I'm a Genius!

Ok, I'm not really a genius. But I do feel a little smarter than usual today, since I actually figured out (within the span of about 4 hours) how to create a video, edit it to add title pages, sign up for Vimeo, and publish my video there.

I haven't had much interest in making videos in the past, but I got my camera out to take pictures of my latest project, a "recycled" journal made from scraps of fabric and paper and all those little bits of things I can't bring myself to throw away:

Once I realized it would take tons of pictures to show all the pages in this journal, I realized that a video would be much more efficient, and that I could talk about the pages as I was showing them. Ok, so I'm a little behind the times, but I can catch up with a vengeance!

So, TADA! Here's my grand entrance into the world of video. The quality leaves something to be desired, but it's a starting point!


My Scrappy Journal from Michele (Textile Traveler) on Vimeo.

I hope embedding the video works, or I won't feel so smart after all :-)

Let me know what you think!

Weekly Square #11

I finally got to last week’s 6x6” square today. This one is influenced by the failed medical procedure in Houston; depression and anxiety; a feeling of isolation; and an inability to create new work (for this square, I "recycled" a piece of screen printing test fabric I used a while back).

Happy Earth Day!

In honor of Earth Day, I’m recycling—old blog postings, that is.

I’ve collected some links to some of my blog postings showing projects from recycled (upcycled? whatever we’re calling it today) materials. Since I’m a terrible packrat, I have quite a few.

Have fun, and go recycle something!

Save those leftover threads and fabric snippets, and make a thread bowl.

Don’t throw away that ugly fabric! If you paint, dye, color, or stamp on it enough, you’ll never know it was once ugly. Even cutting it up into small pieces can make it not-so-ugly!

Make some earth-strata Earth Day ATCs.

Save your paper towels and make pretty paper! Then, use the paper to make a journal cover.

Use fabric scraps to make awesome new fabric.

Tear your scraps into strips and use them to crochet a fabric bag.

Cut squares out of old blue jeans and make a rag quilt.

Piece little squares of leftover fabric together and make a patchwork book cover.

My Easter Basket

So, what do you do when you’re overwhelmed with things you need to do and have too much to do and to read and to clean and to write and to compute and to . . . and really, you’re too tired to do much of anything and you don’t feel all that well, but you just want to feel like you’ve accomplished something???

Make a bright and cheerful Easter basket from thread and scraps of fabric, of course!

Happy Easter to all those who celebrate it!

Weekly Square #7

Influences for this week’s 6x6” square: the "ugly duckling" fabric; a circular stamp I carved from rubber; painted fabric. The quickly-approaching due date for taxes (which aren’t done) and worry about the possibility of upcoming surgery represented by the black background; joy in creating represented by the foreground squares. The need right now for simplicity, order and balance in my life represented by the design.

Earth Day ATCs

I’ve signed up for the Earth Day ATC swap through a Yahoo list I’m on, and even though the ATCs aren’t due until the end of this month, I wanted to get them finished and mailed off.

• I started these by fusing scraps of the transformed ugly fabric (see the last post) to a black background.
• I sprinkled this with Bo-Nash powder, heated it, and rubbed a blue-green foil onto it.
• I laid an interesting piece of sheer fabric over that (that’s the blue, green, and purple fabric you see); it’s more sheer in some places than in others. I have no idea what it is, since I got it from the clearance bin at Jo Ann’s. Then I stitched it down with black cotton thread.
• I burned away the sheer part of the fabric with a wood-burning tool.
• I stitched painted Tyvek over the fabric and a layer of batting, then ironed it (with a piece of parchment paper on top, of course) until the Tyvek shriveled and melted.
• I sewed beads and broken shells on.
• I added hand-dyed fabric to the back and free-motion satin-stitched around the edge (I wanted a little “rougher” feel to the satin stitching to match the card, which is why I dropped the feed dogs. I actually liked this better than satin-stitching with the feed dogs up!).

Here are close-ups of each of the cards:

I think these ATCs are particularly appropriate for "Earth Day," since they remind me of Earth's strata (and the beads represent the gems and minerals found in the various layers).

As usual, my sweetie claimed one, and the other three will go to the swap (I need to remember to always make TWO extra now: one for her, one for me!).

Ugly Duckling Fabric

Despite my intentions (or just interest) yesterday to create a large quilt, I fell back into my habit of jumping into whatever struck my fancy at the moment. This may not be a very disciplined way to work, but it sure is fun!

I had carved a circular rubber stamp and was anxious to try it out. I took a bright, less than successfully-painted piece of fabric and stamped acrylic white paint over it. Interesting, but the white didn’t show up as much as I wanted. I then stamped quinacridone magenta, crimson, and nickel azo gold over it.

Before I was through, I had created the UGLIEST piece of fabric I may have ever seen. In fact, it was so ugly I didn’t even take a pic of it, and I’m a compulsive pic-taker.

I started cutting it up and putting the little squares against a black background, and low and behold, it wasn’t so ugly anymore. That will probably be my weekly 6x6” square, so you’ll have to wait to see it when it’s done.

Then I took the same fabric, put fusible on the back, and cut tear/water-droplet shapes from it. I fused those onto hand-dyed fabric to make another spiral piece for Lily Kern’s Fractal Fragments class:

I like this and think I’ll follow up with some thread-painting to “increase the complexity” (part of the fractalness of fractals, I guess).

I used the tiny scraps of leftover cut-out ugly (now not-so-ugly) fabric, along with sheers, Tyvek, and beads, to start my ATCs for a swap (instructions to follow closer to the swap):

And in between all that, I over-dyed my complex cloth project to bring the color down a little and make the whole piece a little more cohesive:

Maybe I should start every day by planning to do something I don’t really want to do; it seems to make me quite productive! (well, that, and staying off of Twitter for stretches at a time).

