Play Day

I rewarded myself for those long days of machine quilting with a play day. After transferring all my paints, stencils and gelli plates to the shed for the summer  about a week ago, I spend some time in there today just playing with all those luscious supplies, specially my gelli plate (I only used the 8 x 10" one today) and a wide variety of Stencilgirl stencils.  And here are the results. This is using acrylic paints on paper.

 It's amazing how many papers I ended up with as a result of 2 hours concentrated play.

And finally I decided to also give shaving cream a try. This seems to be cropping up more and more on blogs and YouTube videos but I did this first back in the days (early nineties) when I was studying for my City & Guilds in Embroidery. It involves putting a layer of shaving cream in a tray, then adding inks (I used alcohol inks) and making marbling patterns with a skewer or fork. Lay the fabric gently on top and push it softly with your flat hand. Take it off and remove the shaving cream from the surface of the fabric and what you are left with is a marbled pattern as you can see below. It's messy and unpredictable but lots of fun. I heat set the fabric but I'm not sure just how water resistant this might be. Not that this matters to me as all of my work is meant to go on the wall. And as I can testify alcohol ink is very difficult to remove from both hands and clothing even without heat setting!

I was rather pleased with this piece in particular!

Machine Stitching Gelli Plate Printed Fabrics

 

 

 

Posted with Blogsy

Gelli Plate Printing on Fabric

The folding book for which I have made the inserts needs a cover and the piece of calico (muslin) cut to size for that purpose has been lingering on my desk for weeks. Today was the moment to get the gelli plate printing done. Of course I never do just one piece of fabric. If I'm going to make a mess (and that is almost guaranteed!) I might as well do it on a big scale. After all the clean-up takes almost as long in either case. So I grabbed a variety of cotton fabrics and a hand full of stencils as well as my largest (12 x 14") gelli plate, later adding the 8" circular one to the mix too. 

Only the piece for the book cover was more or less planned (and you can see a detail at the top of this post).

The rest were entirely improvisational. I just added things where I felt I wanted them and only towards the end when the pieces of fabric were almost done did I have a careful look at them to see what more they needed. I have no idea why I bother with this as most of these fabrics will be cut up and used in various pieces of work but I don't seem to be able to stop fussing (or maybe I just call it designing!)

I then I do the exact same thing again when I'm taking photographs of the finished results. Areas that I particularly like are carefully positioned in the camera's viewfinder till I have a picture I'm happy with.

 All a tad obsessive! 

But it makes me happy!

Every Leaf is a Flower Journal Quilt

Does this look familiar to you? If so, well spotted. I'm plagiarizing my own work here to make my November Journal Quilt for the Sketchbook Challenge site. I have to also admit that I was a bit disappointed with the theme there this month which was: Autumn Leaves. Nothing wrong with it as such but the theme last month was Trees and I could as easily have used last month's journal quilt for this month. I would have loved something completely different. But as that wasn't to be I did my best to make this one as different from last month's as was possible and to do so I reached for my planner and found the Leaf Page I made for The Documented Life Project 2 weeks ago when the theme was Add Leaves. You can see that page underneath and also by following this link.

The page in my planner was done entirely in paper so my task was to translate that into fabric. I started with a piece of drop cloth (which I blogged earlier here). I then used the same Stencilgirl leaf stencil as I did for the Leaf Page and used it with the same colours of paint: red, orange and pink.  I then layered the resulting piece of fabric with wadding and backing fabric and outlined stitched the leaves with a variegated thread in those same colours.

I then filled in the background with running stitch in another variegated thread to tone in with that as you can see above. I also wanted to use postage stamps as in the original page, so made sure to leave some space for them. I used 3 French stamps with the same image but different colours and sealed them with several layers of matte medium.

I was asked about the postage stamps I had added to some of my 52 Journals a lot during the exhibition and most of those were sealed with acrylic wax (available from Art Van Go) but that does add a bit of a shine to the surface. In this case I didn't want to make the stamps the focus of the page so by using matte medium they fade more into the background.

