Art Journal—A Creative Journey

I am working this week. I am preparing for a fabric dyeing class this weekend at the Rend Lake Visitor’s center. I have been studying and writing my handout and getting kits ready.

I have also been playing/working in my room. My new best friend is gesso. A friend of mine had given me several books of home dec samples. Being the little hoarding and can’t-waste-anything person that I am, I have found a use for some of these pieces. I usually work fairly small, so these do come in handy. (When, oh, when will I work larger?) I am taking the large florals and painting them with gesso, then painting over that with the Adirondack iridescent paints. I love the whitewashed feeling the gesso does to the fabric. The paint is not put on solid, but a bit randomly. You’ll see. I am using these pieces to frame other small pieces of art. I like the look. Now to find a way to mount them for hanging. I glued (PVA, acid free) the gessoed, painted home dec fabric to matboard, but have stopped there so far. These pieces are not stitched yet. The only problem I see so far, is that the lovely gessoed florals are mostly covered up, but I do like the “framing” look of it.

I am thinking “Fragments of a Life”. What do you think?

Again using scraps…home dec fabric, gesso, acrylics, stamping, dyed craft paper, torn paper from a photo, screening, painted dryer sheets, hand dyed fabric, calligraphy pen. This started with a georgous earthy hand dye I wish I could repeat.

I think I will be adding more to this one. I am thinking more background texture. The home dec fabric pieces have a lovely ragged edge on one side (shown here on the bottom), from cutting them out of the book. I would like to utitilize that.

I am looking forward to soon spending a few days dyeing, painting and screening with soy wax out in my patio…if this cold, rainy weather ever clears up!

I have been wanting to blog my observations about the Adirondack paint that I recently purchased.  I love, love, love, the Adirondack Dabbers. I got those in Chicago.  This is acrylic paint with a sponge dabber in the lid.  You simply turn the bottle upside down and “dab” the paint onto your stamp or whatever.  The two colors I purchased, Espresso and Lettuce, are very rich, and I am looking for more of those.

At Paducah I was looking for more of the dabbers, but did not find them.  I did find Adirondack acrylics.  Thinking these were the same as the paint in the dabbers, I purchased them (and they were half off).  I reasoned that I could just use my own dabbers.  They wouldn’t have quite the convenience of the others, but I could make do.  These paints turned out to be metallic, and I was quite surprised because I did think I was purchasing the same kind of paint.  There was nothing in the labeling to indicate that they were anything but regular acrylics, so a word to the wise…but they are nice thick paints.

It’s time to blog again and I feel a little bit lost as to topic.  This week has mainly been a week of just doing a little of this and that and tying up loose ends on stuff.  I can’t say that I have accomplished anything major.

I did manage to get a tote bag sample made up for a class in June so that I could deliver it when I went to Evansville on Thursday.  You can see it at the bottom of the page, Classes In Evansville.  I like how it turned out, all bright and cheerful.  And yesterday I worked on blocks for another class I am planning for the fall, the 4 Patch Posy.  You can see those blocks on the Coming Soon page.  I have this group of girls from Indiana that are keeping me quite busy.  You see, they have full time jobs, and they just love getting out for a day and coming to the shop, taking a class and learning something new.  So it’s keeping me hopping, planning classes and making the samples.  But they help out quite well.  They choose the class and usually the date they can come.  I just schedule it and get the sample made if I don’t already have one.  Does anyone want to buy samples?  I am getting quite a collection!  I do schedule the classes several times to maximize the use of my samples.

I did do some playing around with some art earlier in the week.  You see, I will be in a group exhibit at the Arts Council gallery in Evansville in August and have been mulling over what I will plan to put in and what I should make before that time for the exhibit.  My workroom is full of scraps of cloth.  I am such a hoarder.  I even have started keeping the plastic tabs from potato bags, because when I look at them I think, I just know something can be done with that in my art!  But my room (needs to be cleaned) has a tableload of “stuff” laying around so I played.

See?  Discharged cotton, scraps of painted dryer sheet and painted white cotton with writing on it, a scrap of joint tape, black cotton, dyed paper.  I must not forget the scrap of plasticized (from heat) onion bag.  It was laying around…can’t let it go to waste.  It’s too cool for texture.  I really love the challenge of using my imagination and the scraps on my table.  I think I could do it all day long and use up the scraps, but then I realize they multiply way faster than I can use them.

I am also working on this.  I really like the red free motion zig zag stitching and I think I will find other ways to use this technique.

So what artsy things are you doing today?

Well, the festival is over for this year.  It was quite fun with lots of artists in all mediums.  The first day was quite ‘blustery” and we had to hold onto our hats (and tents!), the downside of outdoor festivals.  The second day was awesome and beautiful.  A columnist for the Evansville Courier, Sally Roth, had a column that came out in Sunday’s paper with a brief mention of the Arts In Harmony festival and a mention of my website and, in particular, a certain fiber piece of mine, called “Leaf”.  It is from a photo of a geranium leaf in my back yard.  She previewed my website and really loved this piece, then wrote about it in her column.  She was at the fair, since she lives in New Harmony.  Since I had prior notice that this column was coming out, I managed to have “Leaf” on hand, mounted and ready to hang…and Sally purchased it.  There were several purchase awards given to other artists, but this was my “purchase award”!

