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Friday, July 24, 2020

A Bad Hair Day?





Do you think this angel is having one? I believe lots of us are having bad hair days since this pandemic began! And an angel is welcome here, hair issues not withstood. She's a fun one that began as a little kit given to the Fiber Art Bee members by Celeste Beck of Goatfeathers Studio. Inside the kit we had a pattern and some metal tape for the wings. There was also a face, but I decided to paint one on muslin to use for this project. The angel has a fabric-paper dress and lots of embellishments, many of which came from our free table where we share leftover bits and pieces. She's about 10" tall, and watches over the proceedings in the sewing room.



I haven't been sewing quilts much of late because I've been doing a big clean out of the sewing room. Of course, as I clean, I also find projects set aside for "someday". Someday seems to have arrived, so I take a break from the cleaning and make a little something. This Ohio Star ornament is stitched with embroidery floss on gold perforated paper. There's enough perforated paper to make several more. 



And for another break in the cleaning action, I've enrolled in two online classes taught by Joanne Sharpe- Art Sparks 1: Watercolor and Words, and Art Sparks 2: Color, Collage, and Concertina. I've never gotten on well with watercolors, though I keep on trying. But somehow, Joanne's style of loose painting combined with lettering is a process that works for me. These are a few of the "sparks" painted and collected to use in a small concertina book. It's great fun, and Joanne offers her classes for "a teeny, tiny price". You can follow this link to her site and see a couple of preview videos. I'll share the books when I'm further along in the class. And now for some more cleaning out. It's mind-boggling the things that accumulate over the years!


Thursday, July 9, 2020

A Bit of This and a Little of That...




Early in the pandemic, The TextileArtist.org offered a free six-week Community Stitch Challenge. Each week a well-known embroidery artist offered an instructional video and a creative challenge for participants. A dedicated Facebook group featured the work of students who responded to the challenges. I enrolled and learned a great deal. I've always liked embroidery, but this is a step beyond- very creative and inspiring. You can still follow along with those original six challenges which are on the website linked above. This wall hanging/art quilt is the result of artist Anne Kelly's video challenge in Week 6. Anne is a UK-based textile artist who likes to include repurposed textiles and folk art images in her pieces. My collage is designed on a background made from a vintage hanky and a lace tablecloth. It also has bits of lace and fancy trims along with beads and a braided yarn edging. It was great fun to work on, especially because it's a repository for so many little things that were part of my extensive stash of questionable textiles.




One thing that Anne likes to do is over-stitching on textile pieces. You can see in the close-up that I chose a decorative machine stitch in variegated thread and sewed parallel rows over all of the elements in the collage. I must say it took a little courage to do this because I liked the piece before the stitching was done. I was concerned how it might look over-stitched. The dense stitching does mute the colors a bit, but overall I really like the effect-soft and quilted.

You can see more of Anne's remarkable work on her website. She's had installations of her work in Canada, Australia, and the UK. I'll share some of the other projects and exercises in upcoming posts. I've been concentrating on smaller projects lately because I've finally begun a much-needed tidying up of the sewing room. It's taking quite awhile and I'm becoming reacquainted with lots of fun stuff!