Stage Four of Compositonal Conversation is Complete!

Textile artist Shelly Baird has completed her contribution to the Conversation, and due to a minor change in schedule, has sent the piece on to me. PLEASE go and read her fascinating journey with our textile baby over at Terry Jarrard-Dimond's Sutdio 24-7 Blog, and give her some comment love for her gorgeous additions!

American Craft Council

I am a newly minted member of the American Craft Council! My membership card arrived in the mail today along with the magazine. Yummy.

Mid-Week Fun

Guess what I did today? No, go ahead, betcha can't! NOPE! I beaded. No, really, I did. But before I show you where all these lovely doo-dads went, let me show you where I started at the beginning of the week.

Still utterly captivated by the texture I'm getting when I stitch a quilt with strips of torn fabric and then dye it, I have also been experimenting with using one or two larger pieces of plain white fabric and stitching them in very tight pleats across the top of a quilt sandwich. The idea is that when the piece is complete, I will rip open the pleats, dye the quilt as usual, and let the dyeing/washing process create my beloved thread schmutz.

That's been working well and has produced this mini-quilt, which I showed you in a previous post.



But I got tired of just stitching from one side of the quilt to the other. I wanted to keep things linear- as per the client's instructions- but I also itched to liven things up a little bit. Recently when stitching a sampler quilt I began free-motion quilting a square spiral and was fascinated with the texture it gave the quilt when squares were placed side-by-side in a row. Wanting to explore this shape more, I created three more test quilts.

As usual, (except where noted) I began with a fully finished, pillowtop-turned quilt sandwich consisting of all white cotton fabric, batting and thread.

The first quilt was tiny, only about 5" x 5", and actually incorporated red rayon thread rather than white to prevent it from changing color. I laid a solid piece of white fabric onto the quilt top and sewed my spiral. I wanted to give Dye-Na_Flow a chance in these experiments, so once the piece was stitched, I painted it in three colors.



Once the paint dried, I heat set it with an iron (a necessary step with Dye-Na-Flow if you're going to launder it!), used sharp little embroidery scissors to cut between the stitch lines, and washed it out just as if I had dyed it- in hot water with a little Synthrapol. Then I tossed it into the dryer and let it run for about 30 minutes.

As you can see, the fraying effect was greatly reduced by the acrylic in the Dye-Na-Flow, but I kind of liked it despite the way it wants to give you a migraine if you study it for more than 60 seconds. Or less.

Still I wasn't ready to give up on the Zen feelings I was grooving on while stitching a square spiral, so I stitched two more little pieces. These I constructed like the one above except that I used white thread and Procion MX dyes to colorize them.




I am severely underwhelmed. However, since I had the dyes out, anyway, and since I had some lovely amethyst left over from my last gradation, I thought I'd give this little orphan, (remember him?)...


... another spin in the dye baths. And holy cow. I fell in love with it when it came out of the dryer this morning. So it got beaded (click to see a larger view, it's better up close)!



This piece has now been dyed twice and laundered three separate times, which has forced the development of intensely tangled and complex thread schmutz. Most of the beads I added were my own dyed and painted fabric, Tyvek, and paper beads, but some of them are commercial beads, too.




Like I said a few posts ago- this is how a series starts!

Happy Creating!

3rd Installment of Compositional Conversation

The third artist to participate in Compositional Conversation, Beth Carney, has completed her contribution to our mutual conversation and has passed the piece on to the fourth artist in the rotation, Shelly Baird.

Please go see photos of our progress, and read about Beth's journey with our infant textile art piece. You can also send her some comment love if you're inspired to do so (I certainly was!) over on the blog of Terry Jarrard-Dimond, the artist-originator of this amazing project.

For those who might be keeping count, I'm 6th in line to converse with the work. This is exciting!

Happy Creating!

My Creative Space (And a short bio)

When I started this blog a couple of months ago, I posted a little "Hello, I'm new to the neighborhood," thing but I never really introduced myself. I think it might be time to do so.

I have no formal art training. I've never been to art school, though I desperately hope one day to spend a few years in England getting a cities & guilds credit in textiles.

I've always been a crafter, the daughter and granddaughter of crafters, but I didn't start making art full time until my own daughter went off to a private boarding school for her last three years of high school. Looking around at old, beat-up furniture and plain while walls, I decided it was time to get serious and revamp my space.

I refurbished a few furniture pieces, built some new ones, and painted large canvases for the walls. That exercise not only created a preliminary studio space, but it also lit a fire in me to explore paints further than I ever had.

