Category: Art Quiltmaking Design

New Piece!

I finished the most recent piece I was working on; I wanted it done so I could photograph it and submit it to the member show at the Tubac Center for the Arts this December.

Last time I posted, I’d straightened up the quilted desert marigold piece. This past week, I picked up where I left off.

I used a zig-zag stitch to attach 4 strips of quilt batting to each side of the marigold center, making a large rectangle; I then put a piece of yellow fabric on the bottom for the backing, and I cut matching strips of the fabric I dyed last week on top of the strips of newly attached batting. Here you can see the quilt sandwich in process, I’ve just started laying down the pressed strips of fabric on top:

Once I attached a strip, I machine quilted it with an abstract stipple pattern; I guess this is the “quilt as you go” part of the process:

Then I cut 4 strips of green fabric from my hand dyed “stash” of fabric, the green strips bring out the green flower stems; I carefully measured and placed each strip over the areas where the raw edges of the fabric were exposed. Then, I straightened up all 4 sides:

Finally, the last step is the binding. There is apparently some sort of quilt sprite or elf at work in my studio space, because out of nowhere I found a pre-assembled binding strip, abandoned from a prior project. Finding this saved me a bit of time! I’ve always liked a black binding with faint polka-dots. I think it’s my universal binding and I tend to use that fabric often for bindings. I just had to press the binding strip I found (it was perfectly long enough) and then draw a 1/2 seam allowance line along the length of the strip to keep me on track as I sewed it down:

Here is the almost-finished piece: not the best photo, as you can’t see the entire binding, but it is straight and hangs nicely: all I have left to do is whip-stitch the binding to the back of the quilt. This was good enough to photograph and submit to the Tubac show.

I would’ve probably gotten more done this week, but Thursday night I made 15 pounds of German potato salad for a big family reunion this weekend in St. David, Arizona; my mother’s 9 siblings and some of their families are in town for a memorial service for my maternal grandmother, who died earlier this summer. Luckily I have a big enough fridge to accommodate all 15 pounds. I also roasted a turkey breast (sadly, I could only afford a commercial factory bird) and made cranberry sauce.

Now it’s time to put it all in a cooler and get ready for a long weekend with family!

Quilt-As-You-Go Part 2

Well, I finished last week’s quilt-as-you-go sample and it turned out really good. I was inspired: finally, I’ve found a solution to a problem that’s been dogging me a while. I started straightening up my quilt piece:

Here it is, nice and even:

I needed some fabric that would make a good border, so I made up a new batch of dye concentrates, I think I mix up the same 7–8 most of the time:

And out to my wet studio I go…..ha ha ha:

I sponged on layers of dye; the fabric was soaked in soda ash water first, then wrung out. The initial dye application was blurry, but as the fabric dried (remember, it’s very dry and hot here) the sponge marks became more distinct. This is what the fabric looked like mid-way through the process:

Here’s the fabric as it rests for a few hours to let the dye work it’s way into the fabric even more:

I also dyed some black and white fabric for the binding. This fabric turned out really interesting, it looks almost skeletal: this is just one piece of fabric scrunched and dyed in black dye:

I attached strips of batting to my quilted piece, then made my quilt sandwich with fabric on the back, batting, and now strips of my newly dyed fabric; here’s how it looked as I was assembling it:

And here it is now that I’ve machine quilted 3 sides of it:

One more piece to go, then I’ll attach the strips and voila, I think I’ll have found the perfect setting for my desert marigolds.

A Foray Into Quilt-As-You-Go

Above, two unfinished projects made of laminated silk fabric. Well, the one on the right I technically “finished”, I just don’t like it. Both are quilted, but neither one has a decent border; I think I didn’t know how to treat the fabric once I’d finished it, and thought perhaps it needed a setting more…exalted…than “just” a quilted border. I thought maybe a wooden frame. I believe I’ve posted about my attempts to use a miter saw to this end. Not pretty.

Now I’ve changed my mind about needing a wooden picture frame, and not just because woodworking is so bleeping difficult. I’m feeling more inclined to remain committed to fabric art….and that means all fabric. No frames. Of course, this perspective has a pragmatic component: I need a few pieces to submit to shows, and the pieces all have to be art quilts. I’d like to submit a piece for this December’s Member’s Exhibit at the lovely Tubac Center for the Arts, just 45 minutes south of Tucson. I’d also like to submit 4 pieces for consideration for a new SAQA (Studio Art Quilters Association) competition, and the deadline is November. And of course I’m working hard to get my January 8 Shooting related piece ready to submit to the Tucson quilt show in just 4 months. I’ve created 3 deadlines for myself.