“Leaf” —SOLD

Ahhh…..it feels good to be home and working in the, ahem, “studio” (aka the 9′x 9′ shrinking spare bedroom).  The Arts In Harmony art festival is this coming weekend.  I have been experimenting with some ideas, altering fabric, and going back to some pieces that have been started, but somewhere along the way I had gotten lost and did not finish it.  First, the cloth, because it led to what I did with an unfinished piece.

I took this rather dark clean-the-brush-cloth….

….and turned it into this….

…took this fabric….

…and turned it into this.

See my new stamps in there?

I started this piece back in the winter (not so long ago).  It is mostly painted dryer sheets, but there is some cheesecloth and scrim and painted fusible web in it too.  I got to a place where I was not satisfied, but lost interest or got busy with other things.  It needed more….more depth…more something.

Yesterday, I gave it a go using the same technique I did on the cloth.  When you are a week away from a show, starting new work is not an option because of the time factor, but pulling out unfinished pieces and finishing them is! A show is a great motivator for getting stuff done.

I am much happier with it.  I’m not sure it is done, but it sure is better!

My piece of cloth has been traveling since last October. It has been in a round robin. Seven people participated and each added a layer of surface design. Now it has finally arrived home and I am very pleased with how it turned out.

I was eating lunch with a friend today and I thought I felt something. No one in the restaurant seemed to notice, so I dismissed it. My husband came home tonight and said we had another one. I checked the USGS site here and found that, indeed we had another one, a 3.7 today at 12:31 p.m. As I continued checking the stats at the website, I see there was another one yesterday also, a 2.6 at 6:44 a.m.  This is a lot of activity for this area, which hardly ever sees this kind of activity. There is a “whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on”.

I’m back from Paducah…and it was a great trip.  ! saw friends from other places, did lots of walking and shopping, and spent too much.  I ran into Kathy Arnett again working for Embellishment Village.  The last time I posted about meeting her, I didn’t know that she had a fabulous website that tells about the retreat she organizes every year, so here it is…www.fabricationsretreat.com.  Be sure to check it out!

I purchased all the fun stuff…ceramic beads, dyes, paints, etc.  I did buy some commercial fabrics that I thought I would cut the motifs from and use in something and some stripes.  I also got some great cinnamon colored solids that I will put some surface design on. I also found some newsprint fabric and tape measure fabric.

There were new vendors on ParkAvenue across from Bluegrass Honda—good stuff there!  A really great hand dyer with wonderful shibori pieces. A wonderful “black/white and one other color” challenge was hung in there as well as two solo quilt exhibits.  Of course, the quilts at the show were great as usual.  It was interesting listening to people comment about certain ones.  One comment was that one person “cheated” by painting ovals on her quilt instead of appliqueing them. (Of course, I loved it.)  Others were surprised at the choice of Best of Show.  There were several whole cloth quilted pieces that had been painted or inked after the quilting, and I thought they were quite stunning.

I was hoping I would find some Adirondack Dabbers for sale there, but was unable to locate them.  I did find some Adirondack paints in these yummy colors…Butterscotch, Raisin, Denim, Terra Cotta, Eggplant and Bottie..and the price was VERY good.  I have some little wooden daubers I can use with them.

I probably can’t say enough about our stay at the Drury Inn and Suites.  They provided a wonderful dinner and breakfast for us.  It was awesome. And of course, to get to spend the time with good friends from back home is totally awesome too.  Now that all of my running around is done, I can get back to “normal life”.  I have a baby quilt waiting for me to finish quilting, then I have an art festival next weekend.  I am looking forward to that and hoping it won’t be hot or rainy.  I’m not asking for much, eh?

I just heard on the news this morning that another earthquake occured in this area shortly after midnight this morning. It was measured at 4.5 and the center was 45 minutes away from me at Mt. Carmel. I slept through it, but it woke my husband up. You can check out all the recent earthquake activity at the USGS site here. It is very interesting to read. I never knew that Alaska had so many quakes.

On another, unrelated, topic, I leave for Paducah tomorrow to spend a couple of days with my friends there. Tomorrow we will shop, shop, shop…and on Wednesday, we will probably shop, shop, shop…and see quilts. I don’t think earthquakes will stop us.

I have been spending my weekend installing a new email client and getting it up and running and connecting with my server. Outlook Express has totally fallen apart. I still can’t get one of the email addresses working, but kathy@katherinesands.com is working, hallelujia. My 70 gb hard drive filled up over the weekend, so I bought a 320 gb external hard drive to put all my photos on. (There, that oughta hold me for awhile.) I have so much computer work to do, I can’t see straight. But…first things first…Paducah.

Here is the last photo I saw of my fabric making its way through the Round Robin #1 circle on the complexcloth list. It will be interesting to see the final outcome in person! See ya’.

I just want to let people know who may be trying to reach me or who read my blog that we are just fine here outside of Carmi. We did feel the earthquake in West Salem and there have been aftershocks, but there is no damage at our house. I have had several phone calls this morning. They said at first it was a 5.4 quake, but have since changed it to 5.2. Email me for any more information!