My new jacket, all ready for my trip to Ashland, Oregon for the Design Outside the Lines Retreat.

The main fabric is African vintage indigo dyed cotton, handwoven in strips on a backstrap loom and hand stitched together.   I then added some running stitches after cutting the fabric for the jacket.  The pocket decorations are old (vintage - 30 - 50 years old?? or more??) from Thailand, cut from old, damaged fabrics, and the trim fabric is printed cotton (new) from my local quilting store.

This was fun to make, but I did quite a bit of various hand stitching on it and it ended up being a lot more work than I originally thought it would.  Oh well!  I'm happy with it and will enjoy wearing it this next week at the retreat.

I'll report on the retreat when I return.  New creative ideas, friends, scenery.  What could be better?

A couple of new watercolor sketches from my sketchbook.  They both had a bit of candle wax rubbed on the preliminary drawing to create resist highlights.  Just experiments, don't think I'd actually do that in a 'real' painting -  too harsh.  I like the highlight on the bowl (no candle wax) best.

This is an older drawing, as you can see by the date, but I hadn't included it in any other blogs so thought I'd do it now.  This was painted with Durwent Durer watercolor pencils.  Lots of fun and I love the way they blend and intensify when you wet them, but you can also use them like colored pencils for lines and shading.  They'd be great for traveling.