Rat Killin’

My sweetie’s grandfather usually responds, when asked what he’s up to, “oh, just rat killin’.”
I take that to mean a little of this, a little of that—all those things you’ve been meaning to get to but just haven’t found the time for.
So this was a rat killin’ kind of weekend. I

• straightened out and organized a drawer full of hand-dyed fabric;
• ran across some reverse appliqué squares I made forever ago and decided to stitch them together;
• screenprinted Softscrub w/bleach onto some ugly fabric, and paint onto some other ugly fabric;
• played with Neocolor water-soluble crayons; and
• created a felted piece based on an article in a recent issue of Quilting Arts.

The felted piece was SO much fun. I used a fabric base, then machine-felted onto it wool roving, silk roving, yarns, and Angelina fibers. I stamped acrylics onto the felted piece and onto unbleached cotton, then sewed torn strips of the cotton, along with pieces of painted cheesecloth, to the felted base. I stitched on the green squares (more hand-painted fabric that’s been in my stash for forever), made some little “flowers” out of silk rods and cocoons, and then added some hand-stitching with dyed perle cotton. Here is the result:

And here’s a close-up:

I love the way this piece turned out, and it was great to use both my felting machine and some of those materials I’ve been collecting along the way. I definitely think I’ll be making more of these.

Here is a pic of one of the Neocolor water-soluble crayon pieces. This was a technique that I’ve been wanting to try for a while—applying the crayons to a screen, then screening them onto fabric with a transparent medium. I bought some transparent silkscreen medium a while back specifically for this technique, but when the time came I couldn’t find it.

On top of that, I ironed my freezer paper stencil to the wrong side of the screen (the inside, instead of the outside). DOH! Consequently, the results weren’t so good (ok, they’re downright hideous):



The good news is that I managed to fix this piece quite a bit by going back over it with the Neocolor crayons, a spray bottle of water, and a stencil brush. The end result:



Much nicer, don’t you think? I love the sort of ethereal quality of the background that came about because of the weird screening medium I used--a combination of textile and gel mediums.

All in all, it was a pretty fulfilling weekend! I'll save pics of the other projects for another time, when the projects are further along. In the meantime, I think I'm going to quilt up that little pear piece!

Time to Complete Those WIPs

Time, that is, in two senses of the word: I have this week off and therefore have a little extra play-time, and it’s time to get this stuff off the sewing table/design wall and finish it.

So, after a very lovely and busy Christmas, I’ve started with the easiest WIP. This one just needed a hanger on the back and a signature to be finished:

This is a silk & wool piece, created using a technique from one of my favorite books, Stitching to Dye in Quilt Art by C. June Barnes. After stitching, dyeing, and shrinking the piece, I added the washers and beads, then sewed the piece to a painted canvas. I’m displaying it in our den, but it’s a fairly small piece on a huge wall, so of course I need to make at least one more to hang with it.

And, I’ve caught up with my 6x6” weekly journal squares; these are for the month of December (with the exception of this week, which I’ll complete by the end of the week).

This marks the crocheted Christmas afghan I was working on the beginning of the month:

This one is influenced by work, and the boring, repetitive tasks I had to spend too much time on. Overlaid on that, though, is a little Christmas spirit:

This one is a compilation of the fabrics I used to make the kids & grandkids Christmas stockings; I thought it represented the holiday lunches, open houses, shopping, and other Christmas preparations very well:

And, here are the Christmas stockings, the last of which I finished at 5 pm on Christmas eve:

Finally, here is my 6x6” weekly journal square for the week of Christmas. I free-motion quilted the names of family members who were at Christmas dinner and helped to make it a lovely day:

 

And now, back to work on those WIPs. Or I could start the next silk and wool piece . . . hmmm, I think I hear that silk calling my name . . .

Fabric Embellishing: Book Review

Somehow we managed, this afternoon, to squeeze in a trip to the bookstore after a holiday lunch with colleagues (the company paid; I should have gotten the salmon, but that’s a different story) and before attending a holiday open house tonight, then meeting friends for our annual Christmas dinner out.

I had been looking forward all afternoon to a hot, creamy latte and a new quilting magazine. You know, just a little treat to help with all the holiday stress and anxiety. Once at the bookstore, I picked out my quilting magazine, ordered my coffee, and caved in to irresistible temptation of a red velvet cupcake in the display case.

