earlier post am currently paying off a rather expensive industrial sewing machine with this in mind. Eternally jumping the gun, I've meanwhile been shopping already for leather. There are a good few leather tanners selling hides on ebay, and I've so far bought 4 roo skins and a few cow hides too, including a rather stunning chrome tanned red one that's almost flawless!

Well having my leather already, I last night tried sewing with my Janome and a small piece of the thinnest kangaroo leather. This leather is incredibly soft and only 0.6mm thick, so just about as domestic machine friendly as you can get. I bought a pack of leather sewing needles and put a brand new one of those on, so it's not punching with a blunt steel, and gave it a whirl.

Firstly, when I sew slowly there's not enough oomph to cleanly break through the skin. It gets through if I'm going medium speed, and if I go too fast it drops stitches. If I'm going carefully and slowly I have to be careful not to go too slow or it goes nnnnngghhhh and I can feel it breaking into a sweat trying to push through!

Secondly, I need compound feed. That's what my machine-to-be has, it has a walking foot and a needle feed as well as ye olde feed dogs underneath, so the material / leather is being pulled through by mechanisms above it as well as from below. Janome of course just has the pooches, so only the bottom layer is being pulled. The top layer of this soft leather gets pushed backwards and stretched out by the foot, and because this soft leather is so stretchy it gets out of shape after only a few inches of sewing!

It's been a handy and very illuminating experiment.. when I told MrFrankie the price of the Highlead industrial I'm lemming he just about choked on his tea. Now at least he sees what the limitations are with this one, and all I'm trying to sew is a very basic pouch in which to put my rayon threads and bobbins, just to keep them separate from the cotton and poly/cotton threads. I haven't even folded over any seams, not even by the zipper, so all it was sewing through was two layers max of soft leather!

I did cross over a couple of seams so that it was 3 and then 4 layers thick, and nada - no go. She just couldn't punch through, I had to handwheel her through the stitches, a pain when I needed both hands free really to position the leather pieces. When we were talking to his Aunt on Skype the other night we all got talking sewing, and I told her of the machine I'm getting. It's 0.75HP.. I did the conversions into watts, and compared it to the Janome's stats on it's power label.. it comes out as 7x more powerful! The Janome is 85W, pretty standard for domestic machine, whereas the 0.75HP Highlead converts to 560W!! Rrrraawwwwrrrr!!!

Anyway, it'll be awhile yet before I get my Highlead, so in the meantime I'll try a few tips I picked up online and from the Leatherworker Forums. I'm going to have fun going through all the information on those boards, and having read through a few threads I've found everyone seems lovely and genuinely keen to help eachother out. Just as well, given the amount of impending questions I have to ask.....!

[still] Mulberry Mad

Always and forever..

Guy Bourdin

❝

One of the Greatest Innovators of Fashion Photography; New Book Provides the Perfect Introduction To a Legendary Career.

Guy Bourdin (1928-1991) was one of the world's greatest innovators of fashion photography. While his contemporaries Richard Avedon and Helmut Newton achieved great notoriety and fame, Bourdin remains relatively unknown to the general public. But within the worlds of fashion and photography, he is a legend. Known for his difficult personality and groundbreaking images that mixed glamour, seduction and surrealism, the impact of Bourdin's work on both commercial and fine art photography continues to resonate today.

GUY BOURDIN, by Guggenheim curator Alison M. Gingeras, provides an illustrated overview of Bourdin's entire career featuring both iconic images, lesser-known photos and an introductory essay that provides a fresh perspective on his life and work, 15 years after his death.

Guy Bourdin worked for French Vogue for over 30 years where he demanded and was allowed full editorial control of his work. During the 1970's and 1980's, his photographs also filled the pages of international fashion magazines in campaigns for Charles Jourdan, Bloomingdales, Versace, Chanel and Dior. Bourdin's approach to advertising campaigns reflected a distinct change in this period by rejecting the `product shot' in favor of atmospheric, often surreal tableaux and suggestions of narrative. Bourdin was not alone in demystifying the object, but he was the most radical in his approach.

Gingeras' accessible introduction looks back on Bourdin's career and places him both in the context of his time and within the history of photography. She reveals that it's no accident that he is not a household name today because "during his lifetime, Bourdin refused to exhibit or sell his fashion photographs as autonomous prints...turning down offers to publish monographic studies of his work." The only "book" he ever made was a lingerie catalogue for Bloomingdales in 1976. By the time he died Bourdin succeeded in guaranteeing the anonymity he always wanted. But now, years later, his influence reigns on. In a recent The New York Times article, fashion writer Tim Blanks said, "Bourdin makes more sense now than he did 20 years ago... (he) had a scarily acute understanding of the heart of darkness that pulsates under society's glossy exterior."

There are numerous previously unpublished photos in Phaidon's GUY BOURDIN, in particular early works that were discovered in the Bourdin personal archive. The book succeeds in filling out the formative years of Bourdin's oeuvre as well as celebrating his most iconic images.

Guy Bourdin's fashion shoots were mysterious, hypnotic, surreal, exposing the true and unnerving nature of desire. He showed that, within the context of fashion, it is rarely the product that compels us. It is the image - carefully staged narrative of sexual fantasy, the quest for the unattainable with a suggestion of danger - that stimulates consumer desire. 

❞

All images sourced from the amazing guybourdin.org!