Since that time, years gone by now, I've taken multiple classes online and in person, trying to educate myself about art and in particular, the kind of art I want to create. The gaps in my knowledge were tremendous and I've slowly been whittling away at those gaps over time.

Two years ago, as a passionate paper artist who became sick to death of making beautiful art and then having to encase it frames behind glass, I looked to quilting as a way to not only expand my art, but get me out of the "box" that framing all of my work had gotten me into. I wanted to make textural art pieces that could be handled without damage and could could hang right out there in the open without suffering overly from their environment. And I could finally create pieces of any size and shape without the deep concern of how in the world to frame it!

So that's me, now... learning to create new art, after having already spent years creating art. How lucky can one woman be?

Interesting News!

Cloth, Paper, Scissors just contacted me about the outline I'd sent them a couple of months ago. They want to read the article I wrote and see photos of my art! Fingers crossed for me, please!

Other Stuff

This fabric started in blueberry dye. No, really. I found some blueberries in the freezer, boiled them down and drained off the juice, and then poured it over this fabric, which was stuffed into a little container with some random fabric scraps that wanted to be blue, too.



I let the fabric batch for three days, turning the container every few hours. When I took it out and rinsed it, it smelled awful- obviously the blueberry juice was going bad and had turned a brownish color. Since I couldn't use the fabric smelling as badly as it did, I tossed it in the washing machine and ran it through a gentle cycle. What came out of the machine was a gunmetal gray I really wasn't satisfied with.

I had juice left over , so I soaked the fabric again for 24 hours. The result wasn't much more pronounced than after the first batching, and since I was dyeing in blues anyway yesterday, I threw this fabric and the scraps into the bath, and what you see above was the result.

I'm pleased.

In order to go not into textile overload, I still splash paint and glue around on a regular basis. This stretched canvas background emerged last week and now awaits a focal point.


While I had the lighting equipment out, I went ahead and photographed this piece, called Jumping Woman, which I did shortly after President Obama won his election. I was overjoyed with his victory, and this piece was the result.


Like the background above, it was also done on a stretched canvas frame and contains fibers, fabrics and painted papers. I also created a fiber figure with her arms raised high in joy, and painted paper/fun foam "buttons", which were adhered along the bottom. It has a couple of beads I made from painted foil candy wrappers that were then melted and formed into bead shapes.


So, another week is off and running... or flying...


Ready, set, create!

The Week In Blues

I recognize this obsessiveness, this need to experiment with one technique, push its limits and see what it can do, what you can do to force it to behave in a manner you prescribe. This is how a series starts.

As I've mentioned in previous posts, I've been "researching" a commissioned textile piece by creating small versions of the final piece and seeing what happens to them when I do various evil, arty things to them.

The client wants a large textile art piece for a master bedroom. She has a specific color scheme in mind and she wants something modern and unusual.

What I have settled on- and hope the client will approve of- is a pillowcase-turned, fully finished quilt top to which I'm sewing strips of fabric in a tight, somewhat irregular pattern. I'm constructing the piece using all white cotton materials so that it can be low-immersion dyed later. The purpose of using strips of torn fabric and dyeing after the piece is constructed rather than before is because I want to celebrate the thread schmutz that always occurs during the dyeing/washing process. I want the edges to fray and tangle and make a lovely, chaotic mess. This, I believe, helps to offset the linear pattern created by the long strips of stitched fabric.

The first test of this technique resulted in this piece,


... which I've mounted on a painted canvas donated to a worthy cause. I love the way this textile turned out, but I believe it to be too soft and feminine for my client, who is drawn, as I am, to more edgy work.

So I sewed two more test pieces, hoping for more chaotic schmutz movement and more appropriate colors for her home.

The first little piece was stitched, as usual, with white cotton materials but rather than dyeing it, I painted it liberally with three colors of Dye-Na-Flow and then turned it upside down to dry.



Dye-Na-Flow is not a dye, it's a thin fabric paint, and as such, it doesn't bond with the fibers the way dye does. It sits on the surface, which means that any irregularity in the textile- folds, creases, wrinkles, fringe- will collect higher amounts of pigment than a smooth surface would. Turning the piece upside down encouraged the paint to migrate into the fringe at the top of the piece and color them more intensely than the rest of the piece. It worked, but not to the extent I was hoping.

The second little piece got low-immersion dyed and then dried in the dryer, which is not something I usually do with my hand-dyeds. I got thread schmutz galore.



I'll take both pieces to my client in September and let her decide if she wants something like this in her home.

Happy creating!

Compositional Conversation off and running!