What I liked most about the Leaf Page were the white dots I added using a marker pen. And of course there was an easy way to transfer that idea onto my journal quilt which was to use size 11 white seed beads as you can see above. The binding is a matching commercial batik fabric and of course I couldn't resist adding some red/orange seed beads along side that too.

So here it is. A fabric interpretation of one of my Documented Life pages. It's one of the reasons why I take on such projects which are non-fabric related. Doing the weekly pages sometimes produces work that is worthy of being made into a piece of fabric art. The pages become sort of an inspirational sketchbook that I can go to for inspiration when I need it as I did this week. Sometimes I veer away from the original page in my fabric interpretation but in this case I stuck pretty close to the original. This is also sort of an answer to another question I was asked frequently during the 52 Journals exhibition: where do I get my inspiration from? And as I said then to many visitors: there is really no greater pleasure than making something that is totally original to you. 

Finally I just discovered that this is my 2000th blog post. I started back in December 2006 and now here we all are in November 2014. I know some of you have been here right from the start and you deserve a medal for sticking with it all these years. Some of you on the other hand, have only recently landed here and a very big Welcome to you. So happy you're here. I have no intention at all of stopping. I'm enjoying this as much as you hopefully are, so onwards and forwards!

Colour Play with the Gelli Plate

I spend more time painting cotton fabric using my gelli plate and a wide variety of acrylic paints. As chance would have it it was exactly a week ago I did this last although that wasn't planned. I simply woke up this morning feeling like doing a painting session. When those moods strike I have found it's a good idea to give in. Doing things when you fancy them is much easier than fighting it. That doesn't just apply to painting fabric but also to writing this blog.

I've had a dry spell even though you might not have noticed. For some reason, probably because of all the internet problems, I suddenly lost the will to write even though we now have two wifi systems to keep us going. But my mojo had gone in hiding. Yes, there were still pictures here courtesy of the Blogsy App, and a few lines of text were even added, but I knew my heart wasn't in it. That was the reason I didn't switch on the laptop and took the time to think about my words and get them down on the page.

The mojo hasn't returned yet and I'm sitting it out. I know it will fly home at some stage, but in the meantime I have finally switched on the PC and made myself type this. Sometimes just doing is enough to bring the will to do more back. If this doesn't help I will (cliché coming up!) go with the flow.

The painting on the other hand flowed a lot easier. I used much the same paints as last week's session, with the addition of some neon and fluorescent colours. As I mentioned then these painted fabrics are for a quilt I have in mind. I want to have lots of fabrics to chose from so anticipate a few more painting sessions till I feel I have enough to get started. I also want to make quite a bit of progress with the quilt that I'm hand quilting at the moment before diving into a new project.

I'm trying not to get to attached to these individual fabrics because they will be cut up in due course but I'm rather pleased with the one above. Not sure if I can persuade myself to put the scissors into this one when the time comes!

Getting My Hands Dirty

After all the upheavals of the last few days or even weeks peace has returned to Macbiehill together with the internet access. And what better way to spend it than to retreat to my painting shed with a stack of cotton fabric in my arms, get the acrylic paint and fabric spray paints out as well as some of my stencils and gelli plates and  proceed to get my hands dirty. And boy, do I do that. Paint up till my elbows, and what a satisfying feeling it is. So is the stack of fabrics and papers that are now drying. All the fabrics will be for a specific project I have had in mind for a long time now but that I wouldn't allow myself to start till the previous quilt was tacked. 

That has happened and I'm in the process of hand quilting it. I'm up to date with all my other projects and am well on the way with an article I'm writing. So all is good! Very good even!

 These fabrics will be cut up in the process of making the new quilt that's in my head but somehow I still "design" every piece of cotton I paint which is strictly speaking unnecessary but I seem to be conditioned to do it anyway plus it's good practice too. One day I might set to work making one large piece of fabric, all painted, to translate into a whole cloth quilt and this will have been an excellent preparation for that. I just have to get to grips with the logistics of such an undertaking given the size of my gelli plates (largest being 12 x 14").

I feel it coming though, which is always exciting. My quilts tend to live in my head long before they ever take shape in reality and it's at this stage that I problem solve and think about how I can turn my vision into cloth. 

