How Do You Make Repair Work More Fun?

     Even though we are artists don't we get asked to repair clothes for our family members? And, in my case, since my husband does so many good things for me, how can I refuse? But I do hate repair sewing. It is so uncreative. Plus, I'm not very skilled at it. I don't take the time to read how to do a repair; I just look at what needs to be done and figure out my own way so that I can be done with it.
     The latest repair request was to sew up some holes that had appeared in the crotch of his favorite shorts.

holes from outside

     He asked me to put a patch on it. I thought a patch there would cause discomfort, so, instead, I used a darning stitch on the machine and did a nice job with matching thread and sewed and disguised the offending area. All was again in the creative mode in the studio (or so I thought).

sewn up on the outside

     After he used them once and they went through a washing cycle, the holes were back. So a patch was indeed required. Well ... My mischievous nature took over...  I used a matching thread for the outside and darned the holes shut.

     But, on the inside, I chose a fabric for the patch that had character!

patch on the inside

      When I gave him back his shorts, I said, "here they are with a matching thread on the outside so that it won't be quite so noticeable." He inspected the outside and agreed that no one would notice, especially since it's deep in the crotch. Then he opened up the shorts to look at the inside and started laughing and said, "Oh, So well done!"
     I think I now know how to have fun with repair sewing. Do any of you have any hints on how to enjoy repair work?
   

Generous Gift and Using Up Fabric

     I was in the studio minding my own business when my husband came in with two plastic cases. I thought they were hardware or fishing tackle or something like that because he had just come home from bike riding with his buddies. He opened them up and this is what was inside!

Gobs and gobs of  embroidery floss

     "Holy moly! Where did you get that?" I asked. One of his friends cleaned out his garage and the floss was from his late mother. It was in two separate cases in random order so I dumped it all out and began to organize it by color as you see in the photo. I'm planning to keep only some of it and take the rest to my art group to give away. I can't imagine that there are any colors missing.
     The last couple of weeks I've been busy making wheel chair covers. I've made seven. I'll be traveling in the Fall a bit so I wanted to have them made through the Holidays and I found it was easier to make them in pairs. So here are photos of six of them. (I haven't taken a photo of the last one  yet.)

Night sailing

Day sailing

Modeled after my friend's dog

A request for another dog

Butterfly

Hummingbird

     I inherited that gingham fabric and wasn't sure I would ever use it, but it sure has been useful for these covers. It's very colorful as a background. Little by little, I'm digging into my stash of commercial fabrics. That's a good thing, because for my art quilts I hardly ever use these fabrics anymore and I hate for things to go to waste. 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.

Need A Fun And Useful Group Activity?

     My art group, ArtsEtc, had an excellent activity taught by one of our members, Pat Miles, for our August meeting. She taught us how to decorate switch plates and electric outlets. All the ones in her house are fabulous mini art pieces.

What you need:
Fabric or decorative papers
Bits of jewelry and/or beads
Paint
Stamps
Thread
Needle
Scissors
Glue
Mat medium
Brush

     Here are the basic steps:

1.) Unscrew the switch plate or outlet from the wall.

2.) Cut the fabric about 3/4 inches larger on all sides than the switch plate or outlet. You can also prepare bits of fused fabrics or even papers. But size it here at this step.

3.) Choose how you want to embellish it. You can sew on beads, bits of  jewelry, found items, you can stamp it, paint it, embroider it, etc. Do it at this step.

4.) This is the step where you glue the finished piece to the plate or outlet. I used tacky glue. Other people used a spray glue. Others used mat medium. I spread the glue onto the plate with my gloved finger and used a little water. Then I pressed the fabric on top and slid it into place. I turned it over, cut into the corners with little scissors, folded the corners in and glued them down. Then I glued the sides down onto the back, too.

5.) Then I used the small scissors to slice open the opening for the switches and cut into the corners there, too. I folded those tiny pieces to the back and glued them down, also.

6.) Next, I used a 1-inch flat brush to apply mat medium to the entire surface on the front and let it dry overnight. That way the plate can still be cleaned.

7.) After it was dry, I used the points of my small scissors (since I don't have an awl) to poke the holes where the screws go.

8.) I screwed it back into the wall. Pat told us that if you use thick fabric, you need to buy longer screws, but they are easy to find. Final step is to paint the tops of the screws.

This one is on a tiled kitchen wall

This one is on my family room wall

This one is on my family room wall

 So I've done three so far and I think I want to do maybe twelve more.
A few tips ... Remember that all sewn embellishments need to be added before you glue the fabric to the plate or outlet.  And don't put embellishments too close to the switches because then they will just be in your way. 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 and thanks for visiting my blog. I hope this posting reads ok. I made it using my iPad instead of my usual laptop because my laptop is in the shop.

What Do You Get Out Of On-LIne Classes?