The second artist, Rebecca Howdeshell, participating in the cooperative textile project I'm involved in, Compositional Conversation, has finished her work on the quilt top and sent it on to the next artist. Read about her experience with our textile piece here!

The 'Busy' Doesn't Stop

I've been a little worker bee all week, toiling away on this project and that. In the process, most of the garage studio, the indoor art studio, and one of the fabric racks got cleaned and organized. I can hardly believe it!

The cleaning was necessary for something that frankly I've been dreading- I need to have my photo taken in my studio. And I have a confession to make- I'm a frumpy, middle-aged, more-than-a-little overweight suburban housewife. Now, of course I'm also an artist who craves, requires, demands explosions of chaotic color, texture that makes you want to sink into it, complex layering and blending, and tons and tons of barely controlled movement.

But, yanno... it's my photograph. Bleh. But now that my secret is out, well... it's out. I'm frumpy. Yeah.

Onward!

I've started on two more small test quilts this week and will post photos of them before they go in the dye baths (probably by Monday or so). Actually. one will get the full Procion treatment, while the other is going to get painted with Dye-Na-Flow and dried upside down. I'll explain why in the appropriate post!

With great relief and no small amount of gladness in being able to help a fellow artist, my funky little donation to Hearts For Anna sold. Dear buyer, if you're reading this, thank you. You've done a good thing for a good reason.

My donation to Art Now For Autism was submitted today. I've very pleased with the result and hope it will also bring a nice price to benefit a particularly poignant cause.


If you click the above image, you'll see a high-res version.

This is a small orphan quilt I did a few weeks ago. I started with white cotton fabric and white cotton thread, and created a pillow-case turned quilt top. To that, I stitched dozens of torn strips of white cotton. The whole thing was then low-immersion dyed in green and aqua. It was beaded with my own hand-made fabric and paper beads, as well as some commercial beads and vintage buttons.



The quilt could be displayed on it's own, but for ease of hanging, I chose to mount it on a stretched canvas that I painted with acrylics in complimentary colors.



It measures 12" x 16" in total. If you've had a fortunate year, I would ask you to consider purchasing a piece of art (it doesn't have to be mine- any will do!) for this cause.

And finally, something just for fun! While cleaning out the freezer tonight I came across a bag of blueberries that were pretty badly freezer-burned. That was all the excuse I needed to toss them in a pan with a little water, boil and squish them, strain out the juice and, yes, you guessed it, dye some fabric. Will post some photos when I have the fabric out of the bath.

Happy creating!

These Are The Days

The living room curtains are coming along. Pumpkin is helping. I'm not sure how, but she is so insistent that she is...


My Grand Opening Giveaway was a great success! I got to meet and chat with so many artists, and through your varied and marvelously colorful blogs, learned about even more talented people with whom I'd love to connect. I now wonder why, for so long, I resisted blogging; it's been an amazing experience. And the thanks go to all of you who read, comment and laugh with me in private emails. I couldn't have asked for a warmer welcome from the blogging community!

I confused Friday with Thursday, started a new gradation and ended up working through much of the weekend. But the dye baths are just too much fun, too succinct a distraction. Inspired by Terry Stegmiller's turquoise-to-amethyst gradation, I dove in with yardage off a bolt newly arrived from Dharma Trading Co.

I did two tie-dye pieces, into which I just squeezed the dye out willy-nilly and let the colors blend as they would.




I tossed in some commercial fabric motifs I found earlier this week- I must have cut them out of fabric years ago and then stuck them away, can't imagine why.


And of course, the string from the tie-dye combined with the usual thread schmutz in the washing machine, leaving me with an epic tangle of schmutz!


This was a very successful dye run, although I wasn't sure it was going to be. I was aiming for the beautiful pastel-y colors Terry achieved, but instead, I nailed some iconic Grateful Dead purples and blues straight out of the 60's! I'll try another run sometime later and see if I can't soften the value of the hues a bit.

The turquoise is a mess to work with, which I was anticipating. It's like working with honey... if you get a little on your finger, within 60 seconds nearly every surface in your house will be sticky. In that same way, turquoise wants to migrate so when you mix and use it, do it somewhere where you can make a mess and not be worried.

Turquoise is also very hard to dissolve, so have some urea solution on hand when you do this to help things along a little. I put about a tablespoon of urea in about a teaspoon of hot water and stir. I actually have to then let it sit for a while because the urea takes some time to dissolve. Once it has, though, you can add it to the water into which you'll be mixing the turquoise dye powder, and it will help break down that pigment and dissolve it.

