Where Do I Go When I'm Not Home?

     Once again, I am returning home after another adventure. This time, I spent two weeks in the Amazon area of Peru. The last two of my blog entries I had scheduled to post for while I was away. I was able to have them appear, but I was in an area that did not have an Internet signal on Fridays so I couldn't link up to Nina's Off the Wall Friday like I usually do each week. The women in the river area of Peru do amazing embroideries. The base city for my trip was Iquitos, Peru and here are two of the local women setting up shop.

One sewing and one setting up

Here is a cloth I considered buying. The white "outlines" around the flower represent anacondas.

All hand embroidered

The asking price was about $200. Of course, the tradition is to bargain. I have nowhere in my home to display it, so I didn't bargain. I just admired it for quite awhile and said how beautiful it was and moved on. I did buy a beautifully embroidered blouse from another woman at the end of our trip, however. And several baskets and bracelets from a village on the river to give as gifts.

     One week of the trip was a 7 day cruise on the Amazon (my husband and I were the only passengers with 6 crew and one guide). They didn't cancel because they had to move the boat anyway. And the second week, we stayed at a jungle lodge.  Here are few photos.

Our way, cool boat, The Selva Viva

Hiking with guide

picked up a friend

owl monkeys so curious about us

our tent for a night out

rainbow over the Marañón River just below the source of the Amazon

     It was a marvelous trip and my head is full of images of amazing birds, monkeys, foliage, and sounds. I'm glad to be home in dry clothes again and away from the many bugs. But the discomforts were so worth the enrichment. I'm linking this, successfully, to Off The Wall Friday where you can find other art quilt blogs. Please make comments on their posts to let them know you stopped by. Thanks for visiting.

Want To Go Way Back With Me?

     I was glancing up on my kitchen wall looking up at an art quilt I created over 10 years ago. At the time was teaching chemistry and had just started making art quilts for fun and didn't even come close to consider calling myself an artist. I was invited to join an art group and bring something for show and tell. I had never shown anyone anything I had created before let alone a group of artists. I was terrified. I almost didn't go to the meeting. But the women I met were very encouraging and friendly so I went. This is what I took to show.

Kitchen Concoction

     To create this, I took a photo of this bowl.

My wooden salad bowl

And a photo of this bottle.

bottle of flavored vinegar

Then I manipulated them in Photoshop Elements until I got layers of colors and I printed out the photos. I chose fabrics with those colors and cut out the shapes and fused them onto the base fabrics and sewed it all together and then quilted it. The difficult part for me was to machine embroider the words for the sauces. I actually ripped them out twice before I was happy with them. The "vapors" are painted on with Shiva paintstiks.

     Looking back at this beginning quilt, there are things I would do differently. It definitely would benefit from having light values in it. I didn't know about varying values back then. I would balance out the dark green more. It's all on the left side. I would also change the shape of the vapor trails and change where the fluid coming out of the bottle intersects with one of the vapor trails. But, overall, I still like this early quilt and that's why it still hangs in my kitchen. And I still cook and/or use the sauces that are named on it. 

     So that day way back when I stood up and showed my quilt the group was very nice and welcoming I decided to join and I am still a member of ArtsEtc today. It has been such a great influence on my artistic life and now I do call myself an artist. I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can find other art quilt blogs. Please make comments on their posts so that they know you stopped by. Thanks for visiting.

Do You Get To Visit Galleries Or Museums?

     Do you make a point of visiting galleries and or museums regularly? Luckily for me, even though I live in a relatively small town, it is an active artist community. In my city there is one art museum with a central space and a satellite space and both have frequent receptions with wonderful exhibits. And in the neighboring cities there are also excellent art receptions and exhibits on a regular basis.
    Recently, I attended an art opening celebrating artists new to the gallery called Arts On Douglas in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. It was well attended with many people I knew as well as many new to me. The gallery space is marvelous and the art there is always a delight.
     One of the artists is a friend of mine and it has been so inspiring to watch her work grow over the years. She recently had a one-woman show at the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum in Golden, Colorado and now is represented in this gallery. Her name is Bobbi Baugh. Here is a photo of some of the art at the show at Arts on Douglas. I tried to get some good photos, but the lights were from above and there was some glare. I love her printmaking techniques and the layering she does.

