Mamushkas

I saw something like these in an Etsy shop a while back, and decided to see if I could make something similar. It took a while to figure out a pattern, but I finally came up with these.
This was the first one, very Russian in colouring, I made a little stand for her.
But I prefer them in pastels,
soft and pretty and cuddly
They only take a few scraps of fabric - the backs are different prints
They are about 6" high. I sent them off to the trading table at our Quilt-in, and I'll find out at our meeting tomorrow if any of them sold.

Stuffing around

It would be nice if all I did was make lovely Baubles, photograph them, and post them on my blog. It's a simple process, after all - stitch the pieces together, leaving an opening for stuffing; turn right side out, stuff firmly, stitch up the opening; decide on a design, and stitch away happily. Then admire perfect creation, and repeat the process.
Ya think so? Then where did these come from?
There's so much that can go wrong, even at the stuffing stage. Overstuffed balls will stretch and become misshapen. Some balls just WANT to be lumpy. With the synthetic fibre-fill I've been using, closing the opening is a real challenge, as the fibre is springy and tries to escape, the opening gapes, you haul on the thread, which either breaks or cuts the fabric. The final seam is ugly.
I tried using a woollen stuffing, with little improvement. Jinny Beyer recommends cotton stuffing, but she's in America, where would an Aussie find such a thing?
At the local Futon Factory, that's where. Yes, the lovely Belinda was happy to supply a sample of cotton, which proved much easier to use. Cotton is kinda inert, lacking the rebellious spring of fibre-fill, content to stay where it's put, allowing for a nice tidy closure. And it's a natural fibre, which I like.
OK, now I have a nice round ball, all I have to do is embellish it. There are lots of possibilities. Let's see, I could... or maybe... no, that won't work. What about... or - no, I don't think so...
This process can take a while. Hours, days even.
Finally a decision is made, and work begins, with lots of happy anticipation. This will be the best yet!!!
Sometimes, everything falls into place, and I stitch away happily, watching my creation unfold in my hands. But not always. Oh no.
Perhaps, after a day or two, it doesn't look at all like what I envisaged - the colours/shapes/layout are all wrong. Should I press on, hoping it will improve with more stitching, unpick it, bin it?
Or maybe it's going according to plan, but it lacks - something... yaaawn... I'm bored.
Which is why I have a boxful of couldabeens...
Birthing a Bauble can be painful.

Aerial view

Another Bauble inspired by Aboriginal depictions of the land. I imagined a river flowing across the country, bordered by greenery, fading gradually to desert sands and rich brown hills.


Worked with stranded cotton, using chain stitch throughout.


I think I achieved what I set out to do with this, but it took a long time to cover the ground!
And while as a decorative piece it succeeds, but as Art? No, I don't think so.
It reminds me of an earlier Bauble which I needlefelted with variegated wool - decorative, but lacking in a focal point, and not interesting enough to hold the viewer's interest for more than a minute or so.

Ethnic

I've been reading a lot about Aboriginal art lately, and wishing I could convey some of the unique mark-making in non-western art. This is an attempt, I think it looks more African than Australian.
I used a patterned fabric for the base, which gives an extra richness to the finished Bauble.

But is it Art?

Do you remember the story of the Emperor's New Clothes, where the Emperor was hoodwinked into paying for a fabulous new suit of invisible clothes, and none of his courtiers dared to tell him the truth, for fear of being labelled stupid or incompetent? He embarks on a grand procession to show off his new finery, and a small boy, as yet unaware of political correctness, blurts out the truth.
Well, in the interest of truth over PC, I have to say that this is an ugly quilt.
And so is this.
And yet these quilts, with many others made by the women of Gee's Bend in Alabama, have been exhibited in prestigious museums, sold for noteworthy sums, and praised by the foremost art critics. The U.S. Postal Service even issued a series of Gee's Bend Quilt stamps.
Most of you probably know the story of the women of Gee's Bend and their quilts, sewn from worn clothing and factory offcuts to keep their families warm. The quilts are, at best, primitive in their design and construction, yet the praise for them has at times verged on the hysterical, if not downright ridiculous.
New York Times art critic, Michael Kimmelman, called them "some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced".
Others spoke of "ravishingly minimal blocks of beige, brown, black and red corduroy" with "irregular quilting stitches wandering triumphantly in dotted lines across fields of colour" and
"recycled denim creating panels of skyscapes and clouds, the faded knee patches immortalising hours of toil in the fields."
"The Quilts of Gee's Bend" (Tinwood Books, Atlanta, Georgia) tells the story of this small settlement and the women who made quilts there. Many of their stories are poignant and courageous, and one can only rejoice that they have gained recognition in the wider world, and a ready market for their work after generations of struggle.
But, is it really Art?

Mothball

Well, what else could I call it?
Eight pastel moths on a creamy background, embellished with sequins and outline stitched.

I used Vliesofix to attach the moths, ironed them down with my nifty little Clover iron, then outlined them in backstitch.

Random words

I still think words would be good on a Bauble, if only I could figure out how to get them there. My first attempt was on Fiesta, not very successful :-(
This time I tried printing text on fabric, a process I'd used before. You just iron freezer paper onto the back of the fabric, feed it through the printer, then iron to set the ink.

