Spring II

Today my little one and I spent a nice day playing in the garden, baking and eating. Although I am itching to get back into embroidery. Hopefully sewing up some small pieces in time to pop onto our shop ahead of Christmas - some small geo abstracts and new sweater letters.

Our daily routine now includes going into the garden to admire the aquilegia that's finally in bloom (trying to stop Ava from plucking all the flowers) and most important of all, checking on our strawberry plants. Trying to harvest the tiny alpine strawberries before the bugs get to them. We also watered the sprawling raspberry tangle that's beginning to fruit. I left it to go wild meaning to prune back a few canes but when I eventually got around to doing it I discovered quite a few canes were in bud. I'm not entirely sure how to take care of this plant and i'm not even sure what type of raspberry it since I purchased it at a local nursery. But I think it might be the floricane type since some of the old canes are fruiting again but then again some new canes are fruiting so it's all very confusing!

I hope I can keep it thriving. We all love raspberries at home and it would be amazing to eat our own instead of the often lack lustre tasting ones from the store. We also made some time for blowing bubbles and baking some muffins. This will be the last time we use frozen blueberries though, they are completely tasteless. With a drizzle of maple syrup and butter they're not too bad though!

Spring I

My lithops seedlings from Dec 13 are finally going through their first regeneration. I didn't use the right soil substrate and generally haven't taken the greatest care of them. They've suffered a few unplanned repottings due to being knocked over thanks to my clumsy positioning of them. But i'm glad to see a few robust looking ones amongst them and it's great to see some of their true colours emerging with the new leaves. The seeds were a mixed lot so it will be interesting trying to identify them! 

Our older lithops are also going through their usual springtime regeneration. Including this Alien lookalike and a pseudotruncatella that's splitting into a double head. Also a cacti and haworthia aristata in different stages of flowering. 

Unexpected Collaborations: Robocrop process

This week's post is about the Robocrop video and the process behind making it. It was quite a different approach to Sweetfighter with the entire video this time shot in camera. We used lighting techniques and wired props to tell the story of an agricultural / robotics collaboration. Our concept was to present a futuristic vision of nature through the symbiotic relationship between science research and nature. The idea was to use plants but have them glow, Avatar like and also be wired electronically to sway as if swaying in the wind.

Having proposed all this in our storyboards we then had to figure out how to build it so began nightly tests using fluorescent fluid to make the flowers and plants glow. After finding some helpful tutorials online we settled on using two recipes. One based on highlighter fluid and the second on tonic water. The difference between the two was the colour of the glow they created. Highlighter fluid created a more toxic looking yellow glow while tonic water produces a more softer blue glow.
Even the clean up produced some interesting specimens. The close up of the tissue looks almost cosmic.

We also tried different methods for getting the plants to soak up the fluid, A – through the cut stems which took a bit longer to take affect and is less effective, B – soaking the flower blooms directly in the fluid. Much more vibrant and the effect can be seen within hours. Just watch out that the blooms don't start to disintegrate! The variegated devil's ivy was soaked through the stem in highlighter fluid for about a week and you can see the glow start to spread through the veins in the leaves. It was really interesting doing these experiments. We'd love to do another project using similar techniques. Not that plants aren't already naturally beautiful but it's amazing how they can be transformed through a relatively lo-fi technique. Down below you can see some of our glow tests on kale, fox glove and the garlic flowers.



Although for glowing purposes white and pale pink flowers worked the best we had to make sure the plants we used were edible. Luckily were able to source some pretty interesting plants at the Eveleigh growers market as well as the Chinatown markets where we scored garlic flowers which we'd never heard of and the enoki which looked amazing under the blacklight.

Meanwhile my partner luckily has started to tinker in electronic gadgetry so offered to build the contraption needed to wire the plants. He used an arduino board with a manual trigger, some of the early tests show a bit of experimentation with how to get the wires hooked up to the plants elegantly. We initially used metal collars which gave a nice motion but looked a little too steampunk. In the end we wrapped the wires directly onto the stems and crossed our fingers the force wouldn't snap them. 

Some shots below on set of the plant set ups in 'daylight' and under the blacklight. The same plants were used for both sets. One of the advantages of using the tonic water to make the plants glow is that it's clear in daylight (unlike the highlighter fluid that gives off a faint yellow tinge).

Home

It's no secret we're plant nerds. We've come to it relatively recently which may explain why we're a bit obsessive about it at the moment. Lithops, tillandsias, cacti and succulents and now calatheas have invaded and steadily taken over every available surface inside and out. We had a mini disaster the other week when my precious lithops seedling that I had patiently been growing for 4 months tipped onto the floor. I tried to be as delicate as possible when I re-potted them but there have been many casualties already. I did manage to take some nice photos though of the tiny babies. You can see most are only about the size of a pinhead after 4 months.

If only I had as much interest in my vegetable garden!

Meanjin - process

The Meanjin cover we embroidered last year was easily one of our most enjoyable commissions to date. We were able to explore our growing plant nerd-dom plus reimagine the traditional embroidery motif of florals. When Zora the editor of Meanjin first contacted us about working on this issue, the brief was both simple and complex. This issue was unofficially a women’s issue with content provided by female writers. Our brief was to use our embroidery to play on the idea of “women’s work” but other than that the Zora was happy for us to propose anything that fit within that broad scope. The challenge was to avoid clichés and not be superficial in our message.