All of that was lovely, but then I REALLY got a treat. While checking out the craft & quilting books, I ran across one I hadn’t seen before. Fabric Embellishing: the Basics & Beyond: More Than 50 Techniques With Step-by-step Photos (what is it with gargantuan titles these days?) by Ruth Chandler, Liz Kettle, Heather Thomas, and Lauren Vlcek is a fun, fun book. It’s pretty much what it sounds like: a compilation of techniques for manipulating, joining, and decorating fabric and other things we’re pretending are fabric these days: Tyvek, Lutradur, paper, etc.

I’m familiar with quite a few of these techniques: beading, printing images on fabric, and using materials such as Angelina fibers, for example. In fact, I think it’s safe to say that I’ve been around the block a time or two when it comes to embellishing fabric. So I was surprised to find some techniques in this book I had never even heard of. Even those techniques and materials I’m familiar with are used in ways I hadn’t thought about. The step-by-step instructions are excellent, and the book includes tons of photos, both to accompany the directions and to show off the finished techniques in all their lusciousness. Works by the artists that incorporate the various techniques are shown throughout the book in “gallery” photos, as well, to illustrate ways to combine the techniques to create art quilts.

Fabric Embellishing: the Basics & Beyond: More Than 50 Techniques With Step-by-step Photos is not a book that I really needed. It’s probably not even a book that I should have bought when I was supposed to be shopping for others’ gifts. But this book sure does make me happy. I love both the techniques and the photos of them, and I’m inspired to jump in and start working through all of the techniques—even the ones I’m familiar with!

The authors suggest that you make a journal quilt for each of the techniques, then bind them together in book format. They’ve included instructions for doing that, as well.

Once my year of creating weekly 6x6 quilted journal squares is up in February, I may create a new challenge for myself to work through this book and practice every technique in it. There’s certainly plenty of material in Fabric Embellishing to keep me busy for a while!

Weekly Square #16

Hurray! This square catches me up through last week (6/7-6/13), so technically I’m caught up with my weekly journal squares, since the current week isn’t over yet.

Would you believe this is an image transfer onto cotton batting of this painting I did a while back? I added some embroidered embellishment and a little color here and there with Prismacolor pencils.

Influences for this week’s square include: (too much?) time to think, especially about the future, while I’m lying in bed watching dreadful television: where am I going? what will it look like? How do I find (create?) the right doorway to my future?

Imagi(ni)ng Faith

I just finished a journal quilt that is all about questions instead of answers. Since I got sick, I've been struggling with issues of faith. In my past, "healthy" life, I thought I had a good grasp on my spirituality, my beliefs, my understanding of the universe. Since then, though, I've been struggling with questions about how my illness (how I?) fit into the bigger scheme of things.

For some reason, thinking about all these issues brought to mind one of our "wildlife" adventures, blogged about in this post. I kept thinking about those birds, swooping through the garage with their sticks and bits of fluff to build a nest, then with food for those little cheeping babies. I wondered if their diligence required a good bit of faith; living in the wild as they do, do they approach the nest every time with fear that either their eggs or screeching little hatchlings will be gone? Or do they fly confidently back with faith that everything is just as they left it? Maybe both: maybe there's no extracting fear from faith, and vice-versa. Or maybe neither: maybe those birds are just living life day-to-day, doing what it is their instincts tell them to do without thought. Either way, they go on, pushing through every day, and I have no doubt that they'll be back this spring, seeking out the relative safety of our garage.

This quilt started as a mixed-media collage on watercolor paper, using scrapbooking papers, stickers, stamps (rubber and postage), and paints. I then printed the collage onto fabric, cut it up into three pieces, and fused it to the background fabric. I left the edges of these pieces raw and pulled some threads to fray them. I machine-quilted the whole piece, then added the ribbon and, on top of it, the beads (which are pretty hard to see in the pic).

I don't think this quilt brought me any closer to resolving my struggles around issues of faith, but I do find something comforting in thinking about those birds and how they press on year after year in the face of their own struggles. Maybe in some small way, that's what faith is about.

Back on the Path

Here's a quilt that I just finished binding. It was inspired by one in The Quilting Arts Book: Techniques and Inspiration for Creating One-of-a-Kind Quilts.

The background fabric is hand-dyed, with acrylic ferns stamped on using gold paint. I quilted the piece with free-motion stitching, then added the leaves. Those have fabric on both sides (fused together with SaS2), are satin-stitched around the edges, and are attached at the top with a few stitches so that they sort of "float" off the background. Then I couched some fun fibers on and sewed some beads on. The piece is 19"h x 16"w.

It was fun to do something sort of different. I really like the dimension and texture that this one has!

