Small Things

     Each of the past few years I've made a 12x12 quilt to donate to  SAQA for their annual auction for fundraising to support the group. It is one of their major fundraising events and I'm a strong advocate for them. They have done a lot for me in advancing my confidence in art making and connecting me with other quilt artists. Here is my donation for this year's event. You can read about the auction and purchasing the quilt and others here.

Continuity III

     Unfortunately, it's not a great photo. The camera is acting up and I could not get good resolution. I'm leaving it up to SAQA to get a professional photo of it for their publicity. I sent the quilt in without a photo to meet the deadline. I think I need to get a different camera. I've had it checked out and the repairman says there is nothing wrong with it, but I say there is. I'm hoping to take it to a friend's house this week and take photos with her camera and with mine and compare photos with the same settings as a final check. 

     Also related to SAQA, I volunteered to work the SAQA booth in Lakeland, Florida on Saturday, March 19 at the Sewing Expo. SAQA had the Celebrating Silver exhibit on display and the quilts were amazing. We had catalogues for sale and we signed up seven new SAQA members just on Saturday. It was a fun day meeting all sorts of new people and talking up SAQA and its benefits. And to top it off, I received an unexpected thank you gift in the mail from Karol Kusmaul who organized our working schedule in the booth and who worked with me in the booth.

A beautiful fabric postcard by Karol Kusmaul

      My dyes and paints arrived from Pro chemical and dye company so now I need to go out and buy my soda ash and pfd fabric to get started on my Art Cloth Mastery projects. In the meantime, I'm still stitching away at the little purse.

in process

It's ready for assembly now so it won't take long to finish. Maybe I can finish it today or tomorrow. 

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 the artists know you stopped by. Thanks for visiting.

How Do You Get Enriched?

     Sometimes I read books or take an online class for enrichment in the arts. But lately I felt like I needed a lot more from someone who is a master at their craft.  So I signed up for Jane Dunnewold's Art Cloth Mastery Class. It lasts two and a half years and involves traveling to her studio in San Antonio, Texas five times and lots of work at home. My first session was last week. I had been busy at home with pre-assignments for the last several months.
     My week there was absolutely glorious because of the other students, the assignments we did and, of course, Jane. She is one of the most spiritual people I've ever met. And so knowledgeable.  We had two lectures every day and worked and worked and worked. My roommates and I had planned to visit a museum and gallery after class time two evenings, but were so exhausted we just went to the closest places to get dinner and came back and did our homework and crashed.

Me at my work station with exercises behind me

Can you see me glowing in the photo above? (Having so much fun.) By the way, the work piece with the bird is not a finished piece; it's just an exercise in layering designs with dye and paint. The studio was so well equipped. Everything was at our fingertips. And right next door was a house that was where we ate lunches that she prepared for us, had a living room where we sometimes sat and had discussions and put work on a design wall and had critiques, and had an amazing library of books we could read while we were there.

On the door frame to the house next to the studio

On the dining room table

wonderful curtains on the living room windows

So now I'm back home armed with ideas and truly enriched. I've begun to order supplies I'll need for my assignments and ready to get started with them so that they will be done for when I go back in October for the second session.
     While I'm waiting for the paints and dyes to arrive, I've begun some hand stitching on a small piece that will become a little purse. I'm trying to do it all by hand as a prototype so that I can have the girls at the Boys and Girls Club where I volunteer make them, too. They want to make purses and they don't have sewing machines. The only problem is the straps. Those are awfully long. I can't see the girls sewing those by hand. Maybe I can sew those at home for them on my machine.

in process

     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 the artists know you stopped by. Thanks for visiting.

Will You Settle For a Design You Aren't Thrilled With?