We presented a few ideas, one of which was to subvert traditional motifs and in place of pretty daisies and roses, embroider fleshy, gruesome plants (or Frankenflowers as we grew to call them while sewing).

We've posted some of our process below. Firstly some rough initial sketches we presented with our first round concept. We didn't sketch a layout for this stage but provided a written treatment outlining our idea along with some support imagery showing how the plants could look. We proposed toothy flowers as well as scrotum buds, and amazingly got the go ahead on everything.

After the concept got the go ahead we started collecting some reference material for the Frankenflwoers. As you can imagine we had a lot of fun researching weird, unusual and gross looking plants. The last preview we sent to the client was a coloured tight sketch which you can compare to the finished piece. Since embroidery is so time consuming changes after the final coloured sketch is approved is rare and usually requires some extra time for the delivery schedule. The coloured tight sketch we present to clients shows them exactly how the embroidery will look so that they'll be comfortable giving a final go ahead. It shows composition and colour but not texture which is something we can build organically as we embroider. For instance we introduced a lot more dimensional stitching techniques in this project to give extra movement and depth to the flowers. We padded out the stitching to create a fat stem for the lower hero flower and added hairlike red fringes on the conophytum inspired globular flowers. We also loosened some of stitching and instead of completely filling in shapes showed some of the black background fabric to imitate shading.

We’re often asked how our embroidery sits within contemporary illustration and we usually struggle to eloquently answer this. I’m really happy we were able to create this piece because it represents what we try to do with our work. Embroidery is an age old medium but like any other technique or mark making medium - like painting or drawing - it can evolve. We try to add a different perspective to the craft with our work and see how much of its tactility we can exploit.

Plants and things

I started writing this post a few weeks back while we were in the middle of a big (for us) project. I had planned for it to be a bit of a wrap-up of the things that had happened over the months since our last proper post but the original draft doesn't make as much sense now. But to boil it down it was mainly a bit of a guilty whinge about being so busy. Guilty because I always feel a little ungrateful complaining when we're busy with work as goodness knows how anxious we feel when we're not busy! And I seem to have tempted fate. Now that we have a bit of a breather studio-wise we're both back to worrying again. Blerg it's a never ending cycle.

Things that have been making us happy lately though are finishing off the Christmas project that kept us occupied for the last 2 months and occupied a huge chunk of my loungeroom/kitchen. I'm very glad not to be finding gold thread in every nook and cranny now (eg daughter's nappy??). We had very sparkly dust bunnies last month:)

Other things in no specific order:

- Taking part in the Sydney Design Studio Pop Ups at the Powerhouse. This was the first time we'd tried holding a market stall (not counting our garage sales) so it was a huge learning experience for us. It was wonderful demonstrating some embroidery techniques to the people that visited our stall, especially the two young visitors we had who blitzed through the beginner stitches we showed them and were keen to learn more.

- Spending the long weekend up the coast at Smiths Lakes which included a walk across the lake, gourmet breakfasts and meals thanks to our friends, lots of sun and did I mention the breakfasts? It was the first time I'd tried blue cheese french toast, I was a bit dubious at first but was a surprise convert.

- Air plants. If you follow our instagram feed you may have noticed a bit of tillandsia love. Sorry for all the plant posts but we have both become obsessed.  A few weeks back we went to the Mr Kitly x Dagamar Rousset Sydney pop up and added some new plants to our collection. Sadly I showered some of mine with too much love (water) and half of them died of rot. I've learnt my lesson since then and promise to take better care (give them some space) of the new dudes I picked up at the Bromeliad/Tillandsia fair.

- Cactus and Succulents. Sorry more plant talk but the C&S Society are holding their Spring show on the 26th of October and i'm coming prepared with my own box this time. We're working on a flower themed magazine cover at the moment, if i'm not embroidering flowers i'm looking up lithops and tillandsia.

- We're contributing some work to the upcoming Art by Design 9 group show at Wedge Gallery, Kinokuniya. I think the opening night is Oct 31 and t will run until Nov 25.

- An interview and spread in House and Garden as part of their Sister Act article in the October issue. It was lovely meeting Elizabeth who wrote the article and it was a thrill seeing our studio included amongst their beautiful pages. We were madly trying to clean up the house ahead of the shoot but made the rookie mistake of shoving everything under our studio table which inevitably was in frame. We had to haul everything out mid shoot causing a minor dust storm.

- And lastly some very lovely and kind write ups on thisispaper, Kaleidoscope blog and the Fox is Black. Special thank you to Amanda from Kaleidoscope blog who saw us at our first ever talk at Field Trip last year, we were so nervous before and after the talk to watch over the tape of it but since you still wanted to write about us I hope that means we didn't mumble/make an arse of ourselves too much!

Prick show

Last weekend with much excitement we headed to a cactus and succulent show. A good friend has gifted us most of our cacti and succulents and got us hooked on them and we were keen to add to our collection. This was our first time going to the show though so we weren't prepared for the awesome amount of weird, spiky, hairy, bulbous specimens on display. I forgot to take the camera so these are just iPhone pics but look at those textures! We also walked around Eden Gardens which hosted the show. It's huuuge and a little overwhelming so I didn't get to look at it all properly but I spotted some lovely patterned leaves.