Do You Make Your Own Christmas or Holiday Cards?

     Should I make my Christmas cards this year or should I just buy a set and send them out? That's the question I pose each year. If I make them, I like to do it in the summer when I'm less busy and then they are ready to go. But I forgot to do it this summer. And I'm not one of those artists that can just slap a collage together. I take a long time to make design decisions. I'm getting quicker about it than I used to be. This week, I decided that I would give myself two days to put together a design and finish a small art quilt for a card cover. If I didn't accomplish that, then I would purchase cards.
     I began by choosing a previously monoprinted fabric for a background. I thought I wanted it to be zen-like. So I chose another previously monoprinted fabric in a complimentary color and cut out a sun shape and hand embroidered it onto the background which I had placed onto batting.

in progress

     Then I got the idea to put a bird and a saying on it. For inspiration, I browsed through my book Inspired to Quilt by Melanie Testa, which has helped me often. And I reviewed my notes from a class called Spirit Cloth 101 which I took from Jude Hill. That class not only showed me many marvelous techniques in hand stitching, but it also passed on the art of story telling in cloth. And the great news is that the class is now open to all for free. Here is a link to it.
     So I finished it up by thread stitching a bird with my sewing machine onto commercial fabric, cutting it out close to the stitching, and hand sewing it onto the background. Then I embroidered branches using two colors of embroidery floss (3 strands) in a wrapped back stitch. I printed out text onto white cotton muslin, cut them out and hand stitched them on. Next, I cut out a piece of commercial fabric an hand sewed it on with embroidery floss. To finish it up, I added a piece of fabric on the back, and then I used two colors of embroidery floss and whip stitched around the edges (6 strands of the dark teal and 3 strands of the rust).

Joy and Peace

     I plan to scan the image in the computer and add a frame. I'll use that for the cover of the card. I'll put some text for inside the card and take it to a printing company and have them print the cards for me. That's the plan, anyway. We'll see how it looks as a printed card. Of course, the watermark won't be on it.  If it doesn't look good, then this year will be about store-bought cards. At least I tried and I ended up with a small art quilt. 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.

     

From Photo To Sketch To Fabric

      My art group, ArtsEtc, meets once a month except for July because that meeting falls on the July 4th weekend. This past summer, a small group of us decided to meet at my house that weekend and take a walk at a local park and take photos for inspiration. I came away with photos of Spanish moss hanging from large live oak trees, and close-up shots of beautiful textures on leaves and bark. The sunlight of the early morning left wonderful patterns peaking through the foliage as we walked down the shaded path towards the lake. Suddenly, the trees opened up before us when reached lake and this is one of the many photos I took as an osprey sat on one of the piers as it fed on a fish it recently caught that morning.

early morning on the lake

     I knew that I wanted to capture this moment in my art somehow. It was very quiet. I could hear the water lapping against the piers. I could hear some birds in the distance. No traffic noise at all. No wind. None of us spoke.

     So at my sketching group, I made a few sketches with this photo as the focal point. Some were more realistic. Some were more abstract. I eventually settled on one that I liked a lot that is a stylized landscape.
     I got out my monoprinted fabrics from here and some older ones and started laying them out on my design board to fit into the sketch background. That was the easy part. The harder part was to figure out how to translate the lines I had drawn on the sketch into fabric. I could couch them on with fibers, I could do bobbin work with thick thread, or I could try to paint the lines on. In the end, I decided to put two black threads in the needle at once and then free motion stitch as normal. To do this, you thread one spool as normal, and then put the other spool on the other thread holder and thread as normal but through the other tension disk. (Both threads go through the same and only eye of the needle; size 90 universal needle.) I had no problems with thread breakage or thread tension.
     I sketched out the lines onto the yellow quilting paper first and pinned it on top of the fabric and then sewed (with the double threads) on top of the drawn lines on the paper. Then I ripped off the paper. Here's a photo that shows some of the stitching done and some of the paper still on with the sketching on the paper.

in-progress stitching

If you think the fabric with the piers is lighter in color than you saw from the link above, you are correct. That's because I decided to use the reverse side of it. I felt that the "right side" was too dark and saturated for this quilt. Here's a close-up photo of part of it.

with paper and sketching waiting to be stitched

     The color inside the piers was added with Shiva Paintstiks. Now I have the stitching done and am down to some more difficult decisions. How to do the bird and how to add Spanish moss. I've made three birds already. One that I printed onto cotton fabric from a photo, but it just doesn't fit with this style of art. One that I painted onto fabric and just doesn't fit, either. And one that I printed onto sheer fabric and it is too faint. I have a few more ideas to try out for the bird.