     Since I wasn't thrilled with my first attempt at a wildflower quilt, and it was going to be displayed in City Hall, I knew I had to make another one pronto. Luckily, as I was packing some previously made quilts to take with me for show and tell, another inspiration struck. I was choosing to take this small quilt called Continuity with me that I liked a lot and I thought its design would do well for a wildflower quilt.
      So I got out my gelatin plate (a store bought Gelli plate) and I mixed up paints in similar colors to the ones on Continuity and I monoprinted some fabrics on cotton muslin. I wanted to use hexagon shapes in the background, so to create those, this is how I did it using two toilet paper rolls, duct tape, and some wire:
1.) I measured one-inch intervals on the wire strip and bent it at one-inch intervals until I had six sides. (I used a printed hexagon as a template to get the angle correct.)
2.) I cut up the side of one of the toilet paper rolls lengthwise.
3.) I cut up a one-inch length on the other toilet paper roll and taped it into the other roll to make it larger.
4.) I wrapped the six-sided wire strip around one end of the newly formed toilet paper roll and bent the end of the roll into a hexagon, wrapping duct tape securely around the wire so that it would hold its hexagon shape. And voila, I had a hexagon stamp.

my sturdy hexagon stamp

     Then, after I spread the paint on the Gelli plate with the brayer, I gently pressed the hexagon onto the plate here and there before I put the fabric on top. 

     And here are some of my fabrics after printing.

This collage was made with the App Pic Collage

     I cut the fabrics into various sized rectangles and sewed them together, put them onto batting, thread sketched one of my wildflower shadow silhouettes,  hand sewed on various sheers, stamped other design elements, did some embroidery, added a pillowcase backing, and then machine sewed onto the flower again. And here is Continuity II.

Continuity II

I'm very happy with this one. It measures 20 inches x 29.5  Here is the artist statement for it:

Wildflowers are a sight to see when they are in masses in fields and on the sides of the road. But they are in peril for several reasons. One of those is the disappearance of the honeybee. The flower and the bee depend upon each other. Will the flowers and the bees continue or will the cycle be broken and these shapes remain only in our imaginations?

As for my "failed" wildflower quilt. I think it needs more contrast in some areas and I'll work on it more some other time after I let it sit awhile. But I think it's important for me to post my not so good attempts here as well as the successes so that beginners can see that it's ok and normal for not all art to work out. It makes me feel less insecure when I see some expert artists post some of their "failed' attempts, too and when they discuss what went wrong.

     In my last post I told you that I had big news. I've been accepted into Jane Dunnewold's three year Art Cloth Mastery Class in San Antonio. It involves me going out there to her studio five times during the three years and working in between sessions at home. The first session begins Sunday, March 6. She sent pre-assignments and I've been busy working on them for weeks. I've read poetry. I read Molly Bang's Picture This which was amazing. I've read many books on design and composition, but this one was exceptional. Also on the reading list was a book about Notan in which I learned a lot from doing the exercises in the book. I read Drawn To Stitch, which I had to review for the class. I had to prepare texture studies, collect color samples, and collect imagery for symbols I might want to work on for the three years. Needless to say, I'm very excited about it. I'm at a point in my artistic endeavors where I need a push and advice from someone with a lot of experience and I've admired her words and work for a long time so I'm jumping in.

     I'm linking this late to Off The Wall Friday where you can find other art quilt blogs. Please make comments on there posts so that they know you stopped by. Thanks for visiting.

     

How Can You Tell When A Design Isn't Quite Right?

     Have you ever finished a piece but then looked at it and thought something wasn't working? I finished my wildflower piece and was sort of happy with it. It came out as I intended it. I hung it on the design wall for a few days and showed it to my art group. I didn't ask for a critique so I didn't get any. But something was bothering me about it.
     So there are a few tricks I knew to do. One is to take a photo and look at the photo on a small scale. That way you just see the shapes, colors, and values. When I did that, I could still tell that something was off, but I couldn't pinpoint it. The next thing, was to look at it upside down. When I did that, I immediately saw what was annoying me. My ammonite fossil was both too small and it was facing in the wrong direction.
     Luckily, it was an easy and quick fix. I cut another fossil from prepainted fabric I had and free motion sewed it right on top of the old one. I ripped out the old seeds, which I didn't like anyway for two reasons. I didn't like the shapes I chose and I didn't like how they ended up on top of one of the rectangle shapes of fabric. Now with the fossil facing the other direction, they were in open space and I could redo the shapes better. Then I added another chain of embroidery to connect to the fossil and all was good.

old version

The Seed Bearer

     So now I declare it finished. I'm still not crazy about it. There are parts of it I like but still I'm bothered about something. Enough time spent here so I'm moving on to other projects now. Maybe someday, I'll see what I'm missing. I'm in the mood to go monoprint some fabrics. Poor cats will be locked out of the studio for a bit. I've got some big news next post. 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 Have A Favorite Process In Creating Your Art?