My Seven Moons

This is a small wall quilt I created using one of the "bleeding-tissue" fabrics I created a while back.

I machine-quilted the piece, then fused the "moon" pieces on and embellished the edges of them with beads.

The piece isn't really crooked by the way, it's just the camera angle.

Winter Break

Well, I've finally finished with all my classes, which is a good thing since work is crazy again (still?). I wasn't particularly happy with any of the pieces from the Elements class from Quilt U, but I learned how to use a lot of those crazy supplies I've been collecting: angelina fibers & tintzl, foils, puff paint (I love it!) etc., and it was fun.

Here are the finished pieces (I say finished, but not really--none of the pieces are actually quilted, with one exception).

"Water" was the first piece; I thought I would lose my mind creating this piece.

"Fire" was the 2nd, and "Air" (or clouds, in this case) was the 3rd. I'm not happy with the air piece either.

The 4th piece should have been "Earth," but I hated it so much I cut the entire bottom section off and saved only the top. I'm going to use it to make a little journal. This is the only piece I had actually quilted. You can't see the amazing tree trunk that was made with puff paint, since it's in the bottom, discarded section, but believe me, puff paint makes great tree trunks.

Not only were these pieces hard to create, they are hard to photograph because of all the "shininess" in them.

More in a future post about the other class I've been taking (and the unsuccessful projects from it), wet felting.

Atlanta Finds

Ok, I didn't really find these so much as listen to other people's advice. At any rate, I was in a conference in Atlanta over the last few days, and I was hoping to have a few minutes to slip away for "fun stuff."

That didn't exactly happen, but I did have a little extra time before heading back to the airport, so I went by Fiber on a Whim. What a great place! Jan was very nice and I wish I had visited before I ordered all the supplies for my upcoming class, Elements in Fabric at Quilt University. I bought some Golden quinacridone paints, which I've only read about and never actually SEEN in person, some ExtravOrganza that I've been wanting to play with, and a really great book about painting on fabric, Skydyes by Mickey Lawler. The book has a lot of information about fabric paints, how to mix and use them, and how to create beautiful painted skyscapes on fabric.

Afterwards, I headed over to Nicholas Kniel. Now, when people said I should visit a "ribbon" shop, it wasn't high on my priority list, but since it was next door to Beadazzles, I popped in. I was amazed. The shop itself is a work of art, and the ribbon, velvet birds and leaves, feathers, and glass glitter are stunning. Nicholas was fun to talk to, and is incredibly passionate about ribbons and embellishments. I bought some beautiful feathers and some German glass glitter.

Next door was Beadazzles. I don't buy a lot of beads, since I have tons and don't use them that often. I was, however, wondering what the best thread and needles were for sewing beads to quilts, so I asked. The shop owner or clerk (not sure which), asked a group of women who were working on beautiful beaded jewelry pieces what they advised. One very nice woman gave me her suggestions for both beading thread and needles; she seemed apologetic, as if she were being bossy, but I was thrilled to have her advice.

Loose Ends

This has been a weekend to finish some of the projects I had underway. I've been working on a fabric book for a while now--bits and pieces here and there, and it's finally finished. Most of it looks like hell, but I liked this project because early on I picked the theme of October, my favorite month. It actually took much more time and work than I expected, but it was fun. I don't think I'll be making any more of these, but you never know. Scroll down to the "From the Pasture" post on this page for more information about these fabric books.
The other project I've been working on for a while is this assemblage piece, called House of My Muse:

Breathing Room

First, a brief aside. I was flipping through a back issue of Somerset Studio as I enjoyed my coffee this morning, when my eyes lit upon this phrase: "the gift of curiousity and desire." I sat and contemplated this for a moment, and realized how profound it is. Curiousity and desire sometimes feel like the bane of my existence, because they're always driving me forward--sometimes in a thousand different directions. And yet, what would my life be like without them? Curiousity and desire allow me to see wonder in what might otherwise pass unnoticed; to seek new experiences and knowledge; and most importantly, to feel joy in both learning and creating. I feel truly blessed to have been given this gift.

This past weekend was crazy busy, and this week has been even worse. I was in an intensive training class for three days, and then came home in the evenings to continue working on the tasks I couldn't complete at work because . . . I was in training. I've been working 12 hours a day or so, but I still needed some "me" time--time for what I think of as my "real" work--not the job that pays the bills, but the work that feeds my soul. Anyway, I was only able to snatch 5 minutes here, 20 minutes there. One night I stayed up until midnight sewing, and paid for it the next day, but it had to be done.

