Hello

Hello.....this is Maya or Embellisher. I'm in my early forties and I live with my husband in Bangalore, a city which has been transformed from a pensioners paradise to the Silicon Valley of India. The transformation continues unabated, its chaotic and dynamic but I thrive on it.

I'm a textile designer by training and qualification and I've worked in the craft sector and I get called in to teach basic design and colour at a Fashion Institute from time to time.I also embroider and make silk scarves.

My interest lies in embroidery, knitting, crochet, patchwork and weaving but I do indulge in bead work- no training just following tutorials on the net, dyeing - I love shibori

I've only made one fiber book ever and it was completed just last week. I'm simply ecstatic.

I try to live my life with the above saying as my mantra. (page for July in the Take it Further Fiber book)
I like cross stitch and beads and sequins. ( page for May in The Take it Further Fiber book)

Journaling is something I do too. Interesting labels, ticket stubs, stickers on fruit, and feathers find their way into my journals and diaries. You'll find leaves and flowers between pages of my books. Before the advent of fiber books it was paper and journals but i must say fiber books are fantastic and I'm so glad that in following my bliss the exploration of this format and medium is going to be furthered. This book of The traveling Pages is going to be very special.

My chosen theme is leaves. Shapes, colours, medicinal properties, myths/legends etc about leaves are all welcome. I have no preferences or dislikes of what should or shouldn't be on the page you create for me.

Have a good weekend tricking or treating. Halloween is in India too, that's globalisation for you.

Introduction

Hello to everyone my name is Juliette I am 62 and I live in the North East of England on the Coast, so my book will be about the seashore which i love. I have lived alone for almost 20 years now and have learned to enjoy my own company. I have 3 children and 6 Grandchildren. I took a degree in Fine and applied arts 8 years ago and have various City and Guilds Qualifications in Embroidery , Stumpwork , Patchwork /Quilting ,Teacher training etc, I am still learning and just now am revisiting machine embroidery and mixed media, you could say the eternal student. I used to teach adults in City and Guilds at my local college but am now retired.

I belong to my locaol Embroidery guild and we have lots of wonderful workshops , the most recent last week was called 'Dyeing and getting plastered ' Yes I know very funny. I do enjoy working in mixed media and this was fun using plaster etc.

At the moment I have some knitted blankets on the go for comforters for my grandchildren to use up the mountain of wool I have, I need to downsize somewhat. The machine is always out and just now working on samples for college.

I am so looking forward to these pages we are undertaking I have made several books in the past both fabric and paper and it is always good fun.

Good luck to everyone

Regards Juliette

Cobi

Time to introduce myself. My name is Cobi, I'm a 48 yr old single mom. My daughter is 22 and lives with me. We have 2 cats. I live in the Netherlands, in Leiden, a city in the west of my country, not far from the North Sea. I've been ill for over 8 yrs now and its impossible for me to have a job. So I devote all my time to fabric, thread, needles and shuttles. I love crazy quilting and I try to learn more techniques all the time. I do stumpwork, Brazilian Ebroidery, ribbon embroider, needle lace and beading. I don't hesitate to paint on a block. I participate in rr blocks all the time. Right now I'm planning on learning Mediterranean knotted lace. I've learned to tat only to be able to add edgings and doilies/motifs to my cq work. I also make art quilts. I belong to an art quilt group that meets in my home town once a month. We do lots of swaps, exchanges and rr's. I cut my own stencils and stamps. I work with heatgun and soldering iron. I love to play with organza and solufleece. I dye, paint, stamps, experiment with shibori and glue resists. I use a lot of flowers in my work. I swap fabric ATCs, AA's, fabric book pages and fibercards. I participate in cq rrs, complex cloth rrs and art quilt rrs and challenges. I even paint my own thread if neccessary. I belong to the local stitch & bitch group and try to go there every Wednesday evening and knit, crochet or whatever I fancy or am working on. I love to wear stole's and I must have knitted and crocheted over 20 of them, lots of them for others, but I do have one in the right color to go with most of my outfits. I love lace knitting, cables and freeform knitting and crocheting. I enjoy crocheting lace curtains, motifs and Irish crochet. Recently I discovered knitted and crocheted tea cosies and instantly fell in love. I have to finish 2 freeform handbags before I can start exploring those. And dd has asked for a big size knitted blanket, preferrable with cables in dark grey. Here is my blog. And here are pictures of the various techniques I enjoy:

stumpwork aloë

Flower Fairy rr block, all embellishment by me. you can see the beaded ribbons I love to stitch and the pink butterfly at the top is a BE motif from a book I had just purchased. Angelina for the fairy wings.

this is a piece I made for a swap at our art quilt group. the theme was poppies.

