Category: Art Projects

Pincushion Update

The pincushion is coming along. Here’s the base, a large vitamin bottle cap with blue felt stitched around the sides with dyed silk yarn:

The base, in theory, will sit on some flower petal shapes:

Here are the shapes, the one the top is finished, the other three need to be sewn and have the bit of batting stuffed inside:

This is the painted rayon/silk fabric that will be stuffed with batting and stitched around the base to resemble something faintly round and will be stuck in the pill bottle top:

Since I have no bulk polyfill, and since today is a no-car day for me (bicycle only) and since I have no interest in pedaling to the fabric store, I chopped up some fusible polyester batting I have gathering dust (why would I ever use polyester fusible batting?) and I think a handful of this stuff chopped will provide an un-lumpy pincushion stuffing.

Pressure is on. Pincushion exchange is in 3 days! I just hope mine will measure up. I don’t want to have the Charlie Brown Christmas Tree Pincushion.

I got some ideas for this pattern from this excellent (miniature) pincushion pattern:

http://www.craftstylish.com/item/945/how-to-make-pretty-pincushions/page/all

Pincushion

Yes, this is really the beginning of a pincushion. It’s for my art quilt group’s Christmas pincushion exchange. The plastic white bottle cap will be the base for a pincushion flower.

As if cutting the felt wasn’t hard enough, gluing it on took for-ev-er.

This is what is really hard about being an artist. If you quit art making for any period of time, getting back into the process takes baby steps; and only after a few baby steps does the routine return.

More pincushion tomorrow.

 

Tubac Center for the Arts Member’s Juried Exhibit

I joined the Tubac Center for the Arts earlier this year, and I entered an art quilt in their annual Member’s Juried Exhibit, which is showing now through January 2, 2012. I went to the opening last night, and there were so many lovely paintings and photos on display. The show was put up very well; it’s a very beautiful space.

New Thermofax Fabric

Below is a not-very-good photo of my first thermofax screen; the smaller, bottom screen is the first screen, and the one above it has the same image but is larger–and, more importantly–has a blank space on the very left before the design starts, and this space is necessary so you have somewhere to put a pile of thickened dye before you scrape it over the screen. I didn’t put this blank space–kind of an improvised “well”–on my first screen, which is why it was so hard and frustrating to print.

Here are a couple of new screens I made of saguaro cactus shapes; you can see the black and white photocopies I used to make the screen on the right.

This is what I jokingly refer to as my “wet studio”: my patio table and a bunch of buckets, old towels, yogurt containers and thickened dye; here I have the screen with some dye on the left, ready to be squeegeed:

This is what the print looked like:

And here I’m starting the next run…

…which looks like this:

Below, the fabric after multiple runs:

I also did yet another layer of mountain-shapes after I was done printing the saguaros, here are all four panels getting a bit of late afternoon sun before they go in the washer:

This is a part of the mountain fabric, as it looks now…

…and here is the saguaro fabric:

Not bad, I think. I’m slowly getting the hang of printing with these screens.

A Surface Design Staycation

What happens when I take some time off from work to stay home and work on art projects? Sadly, I go a bit nuts. As it turns out, mixing and stirring up a good dye bath for fabric involves the same set of skills as mixing up a good pot of soup.

This is some fabric I dyed the other day.

I’m making a big saguaro cactus applique for my next art quilt project.  Yesterday, I put together my 3 chosen, recently dyed fabrics, kind of in the shape I plan the cactus to be, and it took me a while to figure out what was wrong:

That photo above is blurry. The fabric where the saguaro “arms” will be looks really nice, a good dark green; but the saguaro “trunk” in the middle is too purple. I thought I’d followed the same dye recipe for all 3 pieces of fabric. And I had. Except I used turquoise blue for the middle piece and sky blue for the 2 other pieces….and that’s what makes the difference.

So I scrunched up the middle piece and re-dyed it, and dyeing any yardage involves quart yogurt containers out on my patio:

And then the weather started to crap out; really no rain, sadly, just a squall blown in with a cold front, obscuring my view of the mountains:

It suddenly became soup weather. I don’t think there’s been soup weather in Tucson since last March.

So, time for soup in between dyeing; here’s the beginning of a good brocolli/havarti/cheddar soup: onions and garlic and butter….

…the broccoli, looking a bit boiled….

…the cheese, a mix of danish havarti and new zealand cheddar…

…on the right, the “roux”, the onion/butter mixture with flour and cheese….so what you really see on the right is a glob of saturated fat–YUM–and the pureed broccoli is on the left. I just added the brocolli, slowly, along with a quart of chicken broth and the water from cooking the brocolli, and I had a very delightful and not terribly rich–just rich enough–soup.

It turned out great. I have 8 cups left. Some will go in the freezer. I tell you, a bit of vermouth and lemon in brocolli/cheddarish soup is all you need for a fantastic soup outcome.

When the weather cleared a bit, I was able to do a bit of screen printing with my thermofax screen. My technique is improving. I did a run of colors in yellow and fuschia and orange:

Once dry, I tossed it in the washer, dried it and did another run of blue on top: the clouds cleared out mid-afternoon, but it got cold (i.e. 55 degrees, not cold for many of you out there) and I let the blue dye set inside for a few hours, where it was warmer.

