What Do You Do With Art Experiments?

     When you create a piece of cloth from an experiment do you put it in a notebook, put it away somewhere, or try to create something out of it? I usually try to create something. I hate for things to be put away and not used. Such was the case with an experiment on silk from my most recent Art Cloth class with Jane Dunnewold. We learned how to print on fabric using thickened dyes and used screens we had created in class to print through. Here is one of my results:

experimental screen print

     It was over a yard square in size. I cut it up into strips and machine-pieced them together. Then I overlapped two of the resulting long strips and sewed them together with a seam. I topstitched around the edges and then my scarf was finished. 

     I have two more cloths from that same procedure, but they don't seem as promising as this one was. But since I don't like cloth to just sit there, I may try to overdye them and turn them into cloth napkins. That's all for now because I'm very busy dyeing and printing to continue with my art series. I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can find other art quilt blogs. Please make comments on the artists' posts so that they know you stopped by. Thanks for visiting.

Fun with Paint

While waiting for the background fabrics to fully cure, I've been busy with side projects. I have four window boxes under our windows in the front of the house, and, over the years have grown various plants in them. We live on a heavily wooded lot in central Florida so they don't get much sun. I want some bright color there and the only flowers that have been successful in the boxes have been impatients. But even those the last few years have been challenging to keep alive. The eaves over the house prevent rain water from getting to them so I have to go out and regularly water them and I get eaten alive by mosquitoes when I do it. This year, I had the idea to forget about putting plants in them and here is my solution for color in them.

painted with acrylics and sprayed with glossy topcoat.

This is a sculpture that is near the front door. I put a painted bird with her to provide unity... I'm learning about the elements of art.

these plants are self-sufficient

With all those acrylic paints to clean up, I used a white transparent cloth of some sort I had laying around. I don't know what type it was. I just wiped up the brushes, sprayed it with water, wiped up the plastic dish I used as a palette. I squished up the cloth and wet it more and spread the paint all over it to clean everything up so that I didn't have any paint to put down the drain. Here is the wipe cloth when I was done.

Wipe-cloth

I knew the cloth had possibilities for an art quilt/s. But instead, I cut it into three long lengths and sewed them together with an embroidery stitch on my machine and then machine couched a fancy yarn along the edges and made a scarf out of it.

I love wipe-rags!