     When you create a piece of art, do you have a favorite step or process? I'm not sure I do. I'm slow to start a piece. I think about how I want it to look in the end and usually try to sketch it out and paint it several times first. I enjoy drawing and painting so I find that part fun and relaxing. Getting fabrics ready is also a good time for me because I get to mix colors with my paints and who can't have fun with that? If you get the wrong color, just keep mixing. If the fabric doesn't come out right for this project, it will be good for another one.
     In my last installment, I had my fabrics pinned on my design wall and was happy with the arrangement and colors, but it was a bit boring.

last week

     The large rectangle in rust needed to be darker and more oomph. There was paint left behind in many of the colors on the plastic on the cutting table. So I sprayed it with water, put the rectangle of fabric on top of the leftover paint, and brayered heavily to pick up the paint.

adding paint from the plastic to the fabric

     That actually helped some and it cleaned up the mess. Then I added more paint using a sponge and Dyne-na-Flow in Chartreuse by Jacquard, and various rust colors I mixed up with acrylic paints and GAC-900 by Golden. Here is the result

surface designed fabric

The fabric to the right of it is a commercial fabric by Stonehenge. I also added acrylic paints and GAC-900 to the girl and the window in places to darken that area, too. Once I was happy with the tints, shades, and hues, I sewed the fabrics down to the background fabric with a straight stitch. Then I backed it with batting and quilted the girl, window, and walkway. After that, I decided to add two more fabrics and pinned them on to try them out. I think I like them because they keep the viewer's eye from leaving the piece. I'll sew them down down today.  All of these steps have been lots of fun for me, too. It's like having a conversation with the artwork. It almost tells me what it needs next. As you see, it has changed from the original sketch and painting. Once it has become fabric, it takes on a life of its own with its textures and unique character and begins to evolve. It's a fascinating process to me.

     I've been struggling with how to quilt the background. Perhaps, that is the least favorite part for me. I take the photos and put them into the App ArtStudio and then sketch possible quilt patterns on top to see what they might look like. For some of them, I'm happy with them for a day. Then the next day, I realize that they just won't look right for the piece. I think that yesterday, I finally hit one that will be just right for it (I hope). At least today, I still like it. 

     So here is how it looks on the design wall now. (By the way, these photos are taken with my iPad at night with just the overhead light. That's why they are a little fuzzy.)

in process

     The next step for today is to sew the two new pieces of fabric onto the background. Then, quilt the flowers onto the bottom right (from the shadow photos I took here), then quilt the rest of the background, and finally put on a pillowcase backing. (I think that's the plan, anyway. Unless the artwork tells me differently as I go.) So, I guess my favorite process overall is the conversation with artwork. I'm linking this with 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.

How Do You Switch From Sketch To Fabric?

     Is there a favorite way you switch from sketch to fabric? I vary in my ways. This time, I painted my sketch here first. Then I painted a set a fabrics. I put plastic over my cutting table and set out all of my paints, fabric medium, sponge brushes, dishes for mixing, tub for putting the painted fabrics, bowl for water, and put the three cats out of the studio so they wouldn't get paint on their paws because some of the paints might be toxic. I forgot something so I quickly went to get it and left the door open a crack and came back to find this.

Opus snuck in to help

After I locked him out again, I painted my background fabric. But when it dried, it was way too blue and too saturated of a blue. I loved the color, but it wasn't the color I wanted for this piece. So I decided I could either save it for the back side or for another art quilt. I painted another large piece of fabric, and it came out a little more green than I had planned, but I decided to go with it. Then I painted the other pieces. All came out as planned except that I couldn't get the large rectangular rust piece dark enough. I'm going to repaint that one.  Here are the painted fabrics.