I’ve been reading about quilt-as-you-go; there are many ways to construct a quilt by assembling quilted fabric piece-by-piece. Too many to mention here. I’ve just kind of put something together. I’m making a sample now to see how it looks, and if I like the result I’ll use it to fix the pieces shown above.
Here is a small 12″ x 12″ block. It’s an unfinished bit of thread-painting I did in a workshop many years ago with Libby Lehman, this is one of her patterns; here I am quilting it:

Now I have a small quilted block with no border, just a lonely block looking for a perfect setting. I cut four strips of batting, each 5 inches wide, to fit around the block, and zig-zag stitched the batting strips to the quilt block:

Here are 4 strips of lavender fabric on top of the batting; looks like a nice harmonious match:

Now I’m quilting each strip onto the batting:

Tomorrow I’ll show you the next steps I’ll take to finish my quilt-as-you-go sample, and then I’ll know if I think it’ll work as a technique for my laminated fabric pieces.

Finished Quilt Top

Here’s what I’ve got now; this is my “quilt top”. This will be roughly the finished size, which is 66″x92″ now. I’ll be adding more appliques and sheer fabric shapes. And the 6 windows. 6 is not an easy design number; 5 and 7 are so much better! But that number drives the design, for better or worse. Perhaps a bad design number will encourage me to come up with the best design possible, given the limitations. We’ll see!

Taking Shape….

This is a very vague mock up of some of the fabric I’ve put together for my new piece:

I really like the fabric on the bottom, here’s a close-up: I’m tired of cutting out contact paper shapes, that’s for sure.

I experimented a bit with pleating some yardage and dyeing just one side, to get some vertical shapes: here’s the pleated fabric and the tub of water for the partial dye-bath:

And here’s the fabric actually in the dye bath:

This is a nice technique to use to get vertical stripes, and it’s something I learned from a book by Claire Benn and Leslie Morgan. I had to do this four different times with four different colors to get the vertical striped fabric you see in first photo above.

Soon I’ll be able to sew all the fabric together for the quilt top. Very exciting!

44th Anniverary of the RFK Assassination

Tomorrow is the 44th anniversary of RFK’s assassination. Very sad to think about that, and how things would be different now if he had lived. His words are going to be a powerful part of my January 8th piece I’m working on now.

This is how my latest paper lamination turned out, I think it has real potential. I mad a collage of photocopies of photos I took of the RFK grave site at Arlington National Cemetery and laminated them on top of some saguaro fabric I screen printed last year with a thermofax screen.  I burned some of the photocopies. Here’s a close-up:

I feel less enthusiastic about the mountain fabric, here it is layered on top of more mountain fabric:

I’m slowly getting all the fabric together…soon this piece will start coming together because I have the finished work in mind. More screen-printing ahead this weekend!

Latest Fabric Designs

I don’t mind the trial-and-error involved in art making; I just prefer the trial part, it always seems more open ended at least. The error part stinks!

Last weekend I made some fabric that didn’t turn out as well as I hoped. Drat!

I had this idea to make fabric with a large mountain motif. Here in Tucson, the Catalina Mountains are a familiar sight, so I drew a large shape of the mountains and then traced it onto contact paper (what you’d use for kitchen shelving) using my “light table” a.k.a patio door:

Here is a rather dim view of what the contact paper shapes (white) look on white fabric out on my patio on a hot day when the glare from the sun, even on my patio, made everything seem very white:

Here are the same shapes with dye screen-printed on top. Warm weather is very good for dyeing. The 4% ambient humidity might frighten some folks who dye, but I find that by adding enough urea to my dye solutions, that seems to be just enough of a wetting agent. As I’ve said before, I don’t batch my dyed fabric. It’s usually sun-dried and tossed in the washer within hours of being dyed.

I usually have better luck, but the above fabric didn’t turn out very well. I was planning on getting a fabric that I’d screen-print again, but what I got isn’t worth it. Sigh.

