What's On The Reverse Side Of Your Fabrics?

     Have you ever flipped over your fabrics to the reverse side to take a look and see what's there? Especially the ones that you've painted yourself? Well, once I decided to use some white crinoline as a base to sew appliqué silk pieces of fabric onto for an art quilt.  (This one, here.) I didn't want any of the white to show through in case the edges of the silks didn't quite but up all the way. So I decided to paint the crinoline first. I used colors of paint that would be similar to the colors of the silks. One side of the art quilt would be cool colors and one side would be warm colors and the center was going to have a female figure in it. I placed a paper cutout of the female figure on the crinoline and used a wet sponge brush and painted with acrylic paints the various colors onto the crinoline. Then I removed the paper cutout and painted onto the then white profile of the female figure. It was a fairly ugly (but functional) piece of crinoline.
     After it dried, it fell onto the floor and flipped over. And oh, my! It was beautiful! The paint had not gone through uniformly at all. It had created a ghostly effect of the female figure. The areas around her had created marbled effects. As a whole, it couldn't be used for a piece of art. It was a shame that it was going to be buried underneath other pieces of fabrics and never seen. But since we are in the digital age, that really isn't the case.

original ghostly figure on back of crinoline

original reverse side of crinoline

     I took photos of all the good parts of it and kept them on file for future use. And that future is now. I sent out the photos to a digital printmaking fabric company and within a few days the fabric was delivered larger than it was before. The colors were true and I was very pleased with it. I hung it on the design wall for about a week and wasn't sure what to do with it. I put it away for about a month. Then I did a few sketches on my iPad from one of its photos and got an idea and out came the rotary cutter.
     I sewed panels of the digitally produced fabric together and then put it on batting and did a lot of stitching. Here's a peak of some of it in-process.

stitching in gray variegated thread

she moves

The crinoline only had a partial head and part of a torso so I had to imagine the rest. Now, I'm working on the rest of the design and a quilting design. So my message to you is that when you paint a piece of fabric, always flip it over to look at the back. You may like the reverse side better. And if you like both sides, you can take photos of the reverse side and have it digitally printed if you want to use it, also. 

     I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can find other art quilt blogs. Please make comments on the artists' posts to let them know you stopped by. Thanks for visiting.

What Happens To You When You Clean Out Your Studio?

     Does anything happen when you clean out your studio other than it becomes more organized and better looking? Like a lot of us do in January, I decided to go through my studio and get rid of the clutter.  I started section by section and was determined to pick up all the little odds and ends that I had put in the nooks and crannies because I couldn't think of a place to put them. They either had to have a place or they had to go. I was also determined to file away all the papers and articles I had collected into folders and organize them so that I could find them later when I wanted them.
     Well, I did that and it actually only took one day. But one of the things I found on my craft desk in a basket was a set of small blank business cards that I had made into small art compositions many years ago. I remember how much fun I had making them on such a small scale. I used pieces of painted dryer sheets, threads, strips of fabrics, sequins, iron-on fusible to attach them to the cards and then colored netting fused on top to hold it all down. Here's one that I particularly liked.

blank business card designed

     When I saw this in the basket, I thought "Hmmm, I wonder if I could actually make an art quilt with this design?" It was 8:30 PM last night. The studio was just about spotless. I had just put away the vacuum cleaner. I was getting ready to sit down with a cup of tea and watch TV. But then I remembered my word for the year of 2015 is EXPLORE.  So I opened up my sketchbook and got out my Inktense pencils and painted what you see in the bottom book. The dark stripes are strips of fabric that I glued on top. The painting confirmed I could paint it. So I checked out my paint supply and I didn't have much on hand. Only some samples from workshops and a few real jars. Maybe enough for a quilt top. But that's what EXPLORE is about, isn't it? So the next step was to see what the samples of paint looked like on crinoline which is what I wanted to what paint on. That's my sample crinoline in the top book with the key on the right page.

sample book on top, sketchbook on bottom

Now it was about 10:00 PM and I was really excited about this. I cut a piece of crinoline that I had prewashed and dried to about 27 inches by 37 inches. I put plastic on my cutting table, a layer of white muslin on top of that and the crinoline on top of that.  I put all my paints that I wanted to use with a container of water and a spray bottle of water and a flat brush.  And of course, Opus, my ever present cat set himself up on table right next to the cutting table not wanting to miss a thing. As the brush moved across the length of the crinoline his head was like a spectator watching a tennis match watching the ball moving back and forth across the net.

supplies 

     I used the Jacquard paints as is. For the Golden paints, I mixed those with the GAC 900 fabric medium 1:1 since they aren't fabric paints. I watered down all the paints a lot as I used them. I painted very loosely and had a lot of fun. My feeling was that if it didn't work out, the fabric piece was so large that I would at least end up with smaller pieces that I would love and could cut up and use for something good. Here is how I ended the evening at about 11:30 PM.

Painted crinoline 27x37

     I'm planning to work more on this fabric today and add batting and fabric strips and stitching if all goes well. Cleaning out the studio accomplished more than I intended and EXPLORE is indeed off to a good start. I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can find other art quilt blogs. Please make comments on their posts to let the artists know you stopped by. Thanks for visiting.

