I didn’t have much time today but I did get a little hand stitching done. I started on the cards that I showed you the other day.

This is the design where I began.

And here it is complete. I am not going to add much stitching to these, just little accents and enough to hold everything together. I use these for when I need a greeting card and I don’t want to spend a huge amount of time making them.

I decided to cut the smaller lino block and get a little practice before I tried the more complex block. Once I found the specific tools I liked, it went pretty quickly. I also found an interesting painting tutorial for doing lots of layers so I thought I’d give it a try.

Here is the design drawn on the block.

 Then I started carving. No injuries today!

 I tried printing, carved a little more off the background and printed again.

 Then I realized that I will have to make a corner block if I am going to do a full page design with these. Will have to figure that one out.

 Here is the painting technique I started. First I applied gesso and put some texture in to it. Let that dry, add a variety of paint colors with liquid acrylic paints. Then let those dry. Then add gel medium. Let that dry. There’s a lot of drying going on here.

 This is the second page. These are part of my journal so I decided I would do a two page spread.

 Then I put gesso on some leaves and printed them on to the pages.

 You overlap the leaves and put them wherever you want.

 Once the gesso is dry, then you go in with paint and add darkness around the edges of some of the leaves. Also, I added some paint into some of the leaves. Kind of gives the effect of skeleton leaves.

I was a bit limited on the leaves I had available in the middle of winter. Mostly I used dried leaves and houseplants. Once I finished the bottom layer of leaves, I painted it all over with gel medium again. It’s drying again and later I will add more layers. You just keep adding more layers until you’re happy with the result. I’ll show you more as I progress.

Our local fiber group is meeting next Friday and we’ll be carving Lino blocks. I haven’t ever done one before and it’s nice to try something new. Today I worked on a couple of designs for a 4″x 4″ block and a 2″ x 4″ block. I continued with the themes I have been using from Kyrgyz rugs. I am planning on making quite a bit of decoration for the yurt using these designs.

 Here is the 4″ x 4″ block. I cut out the design from paper and then covered one side with charcoal pencil and pressed that on the block to transfer the design.

 Here’s the journal I’m working in. I’m trying out different designs for the borders.

I finished all my homework for my stitch class! Whoopee! Today I cut out the painted felt from last week. We will be making machine stitched books with these pages. I also cut out some 50 weight Pellon interfacing for another book construction in our last class. Then since I was finished with my homework, I thought I’d play a little bit and make some cards with fabric collage.

 Here’s my ten pages of felt, they are 4 1/2 x 7 inches.

 This is the first card. I used some fabric that was rusted and then shibori dyed. The blue fabric is a batik that has been painted and sun printed.

 I am planning on adding hand stitching to these and then I’ll probably machine stitch the fabric to the card.

 The little bits of felt are some that I found in my felt scraps.

 I think that the felt is actually more of a prefelt but I can’t remember when or why I made this felt.

 It will be interesting to see how stitching will change the design.

I have no exact plans for the stitching at the moment. I plan on just going with the flow.

It’s been a month since I started the Daily Dose of Fiber challenge and besides the cut finger, it went very well. I’ve managed to post every day and get at least 5 minutes of something creative every day. I’m going to continue but I don’t think I’m going to keep track of the days for the full three months. Today, I finished the felt applique couching. I really like the result. I am sure that there will be more of these especially for decorating the inside of the yurt.

 Here’s the finished applique with the green yarn couched all the way around.

 And a closer photo.

 Then I did a little research on art in the late Bronze age. I am not very inspired by this era.

 Here’s a little more work in my sketchbook about the different symbols in the Kyrgyz rugs. These would all work for other felt applique pieces.

 Here’s more about the Bronze age. We have our local meeting next week so I needed to do my “art history” homework.

 Over at the Felting and Fiber studio, I wrote a post several weeks ago about drawing. I decided to try a little of the goofy animal drawing on to a previously painted piece of paper. You are supposed to find the shapes from the paint and then draw into them to make an animal. So here is my little snail Stanley.

He was fun to draw and just took a few minutes.