Fingers Crossed!

This is Enuff on my Plate, my response to the mandala challenge the Mavericks had. I've entered it in a juried art show at the Coast Collective. The theme of the show is Memory, Family, History, and this piece fits all three, so we'll see.

It's the first time I've entered a juried art show so who knows what will happen. I won't know until April 19th. I'm aware that my pieces are one-offs and distinctive looking, so it very much depends what the jury is looking for. It was exhibited already in Phoenix in 2007 in the Mavericks show.

Starting a New Piece

The provisional working title for this is Shy Beast, he is on the pale blue background. All of these fabrics were created in one session using the marbling technique taught by Susan Purney Mark. Have been mulling ideas over for a while and had him up on my wall so I could think about what needs to happen. Even pressing the fabrics to start auditioning and scanning helped me come up with more ideas of how to do this piece, which I want to keep to fairly small dimensions. Although the beast is 12 by 7 inches and there has to be significant surroundings or he won't look shy!

I have auditioned other fabric, both my own altered/hand dyed and some commercial, but at this point I feel the fabrics shown here are going to be the main parts. Plus scanning is time consuming and less fun than designing!

Colour Meanings

This is a fascinating study done at University of British Columbia about how red improves cognitive performance while blue improves creativity ...

www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-02/uobc-cbb020409.php

Marbled Madness

Hard to believe this was a first attempt using shaving foam and Dy-Na-Flow. So often the very first attempt at a new technique is fine to keep in the sketchbook but not something you can really feel proud of.

Susan Purney Mark gave the workshop and I was delighted with most of what I produced. It's fast and I quickly got into a rhythm of primping the foam, laying down the fabric, smoothing it out, lifting it up, scraping off the excess foam, and laying my finished piece to dry. By the end of the afternoon I was like a kid at the beach, exhausted but begging to do "just one more, PLEEZE PLEEZE!"

Apart from the ease of the technique, the other great thing is that it is truly not messy. In fact I have had another session at home using my Jacquard Setasilk colors, and there were no splashes on the rug or the walls.

and since inquiring minds want to know ...

this past week I worked for 33-1/2 hours
the previous week, 39-3/4 hours (this counts attendance at the Victoria Sewing Show)

A Calmer Chameleon!

This is an African linocut from Kitambaa fabrics. See www.kitambaa.blogspot.com, which is Pippa Moore's blog. I heard her presentation at the Victoria Sewing Show last weekend (the room was filled!) and she is at the Westshore Quilters Guild Symphony of Quilts show this weekend, which is where I picked up this little critter. I plan to do something with him and perhaps have him on the front page of the blog when finished.

And a shout-out to "Dragon Lady" Laura for the ride yesterday! Thanks!

Gleeful Celebration

This is a rendition of a collage I made in January. The original is actually a lot more gleeful because it's on orange construction paper with gold chocolate truffle wrappers. Suffice it to say that the celebration involved unwrapping the truffles ...

The sketch effect is from processing the scan through dumpr sketch, a free program with many possibilities, both creative and educational. It can create sketches from photos, so you could create personalized family colouring books, for example.

Go to www.dumpr.net and click on the links!

Modesty in different cultures

Identity by Design, tradition, change, and celebration in native women's dresses is published by the Smithsonian and HarperCollins. Edited by Emil Her Many Horses, it is lavishly illustrated and contains thoughtful essays, mostly by native American scholars, about dress. The perspective goes from historical times to the present.

I was fascinated that the metal ornaments which jingle have a social purpose (not just decorative). Women are not supposed to be alone with certain males, such as their father-in-law. The noise is to alert men that a woman is coming. In Islam, unrelated men and women are not supposed to be along together, but women are admonished not to stamp their feet and make their jewelry jingle.

Deconstructed Paisley

Although I've collected paisley fabs and often used them in quilts, I found I was somehow bored with some that have been in the collection for a long time, and they were among the fabrics I donated before my move, and traded at Fabric Traders in Sidney.

However right before the silk screening class with Susan Purney Mark, I bought a shower curtain with giant paisleys on it. I'm only sorry I had someone else do the hard labour of climbing up and hanging it before it occurred to me to pop it on the scanner.

