January This ‘N That

Here it is January 5th of the new year and I’m just now blogging.  Been sick all through the holidays, tired and still had to do all the festivities stuff.  Now I’m just tired!  I am better though and thankful for that.

In my last blog post I said I would share a picture of a pattern that caught my eye.  I was too busy to do art during the holidays, but it’s interesting how my attention was taken by a pattern made by the dipped pretzels on the wax paper!  I may use this for something. That’s a plaid dishtowel laying beneath it so that I could photograph the pattern. I wonder what India ink would do?  Would it go around the outlines of the patterns?  I may have to try that tomorrow.

Today I “autographed” a couple of my art pieces in stitch.  I recently heard a horror story about someone being denied their art because their name wasn’t stitched on it….I am not going to have that happen to me!  I am taking these two quilts to a photographer’s studio to be photographed next week and wanted to get my name on them before that. I am considering entering these in an exhibit and want to get some really good pictures as I don’t think mine are that great.

And now my playtime event…a piece of screened cloth from a long time ago with lots of white spaces in it because I used torn paper…I decided to paint those white areas and then maybe I can finally do something with it.  This also gave me ideas for doing a larger piece of cloth.  I ‘m really loving the colors, but not sure where this goes from here.  When I screened it, I used screenprinting inks which made the cloth kind of stiff.  The inks are very thick.  I came back in with fabric paints and liquid acrylics to paint the white areas.

Well, I guess it will sit again until I get an urge to do something with it.  I am really wanting to do some free form piecing….maybe on the retreat I’m going to later this month….

Dye Painting Class

Here are some pictures from the class from a couple of weeks ago.

Avery, our only male in the class, painting with a syringe on a monoprinted piece, I believe.

A better look at where he was going with this one.  I love the colors.

Sandra, doing some layering on a monoprint.

Jennifer’s piece has some rubbings and stamping on it.

Avery did a rubbing over a piece of construction fence, then came back in with another color.

A rubbing from a paint grid and I’m not sure what else, but I like the colors.

I’m really mad at myself for not getting more pictures!  There were so many pieces of awesome cloth everyone was working on.

Serendipity Printing

I’ve been sickly this week, just a cold, but still had to push on and get some silk scarves dyed and printed for another art festival this weekend.  Starting life as the dropcloth for printing a scarf…I think I see the start of a new piece…I added some more marks to it.

Besides black, I used Dharma’s Greenish Brown color, doubled.  It looks really brown when first printed, but after batching and washing, it looks more olive brown, drab olive, whatever.  I like it.  This is on cotton, not silk.

Dropcloth Art…

It’s not finished!

Farm Progress Show Follow Up

Dear Readers: In my haste to get ready, load up the van and get to breakfast on time yesterday, it never once entered my head to get the camera!  I’m just not in the habit of carrying it with me to meals…yet!  I am going to have to get advice from Gerrie since she always has lovely pictures of food and meals, even when they eat out.

But I can describe it for you…we had a fruit dish of bananas and strawberries, small stack of pancakes, sausage patties, hard fried eggs with a soft white cheese melted on top (never had that before!), juice and coffee.  Yes, it was another wonderful breakfast.  If anyone questions my infatuation with my breakfasts the past few days…let me explain.  My husband goes to work early and we don’t fix breakfast.  Every morning I have a bowl of bran flakes with soy milk and dried cranberries on top…that is it.  Being at the bed and breakfast this week was quite a treat as far as breakfast was concerned!  And someone else was fixing it…and it was way better than the continental breakfasts you get at a motel for the same price.

Anyway, I sold a few more scarves yesterday…that was very encouraging.  Right before I left, I worked on some large square chiffon scarves and was quite pleased with how they turned out.  Every day I draped a new one over my “dummy” to see public reaction.  The third one sold, and it was one I ran out of time on and planned on doing more to it when I got back.  The sale saved me more work!

I still have these two…the one that sold was a bit more reddish than the orange one above.  I discharged it the same way, but didn’t like the color so I overdyed it.  The discharged areas were more muted.  I also used the same screen print on it that the orange one has.  It is a Thermofax print of a picture of tree branches.

I’m back home now and need to re-stock my inventory…next art show is in two weeks.

