Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Another Favorite Fabric


Forgot to mention earlier that ikatbag has been on the air
for a whole year. About 3 weeks ago, our little birthday was.
Slipped by unnoticed. Here's probably where many one-year-
old bloggers would write a little encouraging post to other
younger bloggers about how rewarding it is and how we've
grown as crafters and people in just twelve months* while
our poor families languished in neglect. But not I! No!
All I want to talk about is fabric. La la la la la la la la la la la la.

Here's another fabric I love -

Mmm, Indonesian batik.

Those are some of my sarongs which I used to wear
with gauzy kebaya tops with embroidery you wouldn't
believe. Free-motion. None of which I made. Grandma made
the tops, and I think I might have one somewhere stashed
away in my Tiny Clothes (pre-pregnancy) rubbermaid tub.
If I find it, I'll take a picture.

The batik in the US looks like this:

Not vile by any means. But not batik like
we used to wear back when we had waists.

Anyway, I am so deliriously fond of my batik sarongs
that I want to put them on my walls. Except I can't frame
them and hang them since I still want to wear them. So
I am working on rendering them in oil pastel. Very
reverse-Spoonflower. So far I've done one. Here's a photo:


Whenever I worked on this, Emily sat with me, thrilled
to be using "mom's supersmooth crayons". She did some
very nice stylus work, which she called, "the unpicker
scratchings" because I used the seam ripper
(didn't have a stylus):


But anyway, who knows when I'll be done with the other
ones and have them up on my real walls at home. So I put
this first one in my blog banner, where it can stay
for a while, all bohemian-like.

Also updated my profile picture - it will be fun to see how
I evolve as Emily adds more features to her people art. If
you remember the previous one, I was an egg. In this new
one, I am toting my satchel/messenger bag purse thing.
Maybe I'll let you all see it someday - it's store-bought
and polyester and black and nowhere as cool as the one
Emily drew. It even has parts held together by safety
pins. Quite an alarming advertisement actually, for a
person who's supposed to be making bags for other people.

Speaking of bags, I made another one this week. I'd been
haunted by this pattern in my brain for a while, and I made
it just to get it out of my head. Unfortunately, I have no
idea what to do with it. This happens sometimes.

Skorts update: Sewed two seams today. Hurrah!
Progress! Might be finished by Christmas.

* It is true: I have grown as a crafter. I used to only
be able to simultaneously tackle a measley four hundred
and seventy three projects. Now I can do three thousand,
five hundred and sixty-nine! Since I gave up sleeping, I mean.

4 comments:

  1. Your oil pastel sarong rendering is beautiful, and it looks like Emily is quite the artist also :)

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  2. You changed your blog colours to match too :) LURVE!

    So sorry if this offends some of your readers but the U.S. batik is rubbish! I would call it tie-dye in order to properly categorize it and return to it some respectability...it is SO NOT batik :)

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  3. Wow, those sarongs are really beautiful!!!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Gorgeous batik! And your rendering is awesome, of course, because you only do awesome. Congratulations on hitting the one year mark. Your blog is so funny and your projects are so amazing that sometimes they make me want to crawl under the bed and quit crafting.

    ReplyDelete

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