I was particularly interested in the way several motifs meet, and based on that sketch I made this screen and printed it on pole-wrapped shibori from Susan's Colour Seduction workshop back in October. Of course this is the NEGATIVE space between the paisleys.

THOUGHT: Has anyone ever made a fabric really exploiting this? Wish I had signed up for Lily Kerns' QuiltU class on using PhotoShop on fabric. Oh well, (1) we don't have PhotoShop and (2) I am starting Filament Fantasy on Friday and that will keep me out of the bingo halls (as if!) and probably make more of a difference to my work.


And speaking of work, my hours are as follows:
through Jan 25: 33 hours
Feb 1: 34 hours
Feb 8: 28 hours
Feb 15: 37 hours
Feb 22: 40 hours

Q: When is ironing not torture?

A: When it's pressing fabrics I've dyed, painted, printed or otherwise manipulated!

Neat gizmo

Susan Purney Mark told us about this at the silk
screening workshop, as a possible way to generate
images for t-shirts, et cetera. 

To try creating your own, just go to
www.wordle.net and type (or paste!) away to your
heart's content.

This is a family recipe for lemon pie which almost
got lost in the upheaval of moving and the demise
of my old PC ~ I thought I had backed up my recipe
file which dated back to 1986 and had been
migrated through every PC I ever owned, but I was
mistaken.  The only reason I had this recipe was
because I had played around with fonts to
incorporate it into a collage.

Closest book to you

How to play:
* Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
* Turn to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post that sentence along with these instructions in a note in your BLOG.
* Don't dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual... Use the CLOSEST

"We see a different person relating to spouse and children and wonder whether that was the same person we've worked with all those years."

My book was What's Right with Islam, by Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf

Got this from Textile Traveler, whose blog is included in my list of blogs.

Screenprinting Workshop

Yesterday I took Susan Purney Mark's silk screening workshop at Satin Moon.

This was fascinating and a good start.

Things that surprised me:

How much paint it takes!

And that it takes longer than I expected it to.

In fairness I suspect that with practice and planning things would go faster. We had a lot of fun playing around and experimenting.

The photo above shows a piece of pole wrapped shibori (made in Susan's Colour Seduction workshop in the fall) screen printed with a repeated motif inspired by the negative spaces in large paisley patterns.

If it looks wrong, it must be right

This is the challenge piece I'm working on. Its current state is the top photo -- the strip on the right is auditioning and not sewn on yet, nor is the ExtravOrganza. In fact I flipped that strip around and now it looks better because the light green continues the motion in the dark piece to the left of it.

Everything is hand dyed except for the dark green/blue around the top and sides. Interestingly this framing of the top and sides is the same as in Ballerina, and even the impression of sideways motion coming from the right of the piece is similar. Wow, a series!

The reason for the title is this is the first piece I've made with curved seams, which has been a learning experience. I finally put the on-line instructions up on my computer screen and reviewed them carefully before sewing each piece. The instructions are at:
www.equilters.com/library/techniques/sewing_curves.html

Soon I will be reaching the point where the top is finished, and since Susan wants to take photos at the next FAD meeting I will need to decide whether to layer and quilt it and have it completed by the 19th or leave it as is and then pick it up after the 19th. Probably I should stick to my motto and complete it.

Swatches are finished!

So that's one thing completed, although they are a tool and stepping stone to silk screening and other projects down the road ...

Embossed Velvet

This is printed rayon acetate stretchy velvet from Gala Fabrics which I embossed by steaming the velvet over a silicon trivet. This was done a few weeks ago and I'm pleased at how it's holding up. It was quick and easy to do.

What I did on my day off

... apart from cutting loose by setting the ironing board up in the living room and getting out an end table so I could sit in my favourite Poang chair by the window and enjoy snack and reading breaks ...

This is a 24 by 24 set of colour mixing samples, in preparation for the silk screening workshop this weekend. I have 24 pots of paint suitable for silkscreening on fabric, viz. Setacolor opaque and shimmer, and Lumiere. The table is supposed to show what happens if you mix each colour with every other colour. It takes longer to do than I expected, so I still have the 24 paint pots lined up in order on my window sill with a note on masking tape warning everyone not to mess with the order!