here I first crocheted a fan, sewed it down onto fabric and applied gesso and paint and finished it off with a shiny pearl colored paint. I made it into an ATC

I love mushrooms, my yahoo name is paddestoelengek, which means "crazy for toadstools"

I take their pictures, identify them if possible and love to search them.

hello! this is me, with my 2 cats. Minoes on the left, Casper on the right. the yellow patch on my shoulder is his cloth that he needs to suck on. he's such a big baby. a mug of tea in my hands, as always. the sofa is my workspot, I have everything around me: threads, needles, books, paint, soldering iron (yes, I do that on my sofa too) beads, ribbon, you name it. cats usually throw over the carefully piled stuff, driving me crazy. used to have rabbits too, have always dearly loved them.

a sample of my tatting, shown on hand dyed fabric.

a stamp that I cut. this is Jugendstil/Art Nouveau

this is a fibercard in stained glass style. embroidered and painted. the motif is from the Arts and Crafts movement, by William Morris. the A & C movement initiated the Jugendstil.

this is a little quilt I finished. stained glass quilt made from a real stained glass pattern. adapted it for fabric and made my own 'lead' in purple because I didn't like black to go with these colors.

my handbag in freeform knitting with a crocheted flower, silk ivy leaves and the handle is handed down necklace.

One of my knitted stoles, this one is knitted from a pattern in the Estonian Lace book.

So my subject for the fabric book pages is Art Nouveau/Jugendstil. I have searched the internet for pictures and put them into this album. Hope I won't get trouble with that. Use the slideshow option, that makes Webshots less annoying to use. You can google Jugendstil pictures yourself or go to your library and look for a book on the subject. I admire the artists William Morris (Arts & Crafts movement) and Mucha.

Changes

Hi all! I made some changes to the look of our blog. I hope you like it. The background is a freebie from Shel's Scraps and I just picked one that I liked. Go take a look and see if there is one you like better. The neat thing about it, is that it can be changed easily. The one I picked is an autumn one. We can change seasonally if we like or just keep it the same all the time. Her backgrounds are free but she asks that she gets credit. That's the new "blinkie" on the bottom left of the sidebar. It was simple to change so if any of you have blogs and want free backgrounds, I would suggest you check it out.

Some of my stuff

Hi again, here's a link to photos of some of my stuff http://www.flickr.com/photos/9950358@N03/sets/72157608269235989/

These are mostly gifts that I made for friends, so I had to record them; plus some flower photos I took hoping to use as inspiration. Hope you like them, Kath

Hi All, Elizabeth here!

I love the fact that we are doing this with a blog versus a Yahoo group! This is going to be such fun.
I thought that I would jump in and tell you a little bit about myself. I live in Virginia (for the past 4 years) in the US with my husband , two kids-17year old son who is a High School Senior and a 12 year old daughter who is in 7th grade. I work in the home as a full time Mom and I am also working hard as an artist selling my work on Etsy and at a Local Gallery. I have also recently started teaching seminar style classes in my home studio. I also teach beading and mixed media classesa t Artistic Artifacts in Alexandria VA.
I also love to work in my garden and I am passionate about having a chemical free organic garden. My garden is a continuous source of inspiration and color theory lessons for me!!!

I love working with lots of different media but started my creative explorations as a small child with needle and thread and yarn and fabric, I always have fiber projects going on no matter what else I am involved in!

I think that it might be fun if we all posted pictures of two recent projects that we are really proud of. That way we could see each other's recent work and get a good idea of everyones style and choices! What do you all think!!!
Got to run to a Dr's appointment, then I can have some coffee and feel more human!!
Have a wonderfully creative day everyone!!
Smiles !
Elizabeth

P.S. How could I forget???? We also live with two dogs, Buddy and Pepper. Buddy is a Rat Terrier and curls up behind me in the computer chair whenever I sit down to work. Pepper is a Rat Terrier mix and alot bigger than Buddy so she does not get lap dog status and wishes she did. Not sure what I would do without my wonderful pets!!!!

