I told you several weeks ago about my daily art project for this year: to make a small stitched collage using fabrics that I scored from my long-time art pal Joanne Weis. She cleaned out her huge stash of fabrics that she had dyed and surface-designed over two decades of making fiber art, and I brought home two huge garbage bags full. I have been reveling in the huge array of different fibers, colors, patterns and techniques that she used to create wonderful fabrics.
Most of her fabrics have some kind of design printed or painted on top of a dyed base. My challenge is to add enough of my own work on top so that it stops being Joanne's work and starts being Kathy's. Usually that has been stitching, mostly by hand but occasionally by machine. Sometimes I meld bits from several different fabrics and try to put them together into a single cohesive composition, unified by stitching.
This collage started with two different pieces from the Joanne bags: the red-white-brown print on top, and the coral-blue on the bottom. Joanne had laminated the green paper on top of the red print. I added two strips of off-white to cover the join between the two prints, and two more to provide interest in boring parts of the red print. Then I added lots of cross stitch in a few different threads. I was particularly enamored of the messy torn edge on the bottom of the coral, and took pains to keep it intact.
This one started with a small bit cut from a sample that Joanne had already collaged onto the gold fabric at left, adding the green and white papers and a lot of yellow machine stitching. I added a piece of the same coral-blue print that I used in the composition above, and tied it together with a strip of painted white paper. I added machine stitching in a dark teal to pick up the blue of the coral print, and more stitching in yellow (which doesn't exactly match the original, but I think I'm the only one who will ever notice that).
This one started with a bit of fabric painted in yellow, pale turquoise and white. I found some bits of blue that were left over from previous daily collages (I am scrupulously throwing away nothing of Joanne's stuff, because ever the tiniest piece may find a place in a subsequent collage). I had torn 1/4 inch strips of the green sateen a couple of weeks ago, but didn't use all of it, so they got stitched on top. I mounted the little collage on black (I was delighted to find about a half yard of plain black in the garbage bags, because sometimes you just need a plain fabric as a background or support). Then I machine stitched curvy leaf shapes to hold the whole thing together.
I'll show you more of my daily collages in another post or two!