Painted fabrics lined up

The one on the left came out lighter than intended but looked alright when first pinned up on the design wall on top of the background fabric. I even painted some whited eyelet cotton fabric thinking that might come in handy since this quilt is about wildflowers. In the layout above, I included a piece of fabric I rusted a few years ago.

     Next, I cut the fabrics as per the sketch and pinned them onto the background on the design wall and made some changes. This is what I have so far. The girl and window are digitally printed. 

in-process

     It's a little boring, but it's on its way. A main part of the design is a group of wildflowers that I want to put in the bottom right. I had thought I would machine stitch outlines of them there, but I need some good photos of some flowers to get the outlines from. I know I can always find copyright free photos online, but I prefer to use my own photos so today, I visited a wildlife refuge looking for some wildflowers to photograph and I got a nice surprise.

     I wanted to place a piece of white paper behind each plant I found for each photo so that I could isolate the lines of each plant. Then I could sketch it later from the photo and from the sketch do a stitching onto the quilt. Here's how I set up the first photo.

taking photo of wildflower

     But what I noticed was not the plant, but how great the shadow was! So for all the photos I took, I set up photos of shadows of plants.  This next one is one in particular that I love.

plant shadow

I took that photo and played with it later using the App Snapseed and got the next photo that I may use for something, maybe on this quilt somehow.

photo from App

I took about ten photos that I think I can get good outlines from so I'll play more with those tomorrow. The fabrics need more oomph, too.
     As I was deciding how to do the wildflowers I came up with all sorts of ideas. Some were very interesting and elaborate. But then, I realized I should stick to the processes that I find fun and that I'm good at so I abandoned most of the other ideas. The answer to the original question then, for me, this time, is to get the fabrics ready first, layout the design, then figure out how to add texture and alter colors to make it more interesting. All fun for me. Opus (and Andy and Rosie) are glad the painting is done so that they can be back in the studio to play with me. 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 the artists know you stopped by. Thanks for visiting.

When Is It Time To Switch From Sketching To Fabric?

     When you use a sketchbook to plan your art quilts, how do you know you are ready to to get out the fabric? I've been working on a series of sketches to prepare for a quilt about wildflowers using my niece as one of the focal points. In it, she represents a force in the Universe. In the series, she is always manipulating an ammonite fossil. This time she is spreading seeds with the fossil. In previous posts, I've shown some sketches. Here is how I've painted them in succession trying to see how I could interpret the image in my head into fabrics.

The Seed Bearer 1

In this one and the others, I was influenced by my trip to Croatia and used the image of a ruined window and aging walls and walkways. I like aspects of this one, but it definitely has a way to go.

Seed Bearer 2

In this one, I used shapes that I would cut out of various fabrics. I like it better, but it is out of balance. It made me notice that the first one didn't have enough of value contrast.

Seed Bearer 3

     In this version, I taped extra paper to the bottom of my sketch page. That's why there is a line there. I like this one the best, but there are changes that are still needed. I took this photo and put it into the Art Studio App and played with the hue of the blue green shape and made it more of an olive green. That seems to work better. Also I made the rust shape longer at the bottom. And I made the yellow orange shapes thinner. 

     Getting back to the original question, I think I need to paint up some fabrics and get to it. The textures and patterns on the fabrics will determine what is needed at this point. The requirement for the exhibit is that it is exactly 20 inches wide and at least 30 inches long. So after Christmas, I'll get out my Gelli plate and paints and see what I come up with. But the sketch has given me a good starting point. 

     Speaking of Christmas, I showed you the Christmas art quilt I planned to have printed into cards here. I'm very pleased with how they came out. I used a card template that came with my Mac. I put the image of my quilt on the first page. I put separate text boxes for each word and bordered them with dashes (so that it looks like stitches) on the third page and I put "Art by reginabdunn.com" on the fourth page. I put that on a flash drive and gave it to my local printing company. Here is the result:

Front Page

(the watermark is not on the card... I only put it on this photo for the blog)

Third page

Fourth Page

I hope you all have a Very Merry Christmas. Thank you so much for reading my blog. It means so much to me. When I look at my statistics and see followers from so many different countries, it makes me so very happy that I can reach you.  Peace, Everyone.

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.