Pavilion of Fortune and Floral Bliss

I'm showing all these complete sets of fabric ATCs first. This is the set of alphabet "E" - we have 3 elephants (my tatted one, Ann's one in outline and Mari's African one), emu from Sherry and Eames chair from Norma. In case you are wondering, the word "elefant" on Ann's ATC wasn't a mistake, but the German word for elephant. And if you have missed my earlier post about the Eames chair, you can click on the word to go back to the post to find out what makes this chair so special.

Next is "F" - my tatted from piece, Mari's (on the left) and Sherry's (right) fish.

Then comes "G" - my tatted goose, Mari's giraffe, Sherry's gray goose and Norma's grapes.

Lisa Cottrell (USA) has caught up on her swaps, and these 3 pieces came together - snowman for the X'mas swap, "U" is for Unicorn and "W" is for Wolf.

With the snowman piece in, here's all the X'mas ATCs - my tatted "JOY", Vicky Baker's wreath, Eileen Carkott's snow scene, Sue Cox's snow globe, Sharon Scothern's reindeer and Lisa's snowman.

Lovely collections, right!?!

Now, back to my creations. Another pair of paper dolls "Queen for A Day". I know they weren't too creative, but that's my dream for a Queen - wearing designer's clothes and jewellery, and walking a poodle.

This is my boy's school project - constructing a lantern for the Chinese New Year with recycled materials. Can you spot them ? Toilet rows, egg crate, and in fact, the pink tissue papers which were used to wrap things that came in a box from USA some time back. I didn't throw them as the pink is so sweet, came in useful now. We are calling it the "Pavilion of Fortune"!

I just finished a beginner tatting class last weekend with Christine, Gina, Hazel and Shireen. I was inspired to design a simple floral pattern for them to try. It started off as a simple flower on the left, then the flower got bigger, and became 2 with leaves and vine. Finally, I have Floral Bliss done, dedicated to the girls, in celebration of Spring, and a gift for everyone.

Do You Know Your Alphabets?

Yippee! I finished my G's and H's, and mailed them out too!

Here we go, G is for Goose ...

... and H is for Hedgehog.

(Read on further for more alphabets!)

I also managed to finish these 2 pairs of ATC dolls on the theme "Time/Clocks/Watches".

Do you like Guess watches ? The heart one is so pretty.

Mails were real slow since the week after Christmas, those posted on the last days of Dec took 3 whole weeks to arrive!

First, we have this cute Maori Warrior Doll and a pair of Snow Angels from New Zealand, sent by Amelia Ruscoe. Maori are NZ natives, and they would dress as in the ATC when they are performing Hapa Haka (music and dancing). The snow angels are summoning snow with their trumpets.

Next are the fabric Alphabet ATCs - E is for Elephant, F is for Fish, G is for Giraffe and H is for Hat and Hearts! Did you notice the interesting backgrounds that are so matching in every aspect? That's because Mari (South Africa) dyed her own fabrics!

Here are Sherry Dreier's (USA) F is for Fish and G is for Gray Goose on Green Grass, wow, really a handful of G's done by needle punching!

There are more, but I shall leave them for the next post :)

Blind Contour Drawing, Anyone?

At the ATC session on Thu, Moses introduced us to Blind Contour drawing. I'm not an arts student, and have not heard of this before, so I read up a little bit on it. This is a method of drawing popularized in part by Kimon Nicolaïdes in his book The Natural Way to Draw(1941). Apparently, Blind Contour drawing is a favourite with drawing teachers to develop hand-eye communication, and it's an effective training aid. Contour drawing is essentially outline drawing. Blind contour drawing means drawing the outline of the subject without looking at the paper. The end result is not important, rather what is crucial is to observe the subject carefully. The student, fixing their eyes on the outline of the model or object, draws the contour very slowly in a steady, continuous line without lifting the pencil or looking at the paper. The student may look at the paper to place an internal feature, but once they begin to draw it, they do not glance down.

Sound easy? Perhaps. But it sure took some courage and a lot of persuasion before my little girl dared to draw anything! It sure breaks away from convention, and the result, an abstract drawing:)

The theme for the month was Chinese New Year. I found an used piece of transparent wrapping paper in my stash, cut it up into ATC size and backed with a painted card. Next I traced and cut the boy from cardstock and painted him with water-colours, added a brad through all the layers, and his head, body and legs could move. Here are my cards - "Fun with Fire Crackers"!

Traded 2 of them for these - Rita's stamped card, and Sekina Yeoh's origami bunny.

I was jumping with joy when Cathy Vigor's mail came in finally after a month - it contained the last piece for my Zodiac collection, and also the last piece for my Leaf collection. Cathy actually did a replacement for her first piece of leaf that never came after a long 3 months. Here are the 12 Leaf ATCs ...

... the left one of the last row is Cathy's and the right one is my tatted leaf.

And the Zodiac ATCs in the order of the signs. Awesome set, right! Cathy did the Virgo piece, and I did the Pisces piece.

And an "U" is for Union Jack ATC from Sharon Scothern (UK). The Union Flag, also known as the Union Jack, is the flag of the United Kingdom. I love the lacy effect!

And here are my "U" cards. It's not U for Butterfly, but Ulysses Butterfly. What's that? The Ulysses butterfly, also known as the Blue Mountain Butterfly, or the Blue Mountain Swallowtail is a large swallowtail butterfly, endemic to Australasia, and used as an emblem for Queensland tourism. I designed this little critter and tatted them with Size 40 Olympus threads. I think they didn't turn out too bad.

Wishing Everyone A Sparkling New Year!!

I have been MIA partly because of the holiday seasons, and preparing the children back to school. But mainly, we moved house, now very close to my mother, cos' DH is posted overseas. Hope we will manage fine.

We never have snow here in Singapore, and I have never see real snow, saved for those artificial ones produced with soap foam and in the ice-skiing/skating rings. But since the Dec theme for the ATC dolls is "Snow Angels", I used some snowing background and cut glittering white wings for each doll. Add a snowflake confetti, they look as fine as they could, just that I do not really know what are snow angels. Or rather, I don't really know the different angels apart! I'm curious how my swap partner will interpret the theme! These first pair went to Lynette McNamara in New Zealand.

I received my very first fabric postcard from Miriam Gogarty of Ireland. It is amazing to know the fabric piece, with a postage stamp at the back, actually made its way here across the vast land and sea.

In return, I sent Miriam my last of the tatted Flying Pig ATC.

There should be more to show next week once we settle down in our new place and into our new routine. Ending off with this photo of my new Celestial diamond ring and wishing everyone a sparking new year!