Art for All 2012 - My Chair

Given that I am at home looking after the kids, I figure it is a great time to be volunteering.  

This year I am helping organise our annual art show Art for All. 

I am really enjoying getting into organising something and making an event happen. It is just 3 weeks away, on the 8-9 September, and some fabulous artists are going to be part of it, and we have a great day of kids activities planning for the Sunday, so I am very excited about it all.

The chair as I found it on
the side of the road.

As I am trying to tick things off my list, I have actually made my chair for the annual Chair Auction on the Opening Night nice and early this year. 

I found this chair on the side of the road in Northcote, it was a little worse for wear!

Since then I have re-padded it, sanded it, put new shellac on, and recovered it with a lovely Australian themed table cloth. 

I hope someone bids on it!

Knitted Tea Cosy

As part of our second hand and home made christmas, my sister and I screenprinted t-shirts for the kids and I made skirts for the girls.  My aunty made necklaces for the kids out of fimo.  My brother-in-law made florentines. My dad made me some fly screens for my windows (very practical).

It was lovely to get stuff that either people knew you really needed and had searched for or something that they had made with love. We are planning to do it again this year.  My Nanna who is 90 is already on the job, and has knitted dishcloths for everyone (I also did these this year, but she is doing much bigger ones - she has more patience than me).  I am looking forward to a larger one, we all agreed that they are terrific - the ones I made are still going strong 8 months later and I use them every day.

I bought my sisters a second hand teapot each, and knitted them a tea cosy to go with it.  I used a number of different elements out of the books 'Tea Cozies 1' and 'Tea Cozies 2' and 'Really Wild Tea Cosies', which I borrowed from the library.  So, if anyone has a need for knitted roses and knitted leaves, I am the girl!

Screen Printed Tea Towels

Even though I haven't posted anything on this blog for a long time, I have still been creative, I just haven't taken the time to upload images.  So, this is a long overdue post, but my second attempt at screen printing assisted by my sister was a little more sophisticated.  We made some tea towels which ended up looking terrific (I think anyway). We ordered them in bulk from Linen Line and they cost about $2 each I think for great quality linen tea towels. 

We cut the screenprinting images out of thin acetate sheet (I bought it in a packet of 20 from Officeworks), which stuck pretty well to the screen (we didn't have any bleeding problems).  Using acetate rather than paper meant that we could keep our designs, and do them in different colours, without having to recut every time.  It was very successful.

 Our only drama was with setting the paint.  When we ironed it some got on the iron and with the red for example, the material became a little pinkish around the print.  I am not sure if we can set the paint in the oven or dryer, but next time if I iron, I will not iron direcly onto the paint.