The Art of Randomness

What a day and night we had. It was unbelievably wild out there and I blipped at the crack of dawn yesterday morning just in case we lost our electricity. Fortunately that didn't happen till late in the afternoon and we were lucky enough to get it back quite quickly although it took a bit longer before the wifi was back up and running. But in the end we did get off very lightly compared to people down south who have now been without power since Christmas Eve. And living in towns not many of them seem to have generators to keep them going. It must be hell!

Today is a much better and calmer day and I'm spending these dog days of the year trying to finish up several projects that were started back in the summer. I think that's when I signed up for the Graffiti of my Life online class by Dinah Wakley.  I think it was the title that most attracted me!I'm on my way now with it but it will no doubt be 2014 before I finish. Above you can see one of my pages in the making, although it's still at the very beginning, so lots more will be added.

But isn't it amazing how much more impressive my drop cloth looks. These are pieces of white cotton which I use to mop up the overspill of paints and inks on my stencils and also to pad the painted pages dry. That's all an entirely random activity. I fold it this way and that to find a dry spot to mop with and what I end up with tends to be so much yummier than the art I made intentionally! What does that say?!  Better not to ask but simply be pleased with the end result.

As I needed a daily blip I took quite a few pictures of that drop cloth finding the details I loved best. The good thing of doing this is that I can save the image and if I want, have that little detail reproduced on cloth by Spoonflower and end up with an entirely new fabric that I have "designed". Oh the joy of it. Really I'm so happy to live in a time when all those things are possible technically speaking. The drop cloth itself will also be used in future work but I now know I can always reproduce it should I want to do so.

No doubt you will see more of the work I do in class as well as another project (also painted related, there is a definite trend going on!!) that is now drying and will then be complete. Pictures will be here when we have another day in which the outside world has not much to offer photographically speaking!

Mysteries of the Woods Journal Quilt

Some days ago I showed you the fabrics I painted in anticipation of making this journal quilt (see the post here) for the latest theme on the Sketchbook Challenge site, which is In the Woods. My wood is definitely a summer one where the trees are in full leaf. As I suspected when painting the fabrics the one with the ash leaf became the focal point in my little (10" square) quilt as you can see above. Apart from my painted leaf fabrics I added some pink in the form of a commercial fabric, just because I had added pink painted dots to some of my painted fabrics. I made a piecing plan for this piece and then it was a simple matter of piecing it all together.

I outline hand quilted around the various leaf shapes and also added more hand quilting where it seemed appropriate. The dragonfly seemed to belong in my wood. She came from Vintaj, and I added some alcohol inks to her in blue shades as I have seen so many blue dragonflies recently on the Blipfoto site.

Of course the next step was to add some more embellishments in the shape of beads as you can see in detail above. I'm quite pleased with how this journal quilt turned out although once again I came nowhere near using a sketchbook for the challenge. I just designed it in my head before and during the painting of the fabrics. Oh well!

Cloth Paper Scissors Fabric Swatch Exchange

I'm not quite sure what possessed me to take time out to do this but it proved the perfect activity for a wet and miserable day. I had read in the Cloth Paper Scissors magazine about a proposed fabric swatch exchange. The idea is to design your own half yard of fabric, and then cut it into eight 9 x 9" pieces which you mail to the magazine and eventually you will receive six pieces back decorated by other artists while the 2 remaining pieces will be used for two giant swatch books, one of which will be won by one of the participants (fingers crossed!).

I started with white cotton fabric and painted it with Dekasilk fabric paints and then let the piece dry. That was done yesterday so that the fabric was ready for me this morning.

I then used stamps bought recently in the children's department of the Hobby Craft shop. I was attracted to them because they featured circular shapes in a variety of sizes and I love circles. I used both fabric paints and acrylic paint for the stamping. Some of them were metallic colours. Again I left this to dry.

The final touch was provided by stencilling through sequin waste (or punchinella) using spray paints as well as acrylic paints till eventually I looked at the fabric and thought: "That's it!".

The finished fabric is shown at the very top and is also my blip for today.