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Archive for March, 2015

A Great Workshop

Monday, March 16th, 2015

firstCCworkshopcollage

I spent 3 days last week in a workshop with Cynthia Corbin – best 3 day workshop I have taken in ever so long. I am overflowing with ideas and ways to get myself out of creative funks. She is such a great teacher and wonderful human being.

The title of the workshop was Structure and Variations: Black Fabric Sketch. We cut a rectangle of black fabric and using a rotary cutter, cut shapes. We could do curves or straight cuts. I chose straight cuts for my first piece.

FirstBlackSketch

We then chose fabrics for each piece and used the black fabric as a template. We could machine piece or fuse our pieces. Well, you know what I chose! The first photo is my first composition. This is such a cool way of using my hand-dyed and printed fabrics. Here is my second composition.

SecondCCworkshopcollage

On the second day, we did another black fabric sketch and it was suggested that we do curves if we had done straight lines the first day. I decided to see how this would work for doing a landscape.

landscapeblackclothsketch

And here is my landscape collage of the California golden hills.

landscapecollage

On Saturday, she showed us how to use fabric sketches to make text. I just love this. I chose the word tree as I want to do a piece about trees for the SAQA show that is not a literal piece. Here are my letters. I think I will add an s and line them up vertically with a collage of other fabrics.

treeword

I came home with 3 finished pieces ready to quilt and a great start on another piece. I am one happy artist.

Yesterday, after church, I ran over to Fabric Depot’s big sale to look for some fabric options for my EB Master Class March piece. We are doing lines. Here are my sketches.

GECMarsketch3 GECMarsketch2 GECMarsketch1

She encouraged me to do the top one and PIECE it. Yikes. I want to do it in neutrals so that I can use it for the High Fiber Diet neutral show. Here are my mock ups. Still not sure which one to use.

MarGECMockup

 

Pivoting

Friday, March 6th, 2015

stillwaters

I finished these two pieces except for the zig zag edge.

Greenpasturesfini

They are 18 inch square. I did zig zag free motion quilting on the green areas of both quilts.

zigzagfreemotion

I am putting my solo show on the back burner. I found out this week that the gallery at Trinity will be in use during the time when conference attendees could come. It was going to be a very short show -10 days. Doing all that work for ten days and no exposure to SAQA members was just not worth it to me.

For me to get the work done, I would need to spend most of my time for the next six weeks getting it done. I could have done it. I hope to be able to do the show in 2016 when Trinity selects the next group of artists for exhibits. If not, I have lots of gorgeous fabric to play with.

Now, I have time to make work for shows that I thought I would miss, which is a very good thing. And, first thing to do, is get the kid quilts quilted and sent to New York.

Here are two things I did this week. I made a platter in the clay class, working with slab clay. It is a bit dorky, but we have such a short time to work that there is not enough time to finesse things.

clayplatter

And here is a fun postcard that I made in the Photoshop class – I added Paige to a photo of the rose garden.

finalexampostcard

 

 

Wordless Wednesday

Wednesday, March 4th, 2015

WW03-04-15

The Printed Fabric Bee February

Monday, March 2nd, 2015

forestfloor6inch

I will admit to being distracted with the enraged knee and my solo show painting, so this printing was done very quickly.

Carol Eaton was the queen bee and she chose the forest floor as her theme. I created two therofax screens to represent the Oregon forest floor – pine boughs and pine cones. I chose a dark beige hand dyed fabric for the base and screened the pine boughs first, using dark green and a metallic green.

pineneedles

I didn’t take more photos, but it was pretty basic, anyway.

The six inch give away piece is at the top. Here is the piece going to Carol:

forestfloorfull

And here is the mosaic of all the pieces that were completed on time.

Febcollage

You can go to Carol’s blog and/or the PFB blog and leave a comment. There are some gorgeous pieces in this collection.