The mid-ranges of this gradation were the most impressive and because I used more fabric than usual in the same amount of dye liquid AND used a smaller container, the "scrunch" effect was especially prominent and eye-popping.




These are going to be fun to quilt with!

Finally, a quick snapshot of the piece I'll be sending to Art Now For Autism as part of the art auction. I'll set up the light kit today and get better shots to send them.



This piece started as this, another experiment in a series I'm creating to research a commission I'll be starting in September. I started with a pillowcase-turned quilt sandwich to which I sewed strips of cotton fabric. Then I dyed the whole thing, low-immersion style. It was so pretty that I beaded it and then I painted a small canvas and sewed the quilt to it.

Off and running into a new week! Happy creating!

Winner of Grand Opening Give-Away Announced!

I asked hubby to find me a random number generator and do the honors of choosing the winning number. Everyone was assigned a number from the top of the list to the bottom, from 1-44. The RNG chose: 9, which makes our winner dolores! (He used an Excel Spreadsheet RNG to do it- who knew?)

Dolores, if you will please send me a private email with your contact info, I will send out your gift in Monday's mail: a 2-yard piece of mercanized cotton muslin fabric, 75 x 75 thread count, which I have tie-dyed myself...



... the book that helped me learn to dye fabrics, Fast, Fun and East Fabric Dyeing by author and art quilter, Lynn Koolish. (Y'all should visit her site and send her some hellos, if you get a chance, too- she's a wonderful artist and a very nice lady!), and one large zipper baggie of odds and ends from my stash of fabric and painted paper scraps. If you do anything wonderful with the farbic, I would love to see- send me a link!

Thank you all so much for making my first give-away such a great success! I have really enjoyed chatting with each of you in private emails and am grateful that you all shared your stories with the rest of us. I know there are still lots of artists hiding in the world, women and men waiting for an opportunity to make art, afraid that they don't qualify, aren't good enough, or just shouldn't try. Stories like the ones you all shared here can reach out and inspire those people, and maybe pull them out of their shells enough to try.

So, thankyouthankyouthankyou all.

Compositional Conversation

Now that this project has launched, I can finally announce my participation in it! I've been sitting on this for a few weeks, so I'm really thrilled to finally be able to tell everyone what's happening.

I've been invited by Terry Jarrard-Dimond to participate in collaborative art project entitled "Compositional Conversation", a round-robin textile construction involving 15 artists: Rebecca Howdeschell, Beth Carney, Shelley Baird, Gayle Vickery Pritchard, Leslie Bixel, Fulvia Luciano, Marcia DeCamp, Marina Kamenskaya, Paula Swett, Valerie Goodwin, Kathy Loomis, Leslie Riley, and of course, myself and Terry.

The project will start with Terry creating a fabric background and her own design elements, and then she will send it all on to the next artist in line. Each artist in turn will have a go at the textile piece (I hesitate to call it a quilt yet, because we're still not totally sure which direction it will take!) for three days- adding, subtracting and changing the "conversation". At the end, when every artist has had a crack at the work, Terry will finish the piece in whatever manner she thinks best.

This is a really big deal to me, to be included with names like Beth Carney, Leslie Riley and Valerie Goodwin. I feel like I'm sitting at the dinner table with royalty!

I will continue to blog about this as the piece evolves. Wish me luck!

Hearts For Anna

Whew, finally! My submission for the Hearts For Anna Event has been submitted. I was really starting to worry that I wouldn't finish on time, but it's done and I'm pleased with it. My hope is that it will sell and help to benefit one of our own.

I titled the piece, "Heart, Reclining (With A Fizzy Cocktail)" and it measures 5" x 7". This is the description I sent along with the submission form:

"This piece was created using primed artist’s canvas for its background, which was then washed with layers of watercolor. The sassy, cocktail-drinking heart, coolly lounging on her froo-froo bed of fringe, was sketched with graphite and then painted with watercolors, Sharpies, and acrylic paint. An appliqué of melted and Lumiere-painted plastic grocery sack was sewn onto her attire. Her fringe bed was created with dyed and stamped fabric that was then torn into strips and machine-sewn stitched into place. She toasts us with an embroidered cocktail glass brimming with beaded bubbles. Her inscription reads: “my heart to yours, our hearts together, for Anna.”

It will be back to the (VERY low-immersion, the drought is still dogging our heels) dye baths later this week- I've been out of white fabric for almost two weeks and there's a bolt on its way to me from Dharma Trading.

And in four more days, I'll draw the winning name of my Grand Opening Giveaway! :D

Until then, happy creating!