Sunday funnies 4

Another fabric collage

I was in the mood to do fabric collage this week as a respite between bouts of quilting.  This one was inspired by a piece of weaving that I acquired in the grab bag at my local textile art group.  It's a fairly unfortunate piece of weaving -- a bit motheaten in the middle, not very firmly woven and scraggly where the yellow yarn was inlaid into the red.  Apparently its maker saw how things were going and cut it off the loom in despair; it has two-inch warp threads flopping off the top and ten-inch warp threads tied in an overhand knot at the bottom.

Some years ago when Baer's, our wonderful old-fashioned fabric store, went out of business, I scored several garbage bags full of upholstery and notion sample books in a grab bag.  Somebody else got to them first and cut out all the actual samples, then gave me the cardboard books, which were what I wanted in the first place.  They make fabulous supports for collage, firm enough not to buckle under wet adhesives, big enough for large compositions, rigid enough to stand up by themselves.

I used a sample book as the base for my collage, covered it in a map and put a layer of cheesecloth over the top to subdue the printing.  Next to the weaving I put a slide that I rescued from the wastebasket at the School of Art (they were converting their slide library to digital images).  Although I love old slides, it's always disappointing that you can't just put them into your own artwork and let viewers see the image on the slide.  But this one, mounted above the white background, is sort of visible -- prompted by the title of the slide you can make out the dark field under a pale sky.

Then to rhyme with the plowed field, I added a sew-off square.

What do I like most about this collage -- that it's spare and evocative, or that every single thing in it, except for the cheesecloth, was rescued and recycled?

Fabric collage

I've been puttering in the studio over the last week or so, finishing up the two "turmoil" and "tranquility" quilts but also working on some smaller projects that have been on my radar screen for a while.  Thought you might like to see one of them.

Faithful readers know that I like to make art in series, and on a regular schedule, so last year I enlisted one of my art pals for a monthly fabric collage.  We agreed on a size and format, and then each of us made up six little baggies of fabric stuff from which we would make our collages.  Or I should say, six pairs, because each month we would both be working with the same raw materials.

I've really enjoyed making the collages, although I think it took almost the whole year before I felt totally comfortable with the concept.  Now that the year is over, I think I want to stick with the program and see if I can make them less like a crafts project and more like art.

I fell behind on my schedule and didn't finish the last two collages in the year until just now.  So here's November.

What I got in the baggie was a hank of blue embroidery floss and larger piece of white fabric with printing on it (actually a reproduction of the Gutenberg Bible).  Rooting around on the big work table in my studio, I found some adorable blue-and-white fabric with farm animals printed on it.  It had obviously once been a shirt -- still had a pocket on one of the pieces -- and I have no recollection of how it got to my studio table as I never saw it before.

I tried to arrange the Bible fabric on the animals but it wasn't working.  For a couple of days I had the fabrics on display by my sewing machine, looking unhappy.  Something else was needed to tie them together.  Then on the other end of my work table I discovered a tiny piece of fabric that I had screenprinted in a Jane Dunnewold workshop, left over from a quilt I made with it.  It called out to me and said it wanted to be with the Bible and the animals.  Since the screenprinted pattern was the words to The Battle Hymn of the Republic, I decided it was a suitable playmate.

I sewed the three pieces of fabric together and embroidered over them and they looked pretty good, but there was still a lot of empty space over at the right.  My first idea was to add a sew-off square, which also looked good but didn't occupy much of the space.  So I looked in my button bag and found lots of red and blue buttons to carry out the color scheme.

And here it is:

Sunday funnies 3

Just a little turmoil

I've written about the quilt I'm making to enter the SAQA "Turmoil" exhibit, and thanks to my husband being gone and not having to make meals or otherwise be sociable, I have finished sewing the top.  I think it looks pretty good; I'd give it a B in the category of for the first time you try something new.

Interestingly, the first time you try something new can fall anywhere on the quality spectrum.  I have looked back at some of the "number one"s in my longer series and thought they were embarrassingly crude (the technique hadn't yet been refined by practice) or embarrassingly simple (I hadn't yet figured out how to add complexity).  On the other hand, I have looked back at some "number one"s and realized that I hit a home run the first time out of the dugout, and much as I tried, I could never recapture the magic.

Here's one that I thought was great --

Crazed 1: Tricolor

I've made more than 20 in this series and while some have been pretty spectacular, I was never able to make another with this lovely character of different widths of the fine lines.  This quilt was sold out of the SAQA@20 traveling exhibit and I've always been sorry that it's gone.
But I digress.  I realized that the red turmoil quilt had become something I wasn't anticipating -- shapes made entirely out of pieced fine lines.  Arranging the shapes into a composition turned out to be easier said than done, especially since I did no advance planning and some of the shapes ended up sewed into larger expanses of background so they couldn't be shifted around without a lot of ripping and resewing.

But anyway, the top is done.  Now to decide how to quilt it.

I took some of my leftover bits and sewed a small quilt, just 6 x 8 inches, to donate to the SAQA Spotlight auction at their conference in April.  (If you're a SAQA member and want to make something small and non-threatening for a good cause, check out the Spotlight requirements here.)

(Actually I want this photo to be turned 90 degrees clockwise, but Blogger isn't letting me do that.  Tip your head to the left and see what you think.  And don't be distracted by those wider strips at the corner; the outer 3/4 inch will be hidden underneath a mat.)

Making the tiny quilt served three purposes: first, to use up the leftover bits; second, to donate to the good cause; and third, to test quilting approaches.  This particular quilting approach, in which I generally follow the lines of the piecing, worked just fine on a 6x8" piece, since I could easily turn it under the needle when the direction of the piecing changed.  But it would be impossibly tedious with a larger quilt, so I need a new approach.  I'll keep thinking.

Drawing -- my New Year's resolution

After three years of daily collage, I decided to shift gears in 2016 and have my daily art be drawing.  I've bought a little sketchbook and am filling a page every day.  But I've done something even more radical and signed up for ART 101 at University of Louisville -- the first formal art course I've ever taken in my life.

So for the first time in my life I find myself with a serious big sketchbook, not the dinky, unthreatening little ones that I am hesitantly becoming comfortable with.

sketchbooks -- big and little



















It's an online course, which makes life a whole lot easier than shlepping to campus.  But taking a drawing class at home requires different kinds of assignments, of course.  Even if you have a husband or roommate on premises there's no guarantee of a live model willing to sit still for you on demand.  So this week we're drawing our own feet, plus an irregularly shaped vegetable and a glass bottle.

I had to go out and buy a whole raft of pencils in different varieties, and have discovered that I like the charcoal pencils better than the graphite.  I'm trying to become confident with a darker, bolder mark, wrestling with my inner wimp who wants to make teeny weeny faint lines so nobody can see my hesitations and mistakes.  I'll keep you posted on how things go.

If you want to follow along with my daily drawing, I'm posting once a week to my daily art blog.  But maybe you'd rather wait till later in the year when I get a little better at it.