Some Days You Just Gotta Play

Everyone knows I don't like to iron. My family doesn't even bother to ask. When my son was little and had to wear the occasional button-down shirt, I would iron only the parts that showed when his shirt was tucked in.

So why am I suddenly ironing, of all things, paper towels?

When I started dyeing fabric, I realized how many paper towels I use in a day as I caught myself throwing one after another after another into the trash. Not only did I feel guilty about the waste, but I'm a hopeless clutter-but, since that crazy little artist voice in my head is constantly sayiing, "hey, what if you . . . " Consequently, I started throwing used paper towels into a bag in my studio. If there's no kitchen towel handy after I wash my hands and I use a paper towel, it goes into the bag; if I eat dinner and barely use my paper-towel napkin, it goes into the bag; if I wipe up paint or put paper towels under dripping fabric, they go into my bag. I don't really worry about mixing or matching colors, since the surprise combinations can be pretty cool.

Every once in a while I'll pull a few out of the bag and use them to mop up paint, or I'll pour the last few drops of ink or watered-down paint out of a spray bottle onto them, or I'll wipe my brushes on them. Then I throw them back into the bag.

Some days I'm just in a mood to do something different and I can't face any of my ongoing projects. Yesterday was like that, so I pulled out those paper towels. I separated them into 3 stacks: those that needed color, or more color went back into the bag; those that looked perfect just the way they were, with variegations of several colors were ironed to smooth them out, then went into the "finished" stack.

And those that had plenty of color, but needed some embellishment, went into my craft room, where I stamped on them, wrote and drew on them with gel pens, squirted them with water and added more transparent paint, and just in general played. I've added pics of the finished pieces.

Now I just have to figure out what to do with them! I'll probably make journal covers with them. If nothing else, they'll serve as wonderful inspiration for trying to recreate them on fabric!

Got Scraps?

I'm a hopeless packrat when it comes to fabric, paper, and anything art-related. I save the tiniest scraps of fabric, pieces of thread, and trimmings. I love it when I run across an article like the one in an old issue of Quilting Arts that uses scraps, because it creates the illusion that all that STUFF I've saved will actually get used someday! If you're interested, here are the basics:

Iron fabric scraps onto a lightweight fusible interfacing

Stamp onto fabric; I used Lumiere white and halo pink gold. Use a brush to fill in areas light on paint.

Cover fabric with one or two layers of sheers (organza? chiffon? I never know what this stuff is; I just buy what looks pretty, but in this case I did notice it was polyester, which is good for burning). I used two: a medium blue and a light lavender on top of that. Note: I mistyfused the sheers down, but this made it harder to remove them when areas were burned out. I probably won't do that again.

Stitch all over. I used metallic thread and invisible thread in the bobbin. It’s very hard to see the stitching in the photo; I free-motioned around the heart & wing shapes, then meandered between the hearts.

Burn away the sheers over the hearts and wings; I used a woodburning tool. I had to scrape off the sheers because I had mistyfused them. At first, I was thinking, "oh no! All that work for nothing!" because it looked a little strange and smudgy from the woodburner. After a few minutes, though, I decided I really loved the colors and textures. Now, I'm just completely enchanted and can't wait to do more of this.

And, I had one of those "in the art moment" revelations: unearthing these hearts by burning off the sheer layers covering them could be a decent metaphor for the way we sometimes protect our hearts by burying or hiding them away. How perfect that these hearts have wings!!!

Paper Trails

For some reason, I've been working a lot with paper. Maybe it's because I took Terry Stegmiller's Paper Quilting class and made lots of fabric paper; or maybe it's because I love scrapbooking paper but not scrapbooking, so I have tons of it; or it could be because paper seems less risky to me than fabric--quicker, easier, less commitment. Or maybe all of the above. Anyway, I made postcards today for a swap and went the paper route.

And, while I was cleaning my sewing table off, I found a couple of completed projects that I forget to show you, so here they are. The first one is a paper journal: the cover is made with painted & stamped paper towels fused onto stiff interfacing, then free-motion stitched. The paper inside the journal is acrylic-painted and stamped. The binding is simply tied fibers.



The other project is a paper vase; squares of paper fused to stiff interfacing, then stitched. I was making real progress on using up some of my paper supply, but I went to Michael's yesterday and there was this BEAUTIFUL paper on sale and . . . well, you probably know the rest of the story.

LOST in TVLand

First, Happy Valentine's Day!

Second, it was bound to happen. After months of the writer's strike and no new episodes of our favorite shows on television, we went crazy. Literally. Someone mentioned that you could watch episodes of ABC shows on their website. I wandered into the den last weekend and my lovely partner had her laptop open to "Lost," a show we never watched, despite all the media hype. I watched the first episode and was intrigued, but was tired of straining my neck to see her laptop screen. We called my son, the electronics genius, and he told us how to hook the laptop up to the television. We spent the rest of the weekend engrossed in the show, watching one episode after another, and made it through the entire first season. We're now on Season 2.

All of which explains why I haven't accomplished much over the past week, with the exception of in-front-of-the-tv projects. Why else would I crochet an entire bag from scrap fabric???

What else could explain the masochistic desire to teach myself how to hand-quilt???
Of course, I am a responsible adult and I can't sit around watching television all night every night. So I did take some time to hand dye some red gradiations (you thought I was going to say I finally did the dishes, didn't you? HA!). My fabric dyeing class is over, so I wanted to wrap up the final exercise. And, I had homework for the fabric painting class, so of course I had to take a break and become un-Lost long enough to do that.

No more time for chatting--Season 2, Episode 4 awaits.

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.