Bicycles have been a bit of a theme recently and I am still working on a new bicycle fabric which needs finishing but annoyingly it won't be ready for the Tour de France, if only I'd thought about this earlier as it starts in Yorkshire.
Anyway I produced a few Le Tour brooches as seen on a previous post and I also did a couple of pictures for the current exhibition running at Gallery 49, Art & The Bicycle.
These were my offerings, I shall start with the simple, graphic piece. This is free cut paper which has been machine stitched.
Like with most pieces of work, I usually finish and then think it looks too plain and I start to tinker about or add more. I'm not sure I improved it by adding flowers and text but that's how it went to the gallery.
I'm thinking with hindsight I prefer the pre flower version! Proving that theory I usually try to work to, "less is more".
The other piece of work I did was slightly more labour intensive and involved some screen printing for the background, a bit of distressed rubber stamping and some embellishing with fabric and threads.
Not surprisingly it's called Bike Ride With Butterflies.
The cold snap continues but I'm looking ahead to February, the month of love and peace. I am just preparing some little wooden flower and heart brooches for listing on Folksy.
I've decided to produce the brooches as ready made or in kit form.
To make the ready made ones a bit extra special, as they will carry a higher price tag to a kit, I have made some little Love Letter pouches from cotton to present them in.
Writing instructions for kits always seems to take forever. I think these are fairly simple to make, a bit like join the dots but you've got to make the description fool proof to cover all abilities.
Here's what you get in the kit, now I just need to make some nice packaging for it to go in.