     For the Spanish moss, I thought I was going to use painted cheese cloth, but the texture doesn't fit with this quilt. Neither does some wool roving that I have. I need something smooth and flat to go with the lines I stitched and the flat look of the painted piers. I have few ideas to try for that, too. Time to put on the creativity hat. 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 the artists know you stopped by. Thanks for visiting.

Unseasonably Warm

     I haven't been posting lately because I've been stuck and unable to show what's been on my design wall. I was working on a call for entry and got to a point where the work just got ugly and I didn't know what to do with it. I had a vision for it, but couldn't get it to come out. Meanwhile, at my sketching sessions with my friends, I was sketching a couple of designs for quilts that quickly came out of nowhere and are just what I want, but don't fit any calls for entry. Go figure. (I can't wait to make those quilts, but those will have to wait.)
     So I took the ugly work off the design wall. And I put up a new one for a different call for entry called Florida in Fabric. It's due in January. Since I live in Florida, I've been meaning to enter this one and have just been putting it off until I got the other one done. This new one has been flowing nicely. I had the fabrics already created. I monoprinted them awhile ago when the call came out. I created patterns on the gelatin plate that reminded me of sand, ocean, sky, tides, etc. and used colors that reminded me of walks along a beach.
     Then I assembled the panels of the fabrics collage-style on batting, added image transfers of photos I took, added stitching, appliqué, and other surface techniques (it's still in process). Here are some close-ups of it so far.

bird panel

shell panel

beach grass panel

That's all I can show you so far. But I'm very happy with it.
     As I've been working on it, I'm getting a feel for what went wrong with my other call for entry and am ready to try again. It's not due until February. What I'm learning is to do work that comes from my heart and and if I have to work too hard to make it come out, then it isn't meant to be. This piece about Florida came together very quickly and easily because Florida is a part of me and I could smell and feel the beach as I assembled this quilt. It has been a joy to make.
     If I can immerse myself back into the location where I experienced the other call for entry (it was in Panama where I took the photo that I'm trying to interpret into cloth), then it also will come from the heart and will just flow and be a joy to make. And now that I've stepped away for a bit of time, I think I can start over and do it right. And this time, I think it will just be easy. And if it isn't, then I'll pass on the other call for entry, do the one for Florida, and get busy making the quilts whose designs appear to me out of nowhere. They are the ones that are meant to be for me.
I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can visit other art quilt blogs. Please make comments on their posts to let them know you stopped by.

Distraction

I took a break from my work on a larger quilt yesterday to make a small one (8 inches x 10 inches). There is a store/gallery downtown that has some of my quilts on display for sale. It's called Funky Trunk Treasures and if you visit the link you'll see that its logo is a peacock feather. So I made this quilt for Kimberly, the owner to display in her shop.

Kimberly's Feather

It was a lot of fun to make and I finished it off by sewing some glass beads onto it. 

Today, I painted the background of my larger quilt with some textile paints. The weather was beautiful today and some migratory birds have been coming through the yard lately. I'm expecting Indigo Buntings any day now. They always visit in mid April for a few days and I don't want to miss seeing them so I set up my fabric and paints outside on our screened-in patio. One of my cats sat on the table with me and watched every move I made. He occasionally grabbed my paintbrush as I used it. Eventually, a box turtle came out of the woods and Opus, the cat, was distracted and left me to watch the turtle make its way across the yard. I was going to go on a bike ride and take my sketching supplies but it was too nice at home.