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Archive for the ‘Surface Design Techniques’ Category

Quilt Content! and Other Stuff

Wednesday, January 9th, 2008

I finally did it. I ironed Misty Fuse to my precious art cloth and I cut it. First, I drove myself nuts by folding and auditioning shapes and fabric on the design wall. I love working with these colors.

Then, I decided to just move forward, and as soon as I started ironing on the misty fuse, I felt more confident.

The next step was to cut the fabric and start laying out the design on batting. It seemed easier to do this on one of my large tables.

Then I pinned the pieces to the batting and put it up on the design wall for a look and tweaking.

Some of the pieces are a little wonky, but it is not fused yet so I will tweak it some more tomorrow. After it is fused, I will move on to quilting it. This is the latest in my construction series.

It is Wednesday so it was off to WW. I am happy to say that I was down 1.6 pounds so I lost my gain and more so I am at a new low weight!!

Mr C and I awoke to an e-mail problem on all three computers. We could receive e-mail, but we couldn’t send it. While I was at WW, Steve got in touch with Comcast. They gave him some hokey story about a virus. I have a Mac; I don’t get viruses and why would it effect all 3 computers – 1 PC and 2 macs. So, we called them back and they checked all of our settings and then had us see if we could send mail from the Web. which we could. The tech then deemed it our problem on our computers. Not!! So we called them back and we did not hang up until they found the problem — a spam filter that was blocking our sending mail. Why was it there? I don’t know.

I am such a political junkie. I was on pins and needles last night. I was disappointed that Obama did not get the predicted double digit win, but in reality, it was a good result for him.

Here is my problem with Hillary. I keep seeing one of those questions in an IQ test. What comes next in this series?

Bush/Clinton/Bush/______

And I don’t want to have it be Clinton. We can do better.

Posted in My creations, Surface Design Techniques, This and that, weight loss/gain | 8 Comments »

New Year Wishes

Tuesday, January 1st, 2008

I think 2008 is going to be quite a year.

We will elect a new president and things will get better in the political arena.
I will not have to start a diet — already been there and done that, but I will continue to lose.
I will turn 70 in October and that seems almost impossible to me. Mia told me the other day that I don’t look old because I have no wrinkles!
Mr C and I are taking a trip to the Holy Land in May which is bound to be an incredible journey for us.
I am excited about creating some new art cloth that will become quilted art.

There is a commercial that has been running on HGTV with a song by Leann Womack. I love the lyrics and so I am posting them here as my wish for all my friends and family in the new year

I Hope You Dance

I hope you never lose your sense of wonder,
You get your fill to eat but always keep that hunger,
May you never take one single breath for granted,
God forbid love ever leave you empty handed,
I hope you still feel small when you stand beside the ocean,
Whenever one door closes I hope one more opens,
Promise me that you’ll give faith a fighting chance,
And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance.

I hope you dance….I hope you dance……….

I am dancing in the studio. Yesterday, I started on a new creation. I am using this piece of discharged fabric. I used skinny masking tape and added turquoise to the discharge paste. This was done in the class I took last summer.

Here are some fabrics that I am auditioning for the piece.

I haven’t worked in these yummy colors for a while so I am quite excited. They will brighten up the dreary Portland winter days.

I had a nice New Year’s eve and day. Last night we attended the annual New Year’s eve concert at the cathedral. It is attended by throngs with SRO and people sitting in the altar area and on the floor. The music director invites people from the Portland music scene to come and perform. Donations are given to Our House (an outreach to aid’s patients) and Sister’s of the Road (a feeding program for the homeless). We got primo seats with our friends who get reserved front row seats because one of them is on the board of the music program at the cathedral. There are two dramatic moments in the evening for me — the singing of a Jewish blessing in Hebrew by the wife of the Rabbi of the Synagogue next door to Trinity. Her husband, the Rabbi translated. It was a beautiful moment. At the end of the service, a bag piper comes up the isle and then plays Auld Lang Syne. This year they had the added attraction of four beautiful young people who performed modern dance pieces to Brahm’s, sung by a tenor.

Today, our friends Reva and Jerry served Hoppin’ John for good luck in the New Year. It was delicious and we enjoyed chatting with many mutual friends.

Wishing you a joy filled and creative new year.

Posted in Holidays, My creations, Quilting Friends, Spiritual Life, Surface Design Techniques | 8 Comments »

Waxing with Ginger

Saturday, November 17th, 2007

Ginger of Gingerfied came by yesterday and we decided to do some soy wax batiking. I heated up my new electric fry pan to melt the wax and hauled out my crate of objects for making marks with soy wax. I bought a bunch of antique potato mashers which I had not used.

You can see Ginger’s results on her blog (link above).

This fabric was originally discharged with turquoise dye added to the discharge paste. Here it is with soy wax marks.

I painted it with turquoise and purple paint. Here it is after heat setting and washing.

It is ready for another layer of something – stamping or screen printing.

This was a rather ugly piece of orangish low immersion dyed cotton with soy wax marks..

Here it is after painting with turquoise paint – what an improvement.