Then I cut out the quote, in two parts, and appliqued it on. I added hearts and flowers, also appliqued and embroidered. Finally I echo 'quilted' it all over.

It's not a great success, the proportions are out of whack, somehow. The text should have been smaller. Another learning experience, I guess (sigh)

Malachite

I've always admired the endless variations of banding on malchite, a copper-based semi-precious gemstone.

So I adapted them to a Bauble, using a pale green cotton fabric for the base.

I began by sewing on six randomly distributed clusters of sequins in various shades of deep green, which I outlined in dark green buttonhole stitch. Then I worked successive lines of stem stitch around each cluster, using five shades of green in all.

I allowed the shapes to join together as they grew larger, and filled in the gaps with more lines of stem stitch.

With hindsight, I think this would have been better with more variation in the stitching - chain stitch, for example - and maybe some prepainted lines on the ball to add a bit of depth. Oh well, there's always a next time...

Delft blue

"Delft" was made as a present for someone who loves blue and white china. I didn't have the exact shade of blue stranded cotton I wanted, and when I went to buy some, it was actually called 'Delft Blue'.


As this Bauble was to be displayed on a shelf, I made a little velvet 'donut' for it to sit on.

This time I laid the design out differently, working a line of embroidery that followed the seams from one intersection to the next - a peak, a vally, a peak, a valley - 3 times in all, dividing the ball in half. Can you see what I mean?


Then, starting in the centre of the top section, I worked a floral design, like the centre of a china plate.


The bottom section has formal trees, radiating from the centre bottom, where I also signed the piece.


It took about a week (on & off) to complete the embroidery, and I'm well pleased with it. So, I think, is the giftee.

Size matters

CAUTION - ugly pictures!
The Baubles you've seen so far are just the ones I consider fit for publication, but there were others...
So far I had been using a simple 8 piece pattern from an old craft book. Then I went looking for other possibilities, and found these juggling ball patterns, free downloads in PDF format.
I experimented with a few of these, but the only one I liked was the dodecahedron* - made of 12 pentagons, or 5 sided pieces. Only trouble was, it's tricky to sew by machine. It can be done, but I suspect handsewing would be just as fast.

Eventually I settled for an adaptation of my original pattern, based on an equilateral triangle, with slightly curved sides. After several attempts, I arrived at a template that gives me a Bauble slightly larger than the early ones, exactly 12 inches in circumference. I discovered that maintaining an accurate seam allowance is vital; even a fraction of an inch difference multiplies considerably over 12 seams!

Stuffing a bauble is an art, one I wish I could say I've mastered! But every so often, I wind up with a funny-shaped, definitely not-quite-spherical object. Perhaps the seams don't match, or I mucked up the closing stitches.

I've learned to turn this to my advantage by using the 'failures' as design balls - happily drawing on them, trying out new techniques, sticking pins in them, wrapping rubber bands around them, testing paints and generally having a good time.

I've learned a lot about the geometry of spheres with these balls, and even read further on the subject at Wikipedia.

*Until recently, words like dodecahedron, and terms like Platonic solids, spherical geometry and great circle were not a part of my everyday vocabulary - I'm the one who failed Geometry at High School, right?
(I failed at Art too, by the way, because I 'couldn't draw'.) So who's laughing now, Mr B----?

Origins

Perhaps I should just clarify something here. In my last post I claimed to have discovered/invented Baubles.
As far as I know, that's true - the name is certainly my creation.
I've never seen anything like them before, and have searched online without finding anything remotely similar. I recently bought a copy of Jinny Beyer's "Patchwork Puzzle Balls", but she only makes a passing reference to embellishment.
A bit surprising really, you'd think someone would have thought of it by now.
So, dear readers, if you know of anyone else doing this, I'd love to hear about it.

There are other, beautiful textile balls called Temari - a traditional Japanese handcraft, you can read about them here.

And the name? Well, if you look up baubles in the dictionary, you find this -
child's toy, plaything; a showy trinket or gewgaw; the baton of the Court fool or jester; a foolish matter; a paltry thing.
Since they are undeniably pretty and fun to play with, and serve no useful purpose that I can think of, Baubles seems an appropriate name.

Jesters carried a mock sceptre, also known as a bauble

Aquamarine

So of course I made another one. Beginning with a plain blue ball, I applied scraps of fabric, using various textures and shades of blue/aqua.

Then I embroidered some scrolly, leafy patterns in light greens, and added some sequins for a bit of bling.


There's actually an underlying design this time. I was beginning to discover some of the possibilities of layout on a spherical shape - a very different proposition from designing for a flat, two-dimensional surface.The first thing I discovered was how to create a "tennis ball" line, very useful for planning embellishments.
Here's how I did it.
I'd used a simple 8 piece pattern for the ball (more on pattern possibilities in a future post).

This gives you 6 intersections - the points where 4 segments meet.
It might help to describe them like points on an Earth globe. Point #1 is the North pole, #2 the South Pole; 3,4,5 &6 are evenly distributed around the Equator.
If you imagine a circle drawn around the points 1,2,3 & 4, and then draw a curved line connecting these, voila! You have a continuous line like the one on a tennis ball.