What To Do With A Piece That Isn't Working?

      Haven’t we all had works that started out with such promise and us with such enthusiasm about them? And then either we’ve overworked them or somehow we just couldn’t get the tone we wanted out of them? Well, that seems to have happened with my latest small piece. It started as just a line study in crinoline. Then I wanted to develop it a little farther into a meditative piece with a Buddha. Since it was a small quilt, I felt I would just work free and easy and see where it went and have fun with it. It was great fun at first, but then I kept making adjustments. I thought I was liking it and when I thought it was done, I realized it wasn’t working out.  So how do I end it so that I’m happy with it?

     Since I last showed you the quilt, I added a fabric piece to the bottom. I had found a teal cotton piece that I had treated with some rusty hardware some time ago. To fit it with this quilt, I added some some texture rubbings with Shiva Paintstiks and left the rough edge of the fabric on the bottom edge. 

rubbing plate, paintstik, brush, palette,
tape to get pain on bottom edge of fabric

And I couched a fiber onto the border of it.  I found some sari silk ribbons and sewed those onto the other edges with the intent of squaring them off but then I liked the pattern of the edges they already had. So for the time being, I’m leaving the edges as they are. And I do love the edges. Funny that I love the fabric piece at the bottom and the sari ribbon shapes more than the actual quilted piece I started with.

     My stitched Buddha wasn’t the greatest. Since the quilt wasn’t looking good to me, I thought that was the problem. So I stitched another Buddha. The Buddha looked much better. Better face, better hand, better foot, but not a better quilt. 

with the new Buddha, couched fiber,
sari ribbon-borders, and bottom fabric

So I removed the Buddha and the squares and pinned a monk from sheer fabric in its place. 

Put a Monk on it!

A little better, but still, I don’t like the quilt as a whole. Next step was to look at the quilt without a monk or a Buddha or squares. 

Sigh (not the title)

It looks empty now.

     The end of this story for me is to put it away for a long time and work on something else. I sure wish I had a design expert on hand to tell me where I went wrong so that I could learn from it, but maybe in the future I’ll figure it out. So for now... Let it go... Let it go... Let it go...

Don't you wish you had a private art expert to guide you? Or would that take away your voice? What do you think? I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can find other art quilt blogs. Please leave comments on their posts to let them know you stopped by.

Adding More Texture and Blending to the Background

     I went to my monthly studio meeting with my art group, ArtsEtc. This meeting was an exercise in texture rubbings. I decided to take my background for the art quilt I've been working on and try to unite the panels more by using the Shiva paintstiks in two ways.
     The first way, was to take the paints and mix the colors on an old plastic plate to get a pale blue and then load a stencil brush with the paint. Then I brushed the paint onto the edges of the whitest panel to have it blend into the bluer panels around it more. The orangish panel was a little too orangish for me for this quilt and I had plans to sew a white sheer fabric on top to tone it down. Instead, I brushed white/gray paintstiks on top. I think it helped.
     The second way, was to make texture rubbings that would overflow the edges of the panels to help blend the panels together more. The problem with this was that the background was already a quilt and the thickness prevented pattern from the texture plates from rubbing through. But there is always a way...
     So here is what the solution was: (I put plastic onto the table surface to keep it clean.)
1.) I took the paintstiks and rubbed them right onto the brass trivet. I used various colors together.

Half of trivet is rubbed with paintstiks of various colors

2.) I placed the trivet paint-side down on the quilt where I wanted the pattern to be.

Trivet placed paint-side down

3.) I carefully, flipped the quilt over and rubbed from the back side of the quilt.

Rubbing with my hand
You can also rub with a hard edge like a ruler

4.) In this panel edge, I felt I wanted more unity. I thought there was too much of a difference between the two panels. (You can see some places in the top of the photo and the bottom where I already did this procedure.)

Needs something here

5.) So I took several colors of paintstiks and rubbed them directly onto this plastic rubbing plate.

Thick with paints

6.) And I place the painted part of this plate paint side down where I wanted the pattern onto the quilt. I flipped the quilt over and I rubbed from the back side of the quilt.

Rubbing the texture from the back

7.) Here you can see the same section with its new pattern uniting the panels better.

With pattern overflowing the edge

So it's not too late to add texture rubbings to quilts after quilting. You just have to do it from the back. If you want a really well defined rubbing, then use a hard edge like a ruler to do the rubbing. If you want a more diffuse rubbing, then use your hand to do the rubbing. But do have the texture plate really thick with paint.             TIP: Practice the technique on a small scrap quilt first.

I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday Where you can visit other artist's art quilt blogs. Please make comments on their posts to let them know you were there.

New Background fabrics

I made a new gelatin plate for monoprinting two days ago and printed up some fabrics yesterday. Here is a great link from Linda Germain on how to make a plate.How to make a gelatin plate Linda has several YouTube videos and tutorials on her website and regularly blogs with tips on how to print. She prints on paper, though.
You can use any kind of paint or ink. I used regular acrylic paints since I had a supply from a painting class and want to use them before they dry out. To get my colors, I mixed ceruleuan blue, ultramarine blue, a little cadmium yellow light, and a lot of titanium white. I added an equal amount of fabric painting medium so that it would play well with fabric (although I don't think that is necessary).
I spread the paint with the brayer onto the gelatin plate and then pressed a toilet paper roll here and there onto the plate to get oval shapes and then laid down a piece of cotton muslin and pressed it down evenly and lifted it up. I sprayed water onto to the plate and used a clean piece of cloth to wipe up the extra paint and got a nice pattern on that cloth, too. I repeated several prints with various patterns for about 10 cloths.
Then, to get gray, I added a little cadmium light to the blue mixture and some more fabric medium and some more white.  Here are two of the prints.

with stripes

I'm linking this post to Off The Wall Friday Be sure to visit to see all the wonderful art quilters and make comments on their posts.

with ovals

After the paint dried, I used Shiva Paintstiks, which are oil paints.  I found out that you can use the oil paints on top of acrylics without a problem, but you cannot use acrylics or other water-based paints on top of oils. Anyway, what I did was to put texture plates under the fabrics and then rub the sticks on top to get patterns and layers of patterns. I pressed the oil sticks first onto a plastic plate and mixed the colors with a palette knife to get colors I wanted and loaded stencil brushes with the paint and then rubbed the brushes across the fabric that was on top of the texture plates. (One of the texture plates was actually a brass trivet that I bought at a thrift shop.)

Here are the same two fabrics from above after I was done adding textures. I hope to use these for my next art quilt background.

with textures

with textures