This fabric is silk that I folded and dyed in a class with Jane Dunnewald. It has been languishing in my studio for over a year. It was a pinkish orange color. I didn’t get a photo with the was, but here it is after painting with red Setacolor silk. It has been heat set and washed. I was going for a subtle effect. It is now ready for another layer of something.

This is a piece of hand-dyed cotton with some gorgeous colors. I am going to mix up some dye for this so it is still sitting with the wax, waiting for me to figure out what color(s) to use.

Ginger and I talked non-stop. We even had a lively theological discussion with Mr C at lunch.

After Ginger left, I ran up to Westmoreland to get my hair cut. Then Mr C and I went to Cha Cha Cha for some Mexican food before attending a lecture at Trinity by the pre-eminent biblical scholars, Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan. They discussed the first Christmas which they have written about in a newly released book.

These men are proponents of what I call progressive Christianity. We first met Marcus when we lived in North Carolina. His wife, Maryanne, is a priest at Trinity and coordinates the Center for Spiritual Development. Mr C and I are very excited because we are going to the Holy Land with the three of them and 30 some other folks next May. That is, if Dumb and Dumber will cool their heels and not invade Iran and escalate the strife in the mid-east.

Today, I did some major work on the SDA site for the 2009 conference and babysat with M & M while their Mom and Dad got some work done. They have no school next week and Steph needed to get organized for Miles’ birthday party on Monday. We messed around in my studio and then after lunch we went to the library. They are such book kids and feel right at home in a library.

Posted in My creations, Quilting Friends, Soy Wax Batik, Surface Design Techniques | 7 Comments »

The Ubiquitous Dandelion

Tuesday, October 30th, 2007

Existing or being everywhere at the same time : constantly encountered — the definition of ubiquitous and so it seemed the appropriate name for my dandelion piece for the Twelve X Twelve challenge. (Link in the sidebar.)

Here are a couple of close-ups that are clickable for a larger view.

Here is the process I went through to achieve the final design.

I started with this photo of a dandelion gone to seed that I took on our trip to Woodinville, WA.

In Photoshop, I created the following design by using a filter to create a line design which I reversed to make the white parts black.

I knew that one side of this was too mushy to make a good thermofax screen so I cut it in half and mirrored the two parts to make a better design.

I created screens of this in 3 different sizes.

My original intent was to try to discharge to white on a black fabric. A chlorine discharge did not give the white color I wanted. I tested some thiox, but I did not have time to steam it and know that it would work before my trip to San Francisco.

I then turned to this overdyed piece of cotton that I had in my stash.

On a test piece, using Soft Scrub, I got this wonderful image – in bright yellow.

Discharging is not an exact science so I didn’t know what I would get when I used a larger piece of fabric.

I almost forgot to photograph this before I started stitching. The photo was taken on the floor of the car as we were driving so the quality is not the best!

As you can see, the fabric discharged in many different ways. But I was so excited to have the white areas where I could do the fluffy dandelions. I was fortunate to have purchased some hand-dyed Perle cotton in variegated yellows and greens. I also used an off -white Perle cotton. After I had hand-embroidered the dandelions, I was not sure what to do with the background. Machine stitching seemed as if it would spoil the integrity of the hand work I had done. I tried some linear background stitching – but that did not work. Then, I decided the wonky all-over stitching worked best. I am very happy with the result.

Be sure to go check out the Twelve X Twelve blog to see all of the varied and wonderful dandelions.

Posted in 12X12 challenge, Discharging fabric, My creations, Quilting Friends, Surface Design Techniques | 14 Comments »

Sensory Overload

Wednesday, October 17th, 2007

This week is turning out to be a fabulous art quilting week. I just finished Wendy Huhn’s class last night. Today, I went to see a show of work and hear a lecture by Ann Johnston. Friday, I am heading to Tacoma for the Quiltart Symposium for a couple of days. Whew!!

Here are some images from yesterday’s work in Wendy’s class. In the morning, we did transfers of images using transparencies printed with an ink jet printer and gel medium.

The top transfer is an old cigar label – Omar, the tent maker on canvas. The next two are photos that were transferred to cotton. The bottom is a photo of the earth transferred to organza. This was so much fun and quite easy to do. Any kind of ink jet printer can be used, but you must have ink jet transparencies.

In the afternoon, we made these fun acrylic stamps with leftover squares of acrylic and that foam stuff you find at Joann’s and Michael’s.

I am not sure how much I will use some of these transfer techniques, but I loved hanging out with other artists and being inspired by them. One of them was Trisha Hassler, who I have mentioned before. She does the work with metal in her work. She is such a great person to hang out with for a few day.

After a disappointing weigh-in at WW (I was up a bit), I spent some time getting some computer stuff done before Terry picked me up for our Art Date with June. We took in a small quilt show of Ann Johnston’s work at the Vancouver campus of the Washington State University. Ann did a lecture which I thoroughly enjoyed because I love, love her work and want to try some of her dye painting techniques. Yum!

Here are June and Terry checking out the quilting on this whole cloth quilt. Ann is now using a long arm and loves the quilting that she can do with it.

After the show, we enjoyed a nice dinner together. I always enjoy my time with these Portland friends.

Posted in Inspiration, photo transfers, Quilting Friends, Surface Design Techniques, Uncategorized, workshop | 4 Comments »

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