So imagine my surprise when I finally had time to take a deep breath and look at what I had done in the past week:

1) Added borders to a convergence piece that I put together a while back.
2) Carved a pear stamp, stamped pears onto fabric, and overdyed.


3) Played with melting crayons onto paper and then adding acrylic; I have no idea why or what to do this, but I love the look

4) Drew a rather awful but somewhat entertaining sketch of one of my dogs (I think he looks like a middle-aged man wearing a sweater).







5) Rolled some fabric beads and melted some angelina fibers.

6) Pieced together a mini art-quilt from fabric I had painted, then machine-quilted it.

Border Crossings

What a week. They've piled so much on me at work that my shoulders ache. This is usually not a problem (at least not too much of one), but for some reason this week I've felt utterly exhausted. I can barely drag myself through the day. Does that mean I haven't worked on arts & crafts? HA. I wouldn't be posting if that were the case, because I would be dead. That's the only thing that will stop me from picking up a paintbrush or flicking on the sewing machine stitch.

I'm traversing a strange border between traditional and art quilting. Or maybe, several borders: sort of a Four Corners of the art world, where traditional quilting, art quilting, painting, and collaging meet. Maybe this will make more sense if I post what I've been working on this week:

1) I found a great book called Creative Embellishments: For Paper, Jewelry, Fabric and More, by Sherrill Kahn. Kahn's work is vibrant and inspiring, and even though I've created many of the embellishments she demonstrates in the book--fabric beads, paper beads, shrink-tags, angelina fibers--the ways she puts them to use in her art are wonderful. I made bead-wrapped beads, yarn-wrapped pipe cleaners, and melted-plastic & thread shapes. Then I was inspired to paint a canvas and add embellishments to it.

2) I'm trying to finish up something practical: placemats for the breakfast-room table. I find it fascinating that my house is completely decorated in these muted earth-tones, yet my art is much more vibrant and contains lots of blues, greens, and purples. The only blue in my house is painted on the walls of my craft room, which is a holdover from when it was my grandson's room. I whine every day about how I should have repainted it before filling the room up with so much stuff.

3) I'm painting fabric. Not just painting as in coloring it with fabric paints, but actually painting on top of that with geometrics, flowers, whatever pops into my head.

4) I've started a miniature art quilt; not really an art quilt, more like a practice art quilt (I'll post a pic soon; battery is dead on the camera). I dislike the design intensely and am debating on whether I should cut the center section (which I like) out and reattach other fabric as borders, or whether I should push along until its done. Sometimes I hate something 1/2-way through, but then end up loving it by the time I've finished futzing with it.

Is this more of my inability to focus on any one thing for too long? I like to think that all these interests will one day converge into something that fits nicely with who I am and what I love; maybe a little border-town of creativity that draws from the best of many worlds (and harbors a few eccentric characters and a couple of crazy outlaws; but what's art without them?). For now, I'm traversing back and forth across the borders of my various interests, but the lines are starting to blur a bit. Sometimes, if you're not paying attention, southern Texas looks just like northern Mexico, and quilting begins to look a little like painting, and vice-versa.

Meandering

After my free-motion fiasco, I decided it was time to slow down, get my bearings, and explore the terrain in more detail. I read as much as I could find online about free-motion quilting, and bought a small book, Marti Mitchell's Learn to Machine Quilt in Just One Weekend. It wasn't terribly helpful for free-motion quilting, but it had some great advice about other aspects of quilting.

I put together some scrap sandwiches of white fabric, batting, and backing. I practiced fast stitching and slow moving. It was amazing how much I improved with just a little practice. I still didn't believe I would ever be capable of the beautiful free-motion designs I was seeing on quilts, but at least I was making progress.

I took one of these scrap practice pieces and decided to paint it. After I painted it, it was too pretty to toss, so I thought I would practice some art quilt techniques on it. I:

• Cut green, painted fabric into very thin, wavy lines, then straight-stitched them on.
• Found an old lino stamp I had carved of a fish and stamped paint onto fabric. Attached it to StS2, cut it out, and appliqued it on.
• Bought some water-soluble stabilizer, sandwiched yarn & other fibers between two pieces, and stitched a grid over it. I dissolved the stabilizer, cut out the "ocean floor" pieces, and stitched those on.
• Couched some green silky fibers on.
• Added white beads of various sizes to look like coral.
  
• Sewed beads to the fish.
• Appliqued a jellyfish on over some tiny copper threads and off-white yarn fibers (those became the tentacles).
• Made some fan coral out of painted cheesecloth.

