decisions, decisions

I hate getting stuck on a piece. Somehow it becomes so wonderful in my head that I'm afraid of messing it up...most of my pieces I liked better during the making than after they are done. Not that they are all messed up, just that when in the moment it can go in any direction, when I can take it anywhere I want to take it, I'm more enamored of it. Of course, the side effect of this is that I have no problem with selling my work--most of it anyway. There's a couple of pieces that would have to sell for an unreasonable amount of money for me to part with them.

But how to quilt this piece...lately I've been doing a lot of close quilting, geometric shapes alternating with organic shapes, filling in the space. I'm kind of tired of that. So I just dove into this piece, and started with where I knew I wanted stabilization lines. The rest just grew from that, and once I started, I didn't have problems continuing with it.

Also lately, I've been quilting as a kind of middle step rather than a final step in the process. I've been adding hand work that seems to look better if the thing is already quilted. This particular piece is going to have some raw edge applique on it, too.

I splurged a little lately, too. When I noticed that I had written 100 posts, I wanted to save them and decided to get a book made from them. Blog2Print will go and find your blog posts and put them together for you. The result is either an ebook you can download for $2.99, or a slickly printed paperback book--mine was around $35; it varies with the number of pages. One thing to watch out for is that there are some missing jpg's in mine, I didn't edit it carefully enough.

For a while my go-to guru for jpg questions has been Gloria Hansen. She has been very generous with her help. And now she's put together a great book that answers all the questions--Digital Essentials. Right now it's on sale for 10% off, but it's well worth the investment if you need help preparing pictures of your art for the web, for juried shows, for whatever. She also designs great websites if you're looking for a designer.

Making Do

When I first unpacked my studio, I quickly realized that I could either take a couple of days to do it, or a couple of months if I fiddled with every little detail. I went with the quick and dirty method of just getting stuff out of the boxes and into some kind of order.

Now as I work, I'm fine tuning the space, making a few minor adjustments, and maybe actually getting rid of some of the stuff.

But as I thought about how to make the space work for me, I bought the current issue of Studios, from the Cloth, Paper Scissors people. There are some really fine spaces in there. But they're full of "perfect" things like just the right antique, or thousands of dollars worth of cabinetry. I'm not in that place, either financially or mentally. I want to make do.

So I'm working with what I have as much as I can. I have spent probably $150 all together, on some new plastic storage boxes and on two sturdy shelving units. And I did have some good bones--a sewing table my husband built for me, as well as a cutting table.

But here are some cobbled together things that cost me nothing and it works:

This started life as a stereo cabinet. Since we didn't need it for that anymore, we put in some extra shelves and now I have a place to store paint and lots of little stuff.


This cheap trunk was one my husband took to college 35 years ago. It now holds rolled up old work of mine. One of the handles is missing, so I tend to set it on end like this. It was sitting right next to my ironing board, and I noticed that it was the perfect place to put my distilled water for my iron, spray bottle, sometimes a pair of scissors.




Last week I finally set up a stereo in the space--using stuff we already had. So now my MP3 player is hooked into a 30 year old amp, chugging away through equally old speakers. There's something kind of cool about all my music being on that itsy thing, and being played through old equipment.

And the table it is sitting on is made by adding a pair of fold up legs to a hollow core door we replaced in our former house--the paint streaks you see on it are because it's where I used to finish furniture. And the wire stand around the stereo? An extra one from previous cabinets.

So I'm making do as best I can. I'm trying not to buy much to make new art; it's working in general, although I am pining for a few things...

If you've read this far, I should mention that Blogger tells me this is my 100th post. Woohoo.

following the rules...or not

The principles of design include something about repetition with variation. This I take to mean it's good to repeat a shape or a line in a piece of art, but don't repeat it exactly--change the color or the size. And odd numbers are a good thing.

So I'm hand stitching these horizontal lines (in various sets of odd numbers--3, 5, 7, and 1), trying to space them a little randomly, varying the exact start and stop.

For some reason (ha), it's not hard to make the actual stitches different sizes. But every time I place the needle to start a new line, it automatically wants to be the exact same distance as between the last two lines. I have to specifically think every time: Vary this line. I can't do it without thinking.

Is that because the brain wants order and regularity? Then why do the art mavens want otherwise? Is repetitiveness more soothing? Why is irregularity interesting?

Such are the boring trains of thought brought about by hand stitching--mind you, I like the look of these stitches well enough to keep doing it, but the actual doing is kind of boring.

