Archive for » October, 2010 «

Embrace Version 3, continued

I was blessed to have time in my studio again today. Okay, it’s my fault that this week was so busy. I insisted on not one, but two trips to Ikea. Poor hubby. He spoils me and I like it! Anyway, I spent more time replacing colors. Considering the fact that I never work in this color range (yellow-green, yellow, yellow-orange), I am actually having fun playing with such strong colors. I find it really helps to stop periodically and take pictures. It sometimes makes it easier to see problem areas. I see a few places now that I am going [ ... ]

Embrace Version 3

Last night I cleared off my work table and began reworking “Embrace.” This time I started with yellow-oranges on the right and I plan on loosely gradating the colors to yellow-greens on the left. I didn’t get quite finished, but I think I’m liking this direction much more that the hand-dyed version. But it will have to wait. Today I decided we had to go to Ikea. I really wanted to get some of these cute fabric vegetables. Sadly, they were completely out of stock. I did get the fabric fruit but now I’m going to [ ... ]

It’s a blustery day

Today is a blustery day. Weather.com said winds were up to 35 mph, although I heard up to 50 mph on the news. When we went on our hour-long walk this morning, there were no other walkers on the path. I wanted to go to Ikea today, but decided to postpone it. DH was all for it, but I don’t particularly like the idea of driving for nearly an hour each way during a tornado watch. So now I’m in the studio. I probably should get something done, so I decided to visit the green and yellow corner of my [ ... ]
Category: Embrace, portraits, work in progress  Comments off

Fabric flowers for shoeboxes

Today was a break from quilting. Today we had a craft day at church. One of our goals was to make fabric flowers with pony tail holders to put in the shoeboxes for Operation Christmas Child. Today we made 35 flowers!

Embrace Version 2

I’m not so sure I like working in black and white alone, so I decided to put the first version of Embrace up on the design wall so I could look at it a while. Back to my fabric stash. This time I pulled out a generous stack hand-dyed fabric. It was pretty much my main attempt at hand dyeing fabric. I used directions frome an American Quilter magazine article which taught how to dye the color wheel in 24 pint-size canning jars. Because this is about the only fabric I’ve dyed, I always treated them as precious. In 1998, [ ... ]
Category: Embrace, work in progress  Comments off

Auditioning fabrics and ideas

Today was all about auditioning fabrics. I made some guesses and filled in all my shapes, but I definitely think I’ll need to do some editing. Some areas seem too dark. In some areas I think two fabrics visually merge together, which I think I want to avoid. I was thinking about how much I enjoyed the original sketch and the overlapping lines, so I thought I would see what it looked like to overlay thin strips of fabric to mimic that feeling. Generally I think I like this sketchy effect, but I think tomorrow I’ll try a couple different shades.
Category: Embrace, work in progress  Comments off

Enjoying the fabric

Today I enjoyed running my fingers through my fabric stash and pulling out every black and white print that I could find. For this first experiment, I wanted to try eliminating color and just enjoy the variety of prints and the perceived shades of gray that they create. I started cutting some of the pieces. Mostly, I just tried to pick prints that were significantly different from the adjacent prints. I expect to audition different prints through this process.
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Revisiting Embrace

I’ve decided it is time for me to quit being lazy and quit making excuses. It’s time for me to get back to experimenting. Experimenting is great because, from the start, it gives you permission to fail. Some experiments will work out and some won’t. Either way, it’s okay because you’re learning something. Unlike starting out with the heavy burden of needing to create “Art.” Talk about fear inducing! I’ve decided to revisit this image. These are woodblock relief prints that I made during my last year of college. At the time, I had every intention of using the [ ... ]
Category: Embrace, portraits, work in progress  Comments off

Tutorial: revolving door calendar

Okay, my door doesn’t revolve, but now my calendar can! I had a bare door just eight feet from my desk that I wanted to use some how. I decided I wanted a really big calendar so I can easily see an overall view of several months at a time. The extra bonus is that now my family can see everything too. Originally I just stapled my calendar pages to the door. That worked great until it was time to remove a few months and rotate the calendar. It was ridiculously hard to get those staples out. Regular scotch tape didn’t [ ... ]
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AQN Retreat Day 2, Part 2

The second day of the Art Quilt Network retreat was so packed full that I thought I’d break it up into two posts. Bing Davis of Dayton, Ohio came to tell us his journey as an artist. It is always so interesting to hear about each person’s experiences. In a second presentation after lunch, he shared images of artwork from various cultures. After his presentation he conducted a workshop where each of us had the opportunity to create a mask. We had access to a huge pile of fabric, papers, yarns, ribbon, and a wide variety of embellishments. I loved [ ... ]
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