     Have you ever taken an on-line class that you have found very freeing and refreshing? Well, I've just finished a piece from one that has done just that for me. Before this class, I've done most of my work on the sewing machine. This class and this piece was done totally by hand. It was pieced by hand, basted by hand, appliquéd by hand, embroidered by hand, and quilted by hand. I never thought I would do such a thing, but I was so inspired by the artist's blog and art, Jude Hill at SpiritCloth that I signed up for her class Spirit Cloth 101. I started it in February by reading through all the text of the class and pondering about what my theme would be for quite some weeks while I worked on other projects.
     If you haven't followed my blog before, you can go back and see how I progressed on this piece here  here, here, and here.
     And here it is finished. The story is that the rocks fell from the moon into the river. There are eight rocks shown on the quilt. The river has eight eyes in it and that symbolizes the eight rocks peaking out of the river as they dance about in it.

Moon Dance

The background fabric is indigo I dyed several years ago with my art group. Most of the rocks I gelatin monoprinted and then hand painted the veins, two of the rocks are from commercial cottons. the "tree" is a piece of commercial silk, the multi-colored strip across the bottom is commercial cotton, and the borders are commercial from Marcia Derse.  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.
     I don't take many classes or workshops, but I'm glad I took this one. I learned some new techniques, but most of all, I learned about storytelling. And to let go more in my work. Thanks for visiting.

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.

Line Study Evolving

     Do you feel pressure trying to decide which colors to use in a piece of art? Or which arrangement to use in a composition? I always do. I wonder if there would have been a better choice. Maybe it's because I don't have a formal art training background. Well, for now, I've found a solution that frees me up from worrying about making an irreversible error. I go back and forth between digital and real media.
     In my last post, here, I showed you lines I had sewn onto white crinoline and I was trying to decide what to do next. I showed you this image that I had created with a combination of ArtStudio and Snapseed Apps on my iPad.

digital image from ArtStudio and Snapseed

 Both Apps are so much fun. ArtStudio is very much like Photoshop Elements. In it I used tools to paint over the photos of my crinoline gong interpretation and my crinoline Buddha. Snapseed doesn't take any work or much imagination. It does all the work. You just click on different screens of your photo and it manipulates it all by itself.
     Then I got to work with actual paints on the crinoline that was sewn onto batting.

Paints and GAC 900 on crinoline

I also painted the crinoline sewn Buddha. Then I hand-appliquéd the Buddha and sewed on beads.

In process

 So now I'm again at a stage of not knowing what to do next. I started to square off the piece with a rotary cutter but when I had three edges cut, I paused before I cut off the bottom. I liked the uneven bottom edge. I have to decide whether to paint that bottom edge of fabric, cut it off, add another piece of fabric on top, hang fringy something or other? How to sew on those brown squares. And of course, I need to decide how to edge it. Probably a pillowcase finish. 

     My next step will be to take this last photo back to ArtStudio and paint up the bottom edge various ways to see how it looks. Light, dark, medium values. Teal, brown, mottled, etc.

     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.

Line Study

     In my latest art group, ArtsEtc, meeting we did an activity exploring how different media can be used on crinoline to express lines. The basic method was to sew the lines onto the white cotton crinoline in black thread and then use various paints afterwards.
NOTE: I prewashed my crinoline to remove any chemicals so that it would take paint well. I drip dried it.
We were supposed to bring some sort of design already drawn out ready to sew. I had no idea what I design I wanted work with and drew out several but didn't like any of them. Then I went through photos I keep in a file that I think I may use for surface design.
     One of the photos is of a gong. It has a nice texture and I do love circles.  So I played with the gong photo in Photoshop Elements and found edges and lines and sketched those out and decided that is what I would sew. I cut out a piece of crinoline and batting and in the meeting I free motion machine stitched this.

gong lines

A good start. But where to go from there. A few days later, I was walking by a Buddha incense burner we have and decided to stitch that too. It might go well with the gong.

incense burner

stitched Buddha on crinoline

To stitch the Buddha:

1.) I made the photo of the incense burner black and white in Photoshop Elements, and increased the contrast.

2.) I inserted it into a WORD document and changed its size until it was a good size to fit nicely onto the stitched gong lines. 

3.)  I printed the WORD document.

4.)  I put tracing paper on top and traced the lines of the Buddha that I wanted to stitch using a mechanical pencil.

5.) I pinned the tracing paper on top of the crinoline and free motioned machined stitched it.

6.) Using tweezers, I carefully pulled off the tracing paper. (I removed the tracing paper before I stitched the "hair" of the Buddha".)

     There remained so many possibilities of how to paint it and how to collage it that I decided to play with the composition with my iPad using ArtStudio and SnapSeed Apps first. 

This is what I ended up with as a digital collage using photos from above.

digital collage

So now I will get out the actual paints, beads, and others and play with my actual stitched pieces. The whole thing is about 7 inches square by the way. I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can find other art quilt blogs. Please make comments to let the artists know you stopped by.