Though before learning the outcome (before it went in the wash) I made some foccacia, following a recipe in The Olives Table cookbook which I just got as a gift from my Aunt Mary. I find making some yummy food in the middle of a day of art making feels very luxurious. The focaccia recipe in that book is fantastic, here are how mine looked, slathered w/olive oil and peccorino romano and about 5 minutes from being done:

Anyway, a whole work week went by and today I picked up from where I left off, this time trying a different spin on the whole mountain theme. Here we have a panorama view of the Catalina mountains, made from color photographs photocopied and then taped together. I burned the edges of the bottom one and will do the same for the top one, as I like the effect:

Here they are on top of some previous screen printed fabric, also of the Catalina mountains. My plan is to laminate these photocopies onto silk organza, and then to layer the silk over the original fabric:

This is the roughly 20″x30″ piece of organza, pinned down on foam core with one of those contact-paper mountain shapes stuck on top. Not giving up on that idea! This fabric was screen printed this afternoon but not washed. Since it’s a sheer, and since the yardage is smaller, I’m hoping for a better outcome since the effect is supposed to be subtle. We’ll see tomorrow!

Shadow Fabric Part 2

I took the fabric I made last weekend (see previous post) and pinned it down today and stuck some more contact-paper shapes on top. Then I applied another layer of screen-printed dye paste. This is how it looked before the dye:

A close up…I’m a bit tired of cutting out the same shapes!

Once the first layer of dye dried, I carefully unstuck the shapes and reapplied them in different spots on the fabric and screen-printed on more dye. Here’s the yardage drying out on the patio. I don’t “proof” or “cure” or “batch” anything; most advice and tips on dyeing fabric calls for the dyed fabric to be sealed in a plastic bag overnight to get the maximum amount of dye.  Sometimes I’ll let something sit that has a lot of nuance; but in this case, after a few hours in the sun this fabric was tossed in the wash. Once dried, this is how both pieces of fabric look:

Here’s a close up:

And another close-up:

I’m generally quite pleased. I’m able to see how everything is going to fit together now; I just need to keep at it and hope to have this project done by the end of summer.

Honey Bee Fabric

One of the women in my quilt group works with honeybees in a government lab; she likes bugs. When there’s a birthday in our group, that person gets a piece of fabric (generally a fat quarter) in their favorite color or style. Diana requests fabric with bugs. I totally spaced out her birthday last year, so I thought I would try making her something this year for this week’s meeting.

First I drew a bee with pencil, so I could make a thermofax screen:

Here you can see a piece of my hand-dyed pink fabric pinned down to some foam core out on my patio; I’ve just screen printed the honeybee shape on the fabric, and you can see the small and rather sloppy screen–with a “frame” made of duct tape– off to the right. I’d say the bees are about 3″x5″.

To make up for missing last year’s birhtday, I also screen printed a similar-sized piece of orange fabric using fuschia dye this time:

I kind of sponged around the areas where I glopped on some dye paste during the printing process. Sloppy! I figure this fabric could come in handy for some picky-piecing, if one wanted to highlight bees for some reason in one’s quilts.

Dye Painting Experiment

There’s a traditional quilt block I’ve always loved called “Memory”, and I made a few of these 12″ blocks for my first ever “sampler” quilt, which I made 16 years ago. I liked how the blocks, when placed together, created very different shapes:

I like the idea of using this block in my new project. Obviously, the name of the block–memory–is something that makes sense in the context of an art quilt about the January 8 shooting.

Rather than piece together fabric to make the quilt block, I drew the shapes on fabric using a disappearing fabric pen with the intention of painting the shapes with thickened dye. Instead of a 12″ quilt block, my version is about a 5″ square; I drafted multiple versions of it. So as to avoid confusion when I painted on the dye, I took a color-by-number approach and made sure each shape had a number so I’d paint it the right color:

This was a project I could do inside on a weeknight. I added dye powder to some print mix and started filling in the shapes. I waited for the dye to dry and then painted some more. I should add that I treated the fabric with a coat of Jacquard’s No-Flo first, which prevents colors from bleeding when painting dye on fabric:

Here’s the finished piece; it’s always brighter before you wash out the colors:

And here it is after I washed it:

One thing I’m not keen about is that the brush strokes are visible. In fact, I don’t like this at all. I’m already coming up with a different plan to get this design on fabric with dye with no brush strokes. I think I’ll have to use screen printing, and I’ll have to mask out the shapes with masking tape.