Hi

Hi, I'm Kath Walls from the UK but now retired to Crete, Greece. I've lived here four years this time (another period I lived here for 5 years) and still love it. We live in the village of Amari in the beautiful Amari valley just south of Rethymno and have a large garden where my partner grows our vegs and I try not to get too involved as I really want to concentrate on sewing. All my life I've worked in offices but usually doing a night school in some craft or art. Really I was born too early, the art college in my home town of Scarborough opened about a year after I started work and, at that time, was really for the super-arty and the sensible thing was to earn money! So I did, then marriage and family came along plus all the other diversions that life throws at you and my hobbies remained very much that. Mid-fifties, unattached and wondering what to do in retirement (but not thinking I'd return to Crete on my own) I started a more serious nightschool in Creative Embroidery and was lucky enough to have Anne Gibson as tutor; she had been at the very prestigious Manchester University teaching but cut down her workload for personal reasons and so we were given a glimpse into the modern world of (really) creative embroidery. That set my mind off and on retirement I enrolled for a City and Guilds course, again in embroidery because that included a little machine embroidery, felting, paper-making and art. Again we were really lucky with our art and embroidery tutors as they treat us like sponges, threw everything at us with the instruction to yell when our brains were full!!! Anyway, the foundation course lasted 2/3 of the year then we started on the first year proper. By this time I'd accepted a suggestion/invitation to return to Crete which was opportune as the course then foundered under funding cuts. So - here I am, lots of techniques somewhere in my brain and in various notebooks but with not a lot of practical experience. Hopefully this discipline will help me to overcome this; I intend to try lots of the techniques and have already been looking at many other embroiderer / textile artists' work as inspiration. Thank you all for having me on your team, I hope my pages stand up to the rest of you

Joining In

Hello all. I'm Liz and I live in Northeast Kansas with DH and two spoiled dogs! We have one son who recently retired from the Navy (how did that happen? I'm not that old!!) I retired almost five years ago and I have spent the time since then getting my basement work room fitted out to be my favorite space! I do try to get down there for a bit every day. Before retirement, I was in a left-brain job (computers), so I have been giving my right-brain a workout since then!

Although I call myself a doll maker, I do a lot of different crafts and arts. One thing I really love to do is "fiber collage" where I cut up fabric, fuse it together in different ways, stitch all over and then embellish, embellish, embellish! I have recently started looking into making books using some of those methods. Although the books I've actually finished (!) don't use much collage, I am hoping to make several more that do. So becoming a part of this group is timed just right for me.

Getting to Know You

Hello to all of you!

I'm Gayle Schipper from Redding, California, USA. Redding is a small city of about 100,000 in the upper end of the Sacramento Valley. While it's mighty hot here in the summer, it is a beautiful place to live. We are surrounded by mountains on 3 sides, and are in driving distance for lake activities in the summer, skiing (not me!) in the winter, and a still active volcano (last erupted in 1919) with geothermal areas to hike around.

I am a newly retired (big grin)elementary school teacher, most recent and favorite grade level was fourth. I still miss the kids, and am working on a deal to do some tutoring. I'm keeping quite busy with this and that and am playing more music than I had time for while I was working. I play flute and piano, mainly in the church setting, although I have played in community orchestras in the past. My DH and I have 4 children, 7 grands and 2 great-grandchildren between the 2 of us. They are a total joy.

About 13 years ago a friend asked if I wanted to go to a silk ribbon class. I asked, "What's that?" and she said, "I have no idea." That was the beginning of my fabric addiction. I am mainly a crazy quilter, learning different techniques for embellishment. "Musings", the result of SharonB's Take It Further Challenge was my first fabric book.

One of the things I am looking forward to in this swap is branching out into some new areas of fiber art. As I look at the blogs of the others members, I can see how different we all are in our approaches. Do whatever you want with my theme "All Creatures Great and Small." Anything goes - land, sky or sea critters - from Ants to Zebras.

BTW, my Flickr name is Stitchintime www.flickr.com/photos/stitchintime

Joyfully,
Gayle

Welcome

Hi Everyone! I would like to welcome you to The Story of the Traveling Pages blog. In the next several weeks, participating members will be introducing themselves and showing photos of their work. In January, we will begin our book page swap so keep your eyes peeled for some beautiful books. In the meantime, you can click on any of the links in the sidebar to see what our members are up to.

To introduce myself, I am Ruth Lane from Kalispell, Montana USA. I began my fiber art journey four years ago when I learned to make silk paper. I then discovered felting and various woolly goodies and have been addicted to fiber ever since. I like to create pieces that combine my love of felt with other techniques such as free motion machine embroidery, hand embroidery, collage, surface design and anything else I can think up! My pieces have loads of texture and my inspiration comes from the vast landscapes and wonderful natural surfaces of western Montana.

Now isn't this just so much fun

Hi Ruth and everyone, I am looking forward to meeting you all and i am sure over the 12 months we will become firm friends. I live in South Wales in the Uk in a little market town called Neath. I am not very far from the coast which is why i chose Coastline as my theme, as i am always drawn to the sea. I find great inspiration once near the sea. I love all forms of embroidery especailly traditional but for the last 5 years i have studied contemporary work doing City and Guilds course. I am currently learning patchwork and quilting and i have really enjoyed making a crazy patchwork bag. I am currently working on a kit i bought at the Knitting and Stitching show in London, its a little canvas work that makes a book cover.

I know i have talked too much, sorry its a fault of mine.
Love Chris