Hot!

This is how it feels here in lovely Indiana. Fires of hell, anyone?

This is a postcard made for the first round of the Postmark'dArt postcard swap.

Rain!

It's finally raining here in sticky, hot Indiana! After three weeks of mid-90s weather, early morning attempts to revive the flowers with the hose (the hosta's a goner), and boiling drives in my rat-trap car without working AC, I am soooo happy! We should have a one-day reprieve from these nasty temperatures on Saturday, when the high should only be 83! The kids were wishing for snow yesterday...

Ginger asked to see some pictures of the samples I was playing with the other day. (Thanks for asking, Ginger!) I was in a rather feverishly productive mood for a couple of days, which unfortunately results in piles of dirty laundry, dishes overflowing from the sink, and processed food-based meals. Oh well, can't do everything all the time. Really, I get most work done in spurts, usually in conjunction with the kids' bath times, lol. (My studio is next to the bathroom, so I can keep an eye on them and stitch a little, too.) Making "art" (geez, that sounds so arrogant--I'm just getting used to calling my sewing room a studio!) seems like a good excuse for generally poor housekeeping. Unless you ask my husband...

Anyway, the top left sample is black cotton covered with painted WonderUnder. I'm not sure yet what I'd like to do with this. I'm thinking it needs stamping or foiling or more paint. The colors of the paint are actually brighter than the scan shows. The top right photo shows oil pastels on the same black fabric. I think this little heart may become a postcard. The bottom left photo is painted cotton batting (Setacolor on Warm and Natural) with needle-felted wool yarn, wool roving, cheesecloth, silk ribbon, and novelty fibers. The piece is actually bigger than the scanner bed. However, I like this portion of it most, and once finished, I'll probably crop it to this size. It needs more work, probably more needle felting and fme/fmq. Maybe I'll have more ideas about what to do with all of the samples after they've aged a bit on the design board.

New obsessions

The art quilt meeting on Friday was great, again! The take-away quote of the evening was from my friend Brenda Ramponi, who says "art is a verb," meaning that a work is not static, but derives meaning from its creator as well as those who view it. In that sense, art is also a collaboration between the artist and the viewer, the "action" of art being complete only when the viewer has reacted to it, whether positivly or negatively. Aside from talking about what art means to us, eating brownie cake, and drinking iced tea, we made plans to travel to Quilt National at the Dairy Barn. This will be my first trip to the show, and I'm prepared to be completely awed.

On to the obsessions... Edy's Dibs Bite-Sized Ice Cream Snacks are the work of the devil. I can't stop eating them! I guess I should just stop buying stuff that looks yummy under the pretense that it's for the kids. Although they do like them, too--just not as much as I do. Maybe because I've eaten them all before they could get hooked...

The other obsession is definitely more quilt-related. I'm having a great time with the Setacolor paints that have been sitting in my studio gathering dust for almost a year. I bought them on a visit to the 'rents and have been afraid to use them because "I don't know how to paint." Well, I still don't know how to paint, but I'm having a great time playing with them anyway. I finished another postcard that has painted Lutradur on the front. I like it, but the hand-dyed back is more striking than the front. I don't think the thread contrasted enough with the paint colors. I also painted some Wonderunder and fused it (after much ironing) to black cotton. It's hanging on the wall until it tells me what the next step should be. Then, yesterday I painted some cotton batting with the intention of breaking out the embellisher and felting some fibers to it. Brenda also suggested playing with oil pastels on fabric, so I made a small heart stencil with freezer paper and messed with the pastels on black fabric. This technique definitely deserves more playtime in the studio! I loved the way the colors popped off the black fabric. But, I'm wondering, is it necessary to heat set the oil pastels or treat them in some other way so that they don't rub off the fabric?

Postcards and Noodling

The second meeting of our art quilt group is tonight, and I haven't progressed further on the bird's eye challenge than sketching two bird's eyes, tearing out a picture of Pale Male from the current issue of Vanity Fair, and digging out some feather trim (rescued earlier from the jaws of the vacuum cleaner) from my stash. Knowing what I want to do with the idea doesn't necessarily equate with knowing how to do it.

Instead of figuring out this puzzle, I've been noodling with more paint and Lutradur. This is too much fun! One small piece was painted for the back of the faux suede postcard below, but I decided to back it with a funky Kaufman print instead. More stuff for the scrap box, but that's okay since I seem to find more inspiration lately in little pieces of fabric than in big hunks of the stuff. Maybe I'm too easily intimidated into creating on a larger scale, who knows.

another postcard with faux suede, painted lutradur, and beads. Hope the shell beads won't be too dimensional for the mail.

postcard made with batik scraps, variegated cotton thread, and glitter glue

Fiber art groups, and postcards, and grumpy folks, oh my!

Our small quilt art/fiber art group is having our second meeting this week! A dear friend of mine who has been a quilt artist for years and has ventured into art doll making is a member of our little group, along with another friend from the local quilt guild, to which I also belong (for how much longer, I'm not sure). We're meeting once a week and already have started planning a road trip to Quilt National at the Dairy Barn. Unfortunately, the other member of our group (in whose wonderful studio space we met) is too busy with other obligations to be involved with the group. We're also exploring the idea of challenges, with a no-pressure approach. The first one is to interpret "bird's eye view," which was spawned by the view of a nearby forest from our host's second-floor studio. I'm trying to figure out how to translate my idea into fabric--or even into a sketch, since I'm not very skilled at drawing. I'd like to construct a close-up of an owl's eye surrounded by "feathers." Trees would be reflected in the eye. I've got a pretty pathetic sketch, but nothing in fabric yet. What really has me hung up is how to do the reflection (maybe using sheers) and how to make the feathers without using feathers (which could be pretty cool). My other idea involves a view of a person from above. Having been the target of a few too many birds, I think this idea has some merit, too. :)

Now that the studio is a little more organized (meaning that one can actually walk through the door and reach the sewing machine without scaling all kinds of stuff piled on the floor), postcard construction must begin. I belong to the Postmark'd Art postcard exchange group (www.postmarkdart.com), and the deadline for mailing off this round of postcards is looming. I pulled out my batik and hand-dyed scraps the other day and started on one. I wasn't satisfied with the fancy machine stitches I had used on part of the postcard, though. So, figuring that it was probably headed for the trash can (or maybe my mom, who likes anything her baby does), I added some glitter glue swirls to it. Okay, glitter glue? I know, not terribly shi-shi surface design material, but hey, JoAnn Fabrics had this really nifty bucket of glitter glue tubes in all sorts of colors on sale the other day. I bought it with the justification that my kids can't get enough of the stuff, but I was secretly coveting all the colors myself. The glue sunk into the fabric and dried nice and flat, just leaving the glitter on the surface. I think I have to fool around a little more with this stuff before I surrender it to the kids...

I also have to finish another card that was started as a memento of our cruise in April. I took a photo of the ship, traced the outlines of the shapes onto vinyl, and used the tracing as a pattern and placement device for fusible applique. I still have to add the details with thread and possibly Pigma pens.

Okay, so is everyone just touchy this time of year, or what? I'm a confessed lurker on several fiber-related lists, and the members of one in particular seem really out of sorts lately. Meaning, like for the last several months. The delete button on my keyboard has been getting a workout. Why can't people just read the posts, maybe get peeved in private, give it a few minutes, then let the urge to lambaste the offender dissipate? And then the vocal members of the group wonder why (and complain about) people lurking. I'm not a terribly confrontational person in "real" life, so why would I want to be in my "cyber" life? And, although I may have a rather noticeable birthmark on my forehead, it isn't in the shape of a bull's-eye.