Tomorrow I plan on more screen printing; the weather is supposed to be really nice, in the 70s. I’ll post more tomorrow. This fabric isn’t done yet! Needs more mountain layers.

Remedial Thermofax 101A

Yes, well, it takes a while to get the hang of using a “new” technology in your art, even if that new things is from circa 1956 (I’m talking about my thermofax machine).

Today I make a quick drawing/shape of the local mountains–the Catalina Mountains–and I used pencil, because the more carbon in the drawing, the better the image transfer…and there’s nothing more carbon than graphite!

Then I put the drawing with the blue, sheer thermofax screen film on top into the double-sided transparency film carrier and fed the sandwich into the thermal copier. Unlike my previous attempts using photocopied images with toner, a drawing transfers really well to the mesh fabric.

Here’s a quick sample of how the screen printed fabric looks (really, this took me just minutes). Please bear in mind I was using runny print paste, and I used only a slim amount of dye and dye fixer….so the results are faint, but sufficient for me: at least I know with thicker print paste and few other precautions, I could probably use this screen to make the kind of fabric I want for my upcoming art quilt project.

And yet more baby steps…

This week I managed to get some garden and art related chores done after work.  It’s fall here in Arizona and temps next week will be in the 80s!!! Time to start the winter garden. I turned over my raised beds and added some potting soil…

Here are my nicely turned over beds; these are home to parnsip, carrot, beet, kale and lettuce; the wire on top is to discourage the local stray cats from confusing my garden with a litter box.

Then later in the week I tackled the dreadful art-quilt-framing issue. Here are my cedar stretcher bars on the back side of the desert marigold piece….

And here’s the piece pulled over the stretcher bars and stapled to the back. I know, it doesn’t look straight, but it is; just a bad camera angle:

Late this afternoon, I measured the stretched piece and cut some poplar molding I have to make a frame; I then used my new mitre-trimmer to make the neatest 45-degree angle cuts:

Unfortunately, my very amateur woodworking skills have got me again, and this frame is going to be just about a quarter-inch too small all around:

So I’m going to have to get a more accurate ruler for measuring; at least it’s reasuring to see that the mitre-trimmer makes a huge difference in cutting wood for frames, check out this very smooth fit below! And that’s not even glued yet.

If I can just get the measurements just right I’ll be fine. Maybe when I do this again, I need to make the stretcher bars and frame at the same time, before I stretch the quilt. It seems that with the quilted fabric stapled over the piece, if I make the frame just 1/4 bigger all around, that frame should then  neatly fit around stretched quilt art.

That’s my plan at least!

Work Week Art Baby Steps

When you have a day job, and you’re an artist, it’s all about being disciplined in taking baby steps to get things done. It is so bleeping frustrating–because any artist would rather go full hog into the art making rather than having to hack away at something for just an hour–but progress does happen with daily measured steps.

So, this week I managed to staple and glue together some cedar stretcher bars for my (finally) completely machine quilted paper/silk lamination, I finished quilting this week during several episodes of the Daily Show. The bars will go UNDER the piece….

…and I’ll staple the 4-layer piece to the back.

Below, you can see the top layer (silk/paper fabric), the second layer (yellow cotton to add color in the background) and 2 layers of cotton flannel (the “batting”, I picked flannel because it will be exposed on the back and you can see the quilting lines on it nicely). I think I will trim the bottom layer of flannel to the exact dimensions of the stretcher bars so there will be less bulk when I staple around the corners.

Here’s the machine quilting up close; not always totally even, sometimes I forget to drop my feed dogs and my free-motion is bit uneven. I can’t believe I am that absent-minded, but I don’t think the quilting looks terrible as a result. I’m sure a quilt-show quilting judge would cringe….but for me, it’s OK. Plus, you can’t really pull out too many stitches on this type of work; once the top is needle-punched, the holes show.

Here’s the quilting on the back:

Also this week, my art quilting pal Mary Vaneckee came by with a 21 yard roll of 9 inch wide blue mesh fabric for making thermofax screens; I’ve blogged before (here)about the ancient thermal copier I found on craigslist, and I’m finally getting around to using it. We split the cost on the mesh; here’s my 30 feet, it’s blue, and it set me back $100. I better get some good screen printed fabric out it!

Anyway. Once the piece above is stapled to stretcher bars, I’ll pull out my newly acquired mitre trimmer and try making a simple frame.

That will likely be my next post!

Miscellaneous Projects

I managed to get a few things done this past week. Like start quilting this paper/silk lamination piece so I can then try and build a frame for it; it’s not easy to see the quilting design, but, it’s there:

I also put up one of my pieces at my chiropractor’s office; I think it looks pretty cool, maybe someone will buy it!

And I finished moving all of my books into my art room, to free up my livingroom wall….

…so I could put up the Drug Blimp triptych from The Grasslands Bakery, which used to hang up behind the bar there:

My sister gave me the painting. It’s hard to believe she made this 20 years ago, when surveillance technology on the US/Mexico border consisted of blimps with cameras. Now there are drones that could fit in my old Mazda hatchback that do the same thing.

I’m off to Asheville, N.C. tomorrow for 5 days of what I hope will be excellent and most favorable fiddling conditions. My update when I return. 🙂