I love fossils so I'm especially fond of this one.

     Then there was work by the artist,  John Westmark. At first, when I looked at his paintings, I thought he used pattern pieces and thought that was interesting. I really liked his overall composition, too. But then, I started reading the words on the "patterns" and was blown away.

By John Westmark

I love the words on this detail shot

     So, lucky for me, I get to go to an artist opening or reception at least once a month. And I never leave disappointed. There is always inspiration in the art and the artists. I hope that you will seek out galleries and museums in your area to visit and to support no matter how small they are and that you will take friends and family with you to discuss what you see and exchange viewpoints. 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 them know you stopped by. Thanks for visiting.

How Do You Start A Series?

     Have you ever decided to start a series of art quilts or other types of art media? I so much enjoyed making my last composition and was pleased with the result (even though I haven't yet finished it), that I've decided to try a series based on the images in it. Rather than just get going making one piece after another with those images, I decided to think about why I liked the composition so much.

The Puppeteer

     One of the reasons is that the images had deeper meaning to me. The fossil ammonite symbolizes several things. It stands for cycles, antiquity, and messages, just to name a few. And the image of the girl (besides being my dear niece) symbolizes one who is on a journey to discover, to make change, and to become changed. So I decided to focus first on the words and a good way to start my series would be to make a mind map of the words. Choose a word that is central to the theme and then start free associating words that branch off of that main word. Once I did that on a scrap piece of paper, I had the idea to make it more artistic to make it more inspiring to me.
     I got out my sketchbook and drew out a fossil ammonite in the center with a gel pen and wrote the main word with an Inktense pencil on top of it. Then I wrote out the other words in other colors with Inktense pencils. After I had that part finished, I decided to add the other image to the sketchbook page of my niece and add words that pertained to her and noticed that there is some overlap between ideas of the two images. As time goes on, I'll probably add more words and images.

mind map

     The plan is that the mind map will help me design my series and spark ideas to provide deeper meaning to each art quilt that I make in the series.
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.

Have You Ever Surprised Yourself With A Composition?

     Have you ever just gone into the studio to play with something quick and ended up with a composition that you liked so much that you might use it start a series? Well, I made a sketch the other day of a fossil and decided to make a small fabric interpretation of it. The first thing to do was to choose a background for it. As I learned in my recent class that I blogged about here, the fossil needed to rest on something. I decided to choose the shape in a shape background. So I got out some fabrics and cut out some rectangles and placed them on top of some dyed cheesecloth.

fabrics on cheesecloth on top of white crinoline

Then I thought it might need more, so I tried this combination.

Another possibility

I decided I didn't like the piece that was separated from the others. Then I hand stitched the pieces of fabric onto the cheesecloth and crinoline. Next,  I sketched my fossil onto the back with pencil and free-motion sewed it with black thread from the back.

Interpretation of fossil sketch on fabric 12x12

     After looking at it for awhile, I felt something needed to be added. So I turned it over and was going to add a bird to it on the orange-red rectangle so that the bird was looking downward towards the fossil. But, I had a photo of my two nieces from when they were toddlers sitting on a rock that I was going to do a series on in fabric and I got the idea instead to do this.

The Puppeteer

I removed part of the rectangle and put one of my nieces on top. She was playing with sticks so I got the idea to make it look like she is manipulating the fossil. The piece is still in process. I like all the raw edges. I'm not sure how I want to finish it. But how it evolved was fun and very intuitive. I can see making a larger quilt with this theme and then some other ones building off of this idea. 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 them know you stopped by. Thanks for visiting.

Do You Work Intuitively or Do You Plan Your Work?