SAQA One Square Foot Auction

Monday, November 10, marks the beginning of the SAQA (Studio Art Quilt Associates) Reverse Auction of one square foot pieces of art. My donation, shown above, will be in the first set auctioned off.

The piece is called Bryce Canyon, and was inspired by the national park of the same name. The peachy background was hand dyed and stamped with hand carved stamps, the 'hoodoo' shapes are painted fusible webbing, the blue sky marks the vivid contrast between sky and land in the low humidity southwest. The y shaped dark piece is taken from a photograph we took of a pine tree with exposed roots that stands on the edge of the canyon--a striking enough sight that we later found postcards made of the same view.

I've belonged to SAQA for a few years, in fact have been juried into their PAM (Professional Artist Member) group. They do a lot to promote art quilts as art, as well as offering lots of exhibit opportunities. Please check them out.



This piece, now entitled Lake Cooper 2, has been juried into Form, Not Function. This show occurs at the Carnegie Center for Art and History in New Albany, IN, from January 9-March 7, 2009. Although I've never been in person, from what I have heard and seen it is a show well worth going to see if you're anywhere near southeastern Indiana.

That is all.

cut and amble

One of the downsides of the Doritos principle of fabric (use it, they'll make more) is that sometimes you flop. My usual problem is that I don't recognize this early enough, and I invest more time (which is not infinite) into something I should abandon. For once, I didn't do that. I just put the offending piece on the table, and whacked it into pieces.

It started out with a piece of silk that had potential, but wasn't quite getting there. I decided to try stamping on part of it--which was overall successful. But I wasn't careful enough, and one of the stampings looks like this:



That black blobbish bit stands out like a sore thumb. So I cut off the offending part, turned a square into a long horizontal and a piece for the boneyard, and moved on with my life.

But it's hard to be disappointed about that; especially when my back yard at this very moment looks like this:



To quote John Hodgman, "that is all."

back in the groove...

I'm back in the groove of working every day in the studio. That's a good thing. The bad thing is I still kind of goof around, jump from one thing to another without finishing everything. I have a bunch of pieces that mostly had been previously begun, that I'm trying to finish. While I'm striving to follow my favorite principle of just do it, you can make more (or buy more), I still haven't gotten all my nerve back. Apparently, that's the down side for me of taking a three month break.

But I have been finding ways to use all the bits and pieces that I have from failed attempts. Thanks to Terry Grant, I now call these piles my 'boneyard.' It's a great way to work--I find it leads to unexpected places. It's only slightly lazy--or maybe a better word would be impatience. I can see quickly how an idea might work, as opposed to working an hour to get to a point at which I can see the idea. So these days hardly anything gets thrown out in my studio.

This method also provides some continuity to the work coming out of my studio. And I feel more inclined to dare to do something unexpected--it is, after all, just a scrap I'm committing to the cause.

And sometimes, just the right scrap turns the piece around. Like this detail, where the blue circle (which I think of as the Earth), changed the composition (which you can't see in the detail) and made the whole thing work.

obsession, distraction, experimentation, whatever

I have become enamored of playing with Jacquard Discharge Paste. It began with playing with some old, cast aside pieces. And the fact that I couldn't fin the anti-chlor to use bleach. But now I'm hooked.

The paste is just that--about Elmer's glue strength, can be thinned with water. I usually brush it on with a small flat brush, but I've also tried stamping it on, and I know people use it with silk screens. You paint it on, let it dry, then iron it with a hot steam iron and the color (mostly) goes away. And one of the best parts is you can use it on silk.

Here's what it looks like after stamping it onto a commercial cotton:



It is a challenge to figure out how much and where to put it on since the paste shows up as a wet mark on the fabric. But you wait until it's dry, and iron it, and get something like this (disregard the darkness of the background, that's a fault of the photographer not something to do with the discharge):



The stamp experiment (done with one of my small stamps) was not quite as successful as I wanted it to be--I think the relief on the stamp wasn't deep enough. But overall I got what I was expecting. Oh, and I had masked out a circle using a freezer paper stencil so I had a hard edge.

Discharge paste also does cool things to hand dyes. Here's one where I just drew in a tree with the edge of a flat brush:



This is out of my daily journal, so it's just a sketch. But I see great potential there.

I also just used it to highlight an area on a piece of silk--something I could not have done with bleach. And playing with this is getting me back in the swing of working regularly in the studio. Another good thing.