TIF February - finished !

I'm feeling very virtuous tonight, I've just put the finishing touches to my February challenge postcard. Our theme was "What are you old enough to remember?"

After several very LONG posts where I let the memories flood out, I was fairly sure about the my subject. I chose the Nat King Cole song "Autumn Leaves" which featured on an old 78rpm record I used to play on a wind-up grammophone as a child.

My piece comprises several fabric leaf shapes in cotton, organza, and gold metallic leather trapped under variegated tulle. The background fabric is a piece of leaf design velvet brocade furnishing fabric (very hard to sew through so didn't need any stiffening!) Then I stitched some feather, twisted chain and leaf stitch "twigs" over the top, and some faceted green beads for a bit of sparkle. The words are from the first line of the song and just by reading them here I'm transported back to the front porch of the family home where I used to sit and listen to the record. A very powerful medium, music.

I've really enjoyed this journey down memory lane. The Challenge was for me to actually interpret my feeling in fabric and complete it, even though it was a tad late. Now on to the March piece, still planning and auditioning fabrics and threads and trying to decide what to do. Perhaps over the Easter break I can finally put needle to fabric.

Several exciting things have happened this week. I travelled into the City to visit our Powerhouse Museum storage area where my special Women Convict costume group was shown extant examples of early women's clothing from the Collection. Then we visited Hyde Park Barracks where there are lots of actual convict / early settler relics on display and in the storage room. We were given a behind-the-scenes tour, a very interesting place. In the early days of our new colony, soldiers then convict women and destitute people were housed in the barracks. Over the years the rats made nests under the floorboards with lost and discarded clothes, utensils and papers. During renovations the "treasure" was discovered, and now they are unravelling the nests (after treatment I hope!) and re-assembling some of the garments and household goods they are finding. Intriguing stuff, wish I had time to volunteer to be a "nester" but maybe next year?

The other exciting thing was that the package containing 2 of the counted thread band round robin pieces has finally arrived from Texas. We've been crossing our fingers and toes that it wasn't lost in transit, it seemed to take so long to get here. Perhaps we should blame the dreadful US weather and then the slow international postal system, but it was very exciting today to collect the package from the post office. I had to show my passport as I.D. as I'm a non-driver. People are incredulous when they ask for your drivers' licence as ID and you state that you don't drive. They stare like you're from another planet, I swear they do. Anyway, parcel safely arrived, collected, opened, and now the work is pinned up on my design board waiting for inspiration to strike so I can stitch my section and send them on to the next person.