Line Study Evolving

     Do you feel pressure trying to decide which colors to use in a piece of art? Or which arrangement to use in a composition? I always do. I wonder if there would have been a better choice. Maybe it's because I don't have a formal art training background. Well, for now, I've found a solution that frees me up from worrying about making an irreversible error. I go back and forth between digital and real media.
     In my last post, here, I showed you lines I had sewn onto white crinoline and I was trying to decide what to do next. I showed you this image that I had created with a combination of ArtStudio and Snapseed Apps on my iPad.

digital image from ArtStudio and Snapseed

 Both Apps are so much fun. ArtStudio is very much like Photoshop Elements. In it I used tools to paint over the photos of my crinoline gong interpretation and my crinoline Buddha. Snapseed doesn't take any work or much imagination. It does all the work. You just click on different screens of your photo and it manipulates it all by itself.
     Then I got to work with actual paints on the crinoline that was sewn onto batting.

Paints and GAC 900 on crinoline

I also painted the crinoline sewn Buddha. Then I hand-appliquéd the Buddha and sewed on beads.

In process

 So now I'm again at a stage of not knowing what to do next. I started to square off the piece with a rotary cutter but when I had three edges cut, I paused before I cut off the bottom. I liked the uneven bottom edge. I have to decide whether to paint that bottom edge of fabric, cut it off, add another piece of fabric on top, hang fringy something or other? How to sew on those brown squares. And of course, I need to decide how to edge it. Probably a pillowcase finish. 

     My next step will be to take this last photo back to ArtStudio and paint up the bottom edge various ways to see how it looks. Light, dark, medium values. Teal, brown, mottled, etc.

     I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday  where you can find other art quilt blogs. Please make comments on their posts to let the artists know you stopped by.

Line Study

     In my latest art group, ArtsEtc, meeting we did an activity exploring how different media can be used on crinoline to express lines. The basic method was to sew the lines onto the white cotton crinoline in black thread and then use various paints afterwards.
NOTE: I prewashed my crinoline to remove any chemicals so that it would take paint well. I drip dried it.
We were supposed to bring some sort of design already drawn out ready to sew. I had no idea what I design I wanted work with and drew out several but didn't like any of them. Then I went through photos I keep in a file that I think I may use for surface design.
     One of the photos is of a gong. It has a nice texture and I do love circles.  So I played with the gong photo in Photoshop Elements and found edges and lines and sketched those out and decided that is what I would sew. I cut out a piece of crinoline and batting and in the meeting I free motion machine stitched this.

gong lines

A good start. But where to go from there. A few days later, I was walking by a Buddha incense burner we have and decided to stitch that too. It might go well with the gong.

incense burner

stitched Buddha on crinoline

To stitch the Buddha:

1.) I made the photo of the incense burner black and white in Photoshop Elements, and increased the contrast.

2.) I inserted it into a WORD document and changed its size until it was a good size to fit nicely onto the stitched gong lines. 

3.)  I printed the WORD document.

4.)  I put tracing paper on top and traced the lines of the Buddha that I wanted to stitch using a mechanical pencil.

5.) I pinned the tracing paper on top of the crinoline and free motioned machined stitched it.

6.) Using tweezers, I carefully pulled off the tracing paper. (I removed the tracing paper before I stitched the "hair" of the Buddha".)

     There remained so many possibilities of how to paint it and how to collage it that I decided to play with the composition with my iPad using ArtStudio and SnapSeed Apps first. 

This is what I ended up with as a digital collage using photos from above.

digital collage

So now I will get out the actual paints, beads, and others and play with my actual stitched pieces. The whole thing is about 7 inches square by the way. I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can find other art quilt blogs. Please make comments to let the artists know you stopped by.

Screen Door

     I've been busy working on another larger quilt. This one is about 30 inches wide and 48 inches tall. It doesn't fit in with my body of work, but it does come from my heart. I was in a restaurant in Panama several years ago. It was on a one-street town. The street was a dirt road with horses going up and down it with the occasional car. It was a very "basic" restaurant. Cement floor, only one item on the menu... beans and rice and chicken. And the screen door had a large hole in it with flies going in and out. But the hole was beautiful. I liked it so much that I took photos of it. I knew that some day I would use that hole in my art. The day/s has/have come.
     I decided to use crinoline as my base fabric to get more of that screen door effect. My cat, Opus, loves crinoline. He dives underneath it and thinks he can't be seen and then dodges out at me. So the first thing I did was let him have his play session with the crinoline.

the invisible Opus

making his appearance

Then I cut up panels from it and monoprinted them on my gelatin plate and sewed the panels together. After that, I stitched patterns on them using different types of thread. For the main hole, I used some parachute thread and did bobbin work from the back because this thread is too thick to run through the needle of the sewing machine. Here's the panel of the quilt stitched with this thread that is an exact copy of the hole in the screen door in Panama.

Screen door hole

The paint colors I chose have blues and rusts and this scarf from Guatemala may be cut up and used on this quilt.

my scarf

I'm having great fun creating this quilt. I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can visit other art quilt blogs. Please make comments to let the artists know you stopped by.