Not sure how effective it will be because the Setacolor opaque particularly tends to cover the colour underneath instead of blending with it. However blending all those colors would take even longer and be messier and use up a lot more paint. The Lumiere in particular are in tiny bottles. Once they are used up I plan to buy bigger pots, I can just see running out while silkscreening!

In any case the shimmery colours may not be the best on t-shirts, except I've just remembered a sleep top that would look perfect with something or other screened onto it, and that could be shimmery!

Practicing with the x-acto knife just now I cut a zigzag-arat.

Is Two a Series?

This is a 12" block I made for a swap in Arizona using indigo and hand-dyed fabric and following the theme of the first zigurat I made, which is the lower photo. This was made in a Cynthia Corbin workshop and the square blocks were cut with a rotary cutter but without a ruler. The dotted background and the brown dotted fabric used on the top block were originally gray but I hand-dyed those and the dots stayed white.


The Journal quilt class lesson this week includes several journal quilters talking about making things in series, which is something I find hard to do, maybe because I don't have enough time/space to devote to quilting. I see a progression in my work but I tend to have pendulum swings or spiral (many pendulum swings really ARE a spiral motion, by the way!) and come back to something I've tried earlier but with some other creation in between.

I did sketch a zigzag-arat yesterday, just because the play on words is so irresistible!

FACTOID: The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, was a zigurat.

Hour last week: 33

Decluttering

Just added a link to Rhonda Ganz's new blog Get Rid of One Thing a Day, which is pretty self-explanatory. Rhonda has set herself the goal of doing this for a year, blogging about it and showing a picture of everything.

She lives in Victoria so for local people there is extra interest in following because she will accept donations to a girls' school in Africa for stuff she doesn't have a home for.

Last year I just know my average must have been one thing a day at least, but it was all crammed into a three-week fling and pack frenzy in Mesa. No way could I have taken a photo of every item, let alone blogged about it!

What, if anything, have I learned from all of this?

1) Replacement costs here are higher than I expected, even figuring in the exchange rate

2) Rubber stamps are even more expensive than that

3) Despite all the purging I have still given stuff to the Sally Ann here

4) I discovered a man's raincoat which I brought thinking it was a woman's coat that I would need

5) Someone used a really ugly orange crochet cushion as packing material

6) I nearly lost a pack of old, old family photos and did not even miss them until someone mailed them to me

7) I truly believe in baraka and paying it forward -- we have been blessed with more stuff including a baby activity car, a silk blouse in my colours, a Marilyn Brooks "Insane Clown Posse" tunic, really cute fuzzy non-slips socks, and just today some extra teaspoons that are similar to what we have

8) Am learning to minimize knickknacks and have NO, zip, zilch, nada fridge magnets. It would be nice to pretend that the fridge is pristine and elegant a la June Cheever but that would be fibbing. But it's all done with masking tape now, no magnetic fields, no choking hazards, no scratches in the enamel!

Tomorrow is dedicated to creating (and perhaps even completing, who knows!) My camera is going out of town but will post pix early in the week I hope.

Testing, Testing!

My first ever curved seam, believe it or not!

Think this will give me many possibilities for future quilts as well as the current challenge.

Beginning of challenge piece

Here are the front and back of a piece of fabric Susan Purney Mark distributed at our last FAD meeting. The challenge is to create a piece using this fabric that is ready to be photographed by the next FAD meeting in February. Susan CLAIMED that this was originally a really ugly fabric until she did things to it, which is hard to believe.

I scanned both sides of my piece because they are so different. Of course due to all the processes Susan had tried out on the fabric, everyone's piece was significantly different.

Also printed the side at the top on a piece of ExtravOrganza. This will be in the piece somehow, not quite sure exactly how yet.

Have pulled out a bunch of other mottled/dappled fabs (and have not yet been into the green and purple bins!).

My thoughts are running on curved seams so I've made a practice piece using other fabrics because I don't want any flubs using the "good" fabric. Will post a photo or scan of that later.

Off to my green bin I go!