Bags, Bags, and More Bags…

At least I’m having fun!!!!!

Life In August

I’m such a slacker on this blog!  I really didn’t have much of anything interesting to report.  I have been getting ready to teach and vend, so have not been making any art, that’s for sure.  I have some new products to sell and the class I taught last weekend was machine quilting.  What’s there to say about that?

I do have a sample that I quilted with my Featherweight machine.  That might be interesting to see.

A complaint I have about stitching this way on the Featherweight, and it may be a problem unique only to mine and not to other machines, is that when the needle goes down in the hole a second time, a pretty noticeable knot appears (at least with black thread on white cloth).  But I made the sample to show my class that it is possible to do this on a Featherweight.

I love Kathy Sandbach’s books on machine quilting.  The one I used for the class was Show Me How To Machine Quilt.  She has developed a method of creating unique continuous line designs in stitch for quilts with diagrams showing how to start and continue. It’s a great book especially if you are looking to go beyond stippling and other filler designs. I have some left over from the class.  They are $16.95 plus shipping.  They are not up on the website yet.

Another piece of news:  I now have Rayna Gillman’s book for sale on my website!  See here.

Well, I guess that’s all for today…hopefully it won’t be so long between posts this time!

Today’s Work…

Well, I claimed on Facebook that I was going to paint sunset fabric today…but this morning I got caught up in the whole idea of making some beaded zipper decorations to jazz up my little bags, so….

I have enough variety of colors of beads that I can create each fob to match the bag.  How fun is that?

I like the little polka dot bead…goes perfect on that bag!

These bags are for sale.  Some of them are made with deconstructed screen prints and some are hand dyed, stamped and painted cloth.  They are then layered with batting and stitched before being made into zippered bags.  The larger ones from the deconstructed prints are 7″ x 5″ (cosmetic bag size) and are $27.  The smaller ones are 5″ x 4″ and are $23. I know I haven’t put pictures up of all of them and I don’t have them listed on etsy yet.  If anyone is interested, email me and I will send you a picture.

More This ‘N That

Does anyone else wake up in the morning with so many choices before you that you find it hard to choose your direction for the day?!  Some days that’s how I feel as I prepare for shows, classes, etc. And then there’s the things I would like to work on “just for fun”. I find it hard finding time for those…

I made another Runaround bag…it makes up so fast and easy.  This one is made with discharge dyed black cotton with another piece of my cloth and then adorned with  leftover chocolate button trim from Moda.

A piece of black cotton sateen discharge dyed in circles. I left the dishwashing gel on it for a long time, so it bleached out quite a bit.

And lastly, some small bags I have been making using deconstructed screen prints.  The prints are just the right size, and after layering and stitching them,  they make a cute makeup bag.

This ‘N That…

I can’t believe it’s been nine days since I blogged here!  First I have to go out and take a walk.  The weather has cooled off considerably and this is a great morning for walking.  The intense heat finally broke here yesterday.  It was much cooler when I came out of church yesterday.  88 degrees actually felt good compared to what we have been having.  Be back later.

What have I been working on? Last week I needed to get photography done for an entry that was to be in by June 30.  Application had to be filled out, etc.  This is for the Mid-States Exhibition that is held every year at the museum in Evansville.  I have only entered once and didn’t get in, but this year I felt I had something that might get accepted. But who knows?  The previous year that I entered, I was beat out by a nylon stocking with rocks or something in it that really looked like a bull’s testicle.  It was supposed to be some sort of  “necklace”.

Here’s some stitching I did on a deconstructed print…I am thinking of making some small bags with these prints.

I got out my Featherweight machine to do this with because I want to demo free form stitching with a Featherweight for an upcoming class.  These machines can be a little touchy.  I couldn’t get it to stitch in free form mode because the needle was in backwards.  But once I figured out that’s why it wouldn’t stitch, all was well!

I loaded some new little bundles of fabric to my etsy shop and someone picked one of them up for a treasury.  That’s never happened before and has increased hits to my shop, although not a sale yet.  Keep fingers crossed. I need to keep working the shop, although I get sidetracked in the morning and forget to load pictures.

Piece of fabric I dye painted a couple of weeks ago…not sure where it’s going yet.