     When you make your art do have a plan that you stick with or do you just let it happen? I usually have some sort of plan and then as I work on it I let it speak to me and changes happen as I go. For this one, I took apart some leaf pieces I had matted and placed them on top of fabrics that coordinated with them and thought I might make a long scroll-like art work of some sort.

leaf pieces on fabrics

But I didn't know exactly what I had in mind. Maybe embroider leaf designs onto the fabrics, maybe put log cabin blocks between the leaf pieces, maybe strips and borders around the leaf pieces.
     I started by sewing extra pieces of batting between them and then hand sewing a strip of the brown fabric onto the batting below one of the leaf pieces.

one piece of fabric sewn on

     Then I cut strips of fabrics and one by one hand sewed each on top of the other onto the batting. Some of the fabrics were sheer and I folded them over to make them thicker before I sewed those on. I used one strand of embroidery floss in the same color as each fabric so that the thread would hardly show. For some of the fabrics, like the brown one in the photo above, I used the finished edge of the fabric because I like the look of the stitching that was already on the edge.

section below leaf finished

Some of the fabrics had stitching on them already in a criss cross pattern and some had a folded texture.

two sections finished

     So now I think I'm going to build it up by adding a small section to the top and a small section to the bottom and then add sides of some sort. After that, I have think about if I want to quilt the added sections or embroider them somehow and how the finish off the edges all around. But I'm enjoying working this piece completely intuitively which is not my normal way of working and I'm enjoying all the hand sewing. Sitting on the porch while I stitch I'm noticing a lot of birds and sounds and I saw our box turtle come by to sip from the small pond we built. If I was at the sewing machine, I'd miss all that. I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can find other art quilt blogs. Please make comments on their posts so that they know you stopped by. Thanks for visiting.

Do You Need An Idea For An Art Party?

     Do you sometimes run out of ideas for group activities? I wanted to have an art party at my house and this idea popped into my head. 

Everyone will started with an identical piece of fabric  10 x 10 with the same line or a mark on it. (That I provided.) 

cotton with felt underneath and line drawn with a marker

I put a box in the center of the table with threads and other objects in it. The other guests brought things to contribute to the box.

These are the directions I sent out ahead of time:

1.) Each person changes one thing on their piece of fabric by taking something from the box and adding to their fabric.

2.) They pass their fabric to the person on their right.

3.) Each person changes one thing on their piece of fabric by taking something from the box and adding to their fabric. Or by adding something of their own accord that they brought.

4.) They pass their fabric to the person on their right.

5.) Each person changes one thing on their piece of fabric by taking something from the box and adding to their fabric. Or by adding something of their own accord.

On it goes until we declare it finished. Each takes one home.

Sometime in there, we'll break for lunch.

What to bring:

Items to put into the box that would be good to add to the fabrics to make for fun compositions.

Items to not add to the box that you might want to use for yourself on the fabrics.

Scissors, sewing needles.

Things I had in the box: buttons, found objects, fabric scraps, Inktense pencils, markers. Off to the side I had a container of water for the Inktense pencils, a paintbrush, and a huge container of embroidery floss.

There were 6 of us and we spent about 10 minutes on each step. Sometimes I forgot to look at the clock and we spent longer. By the time the cloths came back around to the original person, we were hungry so we called it finished. It was interesting that some people rotated them as as they went around. At the end we put them in a bag and randomly chose one from the bag to take home. Then we enjoyed a nice lunch. Here are the results.

Sample 1

Sample 2

Sample 3

Sample 4

Sample 5

Sample 6

     Now I have no idea which side is up on any of them except for Sample 2 with the bird and cat. I think all of them are pretty impressive especially since we worked quickly. One of the members already took hers home and did more work on it and is sewing a fabric edge around the four sides and is planning to hang it. We liked it so much that we may propose to do it with our art group ArtsEtc., also.
     I even dressed up my Xian warrior for the event.

in the entrance hallway

     So if you need another group activity, this is one that can be done in a little over an hour if everything is set up ahead of time. It worked well for a group of six.  I think it could work for up to nine people. If you have more than that, you might want to split up into smaller groups. I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can find more art quilt blogs. Please make comments on the artists' posts so that they know you stopped by. Thanks for visiting.