Embroidered Collage

I've decided to start a new page on my site in the blog format for displaying pictures of my artists sketchbook, especially since I am currently taking Deb's class on art journaling.    The gallery format is a little awkward for showing the newest stuff first and you have to keep loading individual images when viewing it.  Some pages will be exercises from the class, others will be other projects and such that I am working on independantly, the kinds of things that I'm hoping to establish a habit to support.  Every so often I will comment here on what is over there, but mostly I'm going to let the pics speak for themselves and there won't be much crossover.  With that said, I have a few new pages up....

At this month's meeting of The Fiber Alliance one of our members, Carol Singer, who quilts and teaches as her career, taught a class on free motion machine quilting using a darning foot and feed dogs down.  I had so much FUN moving the fabric around under the needle to create patterns and that pettable quilted texture.  We covered how to think about needle and thread choices and the importance of thinking ahead with many of the designs, in order to avoid being painted into a corner.  I was able to get reasonably even stitches by the end of the class but need to practice on my own machine (Carol let me use hers) and go a bit slower in order to get really good looking ones.  I also need to go buy a darning foot.  I've posted pics of my five sample quilt sandwiches done during class. 

I came in late last night from a business trip to a brainstorming meeting at Cape Cod.  Gorgeous, even in the grey of the first day, but the water the sunny second day was an unbeliveable blue.  We were on the bay side and I did a little sketching in my purse sketchbook and I was pretty pleased with how they came out.  I'm tempted to do a little development on different paper and add some watercolors and make atcs and/or postcards.

Instead of messing with wall paper paste I decided to try out the look of the technique by using acrylic texture builder from the craft paint section.  I'd played with this medium before when I tried doing some paint build-up on atcs, so I was familiar with it.  It took most of the little tube to make these three papers though, so if I do this again I will try out the actual wall paper paste route.  I was successful in being able to make some swoops and lines of different patterns, but didn't find the process as interesting as some of the others I've played with along the way. 

I decorated paper and carved some eraser stamps to play with my new petal set of Colorbox pigment inks.  I enjoyed having more colors to work with and I like the way these pads make marks.  I first tried just using the triangular pieces themselves.  For the mottled page I also used a round tack and part of a shell for stamping.  For the page with cellular structure I used one of my eraser stamps.

I made six small stamps by cutting up and carving two erasers based on my reading in a book called "Make Your Mark" by Margaret Peot.  Shown below are the two sketchbook pages I made while playing with them. The spiral is the stamp I tried carving from linoleum a couple weeks ago.

I enjoyed the exercises.  I've never really "gotten" stamping, despite reading about it and seeing it in others works.  But I begin to understand how I might use the technique in my own work. It would certainly speed certain things up and has quite a different look than the same image would if it were painted.

The Eighth Deadly Sin exhibit at Quiltfest was very striking.  The topics covered ranged from personal issues to very political ones, chocolate to apathy to hypocrisy and beyond.  You can also view the online exhibit on the QuiltArt page.  My favorite was Mary Richling's "Cash is King - Clip the Card" because of how she manipulated a classic quilt pattern to a great visual effect from both a distance and close up.  Close up you can see the comments she's written in the red areas about obtaining, declining, using, and misusing credit.

Another highlight was seeing Laura Murray do a demonstration on how to use Shiva Paintstiks.  I was able to see the effects of rubbing, stenciling, and direct application in person.  The stenciling aspect was new to me and an interesting idea.  It had also never really registered that you can use the paintstiks on ANY fabric.  I bought a gold one from her and won an auction for a few mini-sized ones at a discounted price on ebay, so I should get to play soon.

Just looking at all the quilts is worth the price of admission for me.  I don't linger over the traditional ones, just the art quilts, but it's fun to see them, especially this year's grouping of log cabin variations.  The international section really piques my interest because the approaches to quilting can very so much, even beyond the normal variance for art quilts.  One thing I'd noticed last year was reinforced this year - I love it when the quilting patterns complement and contrast with the piecing pattern, adding a full extra layer of interest to the piece, taking advantage of the possibilities of the media chosen.

My favorites this year included two Australians and a Canadian.  Rosalee Morris created "Complexities and Complications" which incorporated traditional methods but had irregular edges, dangly bits, incorporated stones, and more rich warm colors.  Gillian Hand made a background of sheer fabric encasing fibers and then applied irregular appliqued and embellished fragments along a color-changing grid to form "Rainbow Lorikeet."  Val Smith's "If Jackson Pollock were a Quilter" was a fantastic explosion of color that was based on English paper piecing shapes, but the section would go in different directions and different elements were added on.

I did wander into the scrapbooking section, new this year, as well.  And discovered the Ichiyo Art Center and their marvelous wonderful papers.  I now completely understand the addiction Zhenia was forming!  I bought a few to play with, of course.  And I finally learned a little more about inkpads, which was helpful.