These images are from exercise lesson 25. Hopefully their makers will get on the blog and share with us their experience of making the pieces. ENJOY!

I finally got around to putting this piece in a frame. Seems to work well for this kind of piece. It's called 'Couch Lock'.

I made this piece for the exercise in which we were to use a fabric unfamiliar to us. I chose to use a beautiful piece of rough weave silk. I had to fuse a interfacing to the back in order to work with it. It is very drapey and fluid and fray's like crazy. In the center section I used mostly commercial cotton batiks, printed fabrics, a loose weave japanese cotton (also had to fuse) and some hand dyed and foiled fabric. I tied sticks and found Point Arena beach glass on the piece with waxed cotton thread. All in all I am happy with the piece. It feels calming to me.

This piece was inspired by the "blue star" as seen from the Hubbel telescope. I used this image for the exercise in which we were to incorporate the background into the foreground or visa versa. Now I can't even remember what it was we were suppose to do and I'm definitely not sure I succeeded either way. It is hand dyed cotton and commercial rayon with found Point Arena beach glass and beaded gel painted with gold ink. Machine applique and quilted.

From old to new

These quilts are the part of an original abstract piece that was not working at all. I had cut the original piece into 3 segments and tried working with each piece as a separate work but that wasn't working either. What you are seeing here are 2 of the pieces (the third was blurry...so much for my photography skills). On my way to the trash can with it all (again) I decided to paint the whole thing with some leftover latex house paint (white) front and back. After the pieces dried I painted it all over with various acrylics, stains, fabric paints, and inks. Then I cut each piece into either squares or rectangles and zigzag stitched them together. The whole thing is stiff as a board which made mounting them on stretched canvas the perfect avenue for displaying them.

Exercises on Texture, Line, and the Integrated Background

I found these three moderately difficult and am not knocked out by the results, largely because it forced me to work in a way that is pretty alien.  That is to say, normally, I begin with some image in mind that is what, for me, the piece is going to be about.  But in this case, since I was having to pick fabric more or less independent of image, or fabric that would push the image, I hardly knew what to choose because I didn't know why to choose anything in particular.  But, anyway, here's the results.

#1.  I don't know that there is any fabric I wouldn't think of using, but the background in this piece is certainly hard to use.  It's some kind of upholstery fabric with very heavy threads in the weave and some kind of rubbery stuff in it which makes it weird to iron.  Even the silicon shoe kind of sticks to both the front and back of it.  From there on, it was just one different kind of texture after another.  I tried to incorporate a shiny, plain fabric (like satin) but was not successful because the shininess was offended by all the texture stuff.  It didn't feel like a contrast; more like an uninvited guest.  I've always wanted to use tassels but never found a sensible place.  Here, though it worked perfectly for me.  The red item is a biggish, ceramic, ladybug bead.

#2.  I had the image here before I started: a dancer in the woods at night.  So I picked a fabric that gave me depth (the dark blue woody print), a fabric that gave me movement (the yellow/green diamond print), and a fabric that gave me focus (the sunflower for her hair).  This one was fun and I think generally it works very well: ie, it did what I was trying to make it do.

#3.  Least pleased with this one.  Largely  because I couldn't get the goal very clear in my head.  I started with the rust-dyed greenish fabric in the background.  Then did the geode design, but wasn't all pleased with the results.  It looked blah-ish and without focus.  So then I put the rust-stripey batik strips in.  It's sort of okay, but I think what I ended up doing was integrating the foreground into the background, rather than integrating the background into the foreground.  But that was largely because I had the background image in my mind before I started and didn't have anything in mind about the foreground.


So, perhaps what I learned from this is that I do better if I start with an image and work to that than do whatever it seemed to me I was supposed to be doing here.  Which is to say, focusing initially on something beside an image.  Maybe it would be good for me to be able to do this successfully, but I'm not sure why when I seem to have a found of images in my head that attract me?