This piece was so much fun to make. I didn't make any rules for myself, and just kept embellishing it until it felt done. I was also happy to know that I could recycle all those scrap sandwiches I've been practicing free-motion meandering and stippling on.

The Dark Road

The quilt shop had piqued my curiousity, so I turned to the smartest thing I know: the web.

Entering "quilting" as a Google search term turned me out onto a dark road littered with too much information that had me stumbling all over the place. I started again: "quilting beginners." Now, IMHO, the problem with most written instruction is that people tend to forget what it's like to be a newbie. Experience and increased skill must create a type of amnesia that results in such breezy commands as, "Attach the binding." Binding?! What is binding? Where do I find it? How do I attach it? Or, "Cut strips on the bias." Ok. Sure thing. Just as soon as I can understand why I would feel any bias towards this beautiful fabric. I gave up and decided I would just have to proceed down this dark road without a flashlight.

I decided to inventory my sewing supplies, since I was now reading about rotary cutters and mats and rulers and threads (nylon, rayon, cotton, metallic?) and batting and needles and quilting feet, most of which I either didn't have or didn't know how to use. I ran across a stash of little fabric samples I had been collecting. I have no idea WHY I had been collecting them. I tend to pack-rat items so that at any moment a lack of supplies will not interfere with a bolt of inspiration.

I decided I would stitch all these pieces together to form some version of patchwork. The pieces were different sizes, different weights, and probably different materials, but I busily sewed them together, leaving the edges frayed. I picked up some thin cotton batting at the fabric store and sandwiched it between this patchwork piece and a solid piece of fabric for the back, then I set out to quilt it. I had no idea what I doing. I simply sewed through the three layers in a semi-diagonal fashion with no pattern. Then I added some zig-zag stitching around the edges of some of the patchwork pieces.

When I was finished, I realized that there were quite a few puckers in the piece; I'm guessing this was due both the difference in the weight of the various pieces, and to haphazard way I sewed them together. I could be wrong, of course, since I still have no idea what I'm doing. Anyway, I sewed some thin strips of fabric (frayed edges and all) on top of the patchwork to cover some of the puckers. I also cut a heart shape from some hand-painted fabric and sewed this onto the cover with invisible thread and beads. I had no idea it was so hard to sew beads on. I cut the quilted piece so that it was a nice rectangle shap, then I zig-zagged all around the edge.

Now, it was time to try to figure out how to attach the journal pages. I pondered and pondered, then finally took the easy route and bought a blank journal refill. I turned the right and left edges of the piece in and sewed them at the top and bottom. On the spine of the fabric cover, I punched a hole through the quilted fabric toward the top and toward the bottom with an awl, then added eyelets. I ran fibers and yarns through the eyelets and tied them at the top, then tied a few small beads and embellishments to the ends of the fibers. I hand-tacked the fibers down to the center of the spine since they seemed somewhat loose.

I love, love, love this journal cover. It's a mess, but it's so soft and strangely comforting (by the way: the front actually is an even rectangle, it just doesn't appear to be due to my lack of photography skills).

Mostly, this journal cover reminds me not to be afraid of even a dark road. Once my eyes adjust, it turns out the road isn't so dark after all. I may have to feel my way along, and there's a good chance I'm headed in the wrong direction, but a road always leads somewhere.

Freewheeling, Continued

Just a quick disclaimer: I have no monetary interest in promoting Bautista's book, Collage Unleashed. I don't know Traci, have never met her, and didn't even know who she was before I picked up her book. I'm crazy about the book, though, not necessarily for the projects (although those are fun, and every time I read it I unearth little nuggets buried everywhere), but because it has led me to some of the most spontaneous, freeing art creation in my life. You move quickly in projects like paper-towel monoprints; it's hard to overthink it, and the instant gratification fuels my desire to create even more.

At any rate, I now had a fabulous canvas/painted fabric bag, and some leftover fused pieces. Traci also has ideas for creating handmade journals in her book, so I gathered up some of those papers I had been painting and stamping and cut them down to create signatures for the journal. I sewed the signatures into a cover I made with the leftover painted fabric. I added fibers, ribbon, & embellishments on the spine, and a lampworked bead to the front as a clasp (I attached a cord loop on the back to wrap around the bead).

I love this little journal, and the only thing I might do differently next time is to use copies of my paper as journal pages. Not only did I use up most of my painted paper, but the acrylic is difficult to write on. I have to use a gel pen (although colored pencils work well for drawings).