Barely contained crazy

I finally finished my quilt-as-you-go contained crazy quilt.  I've been working on it for 3 years and decided that I either had to finish it or throw it away since I wan't going to move the pieces with me to the new house.  Part of the stumbling block, so to speak, was that I was throroughly sick of the squares and was NOT going to make more.  Since it wasn't big enough, I had to decide what the border would be and then figure out how to put the whole thing together.  Once I knuckled down and started sewing it together, it went better than expected.  But I kept running out of thread!  Each seam was zigzagged and then covered with seam binding that had to be sewn on both sides.  The thrill of finishing it was enhanced by actually liking how it turned out.  There were only a few pieces of fabric that I liked - they were leftovers, Bill's old shirts and pieces chosen by virtue of being blue, green or brown, - and I didn't like most of the squares individually.  But when put together it's really something to look at.

Idealized Notions of Beauty

I've just begun a new altered book. At this point, it has no theme other than the intention to do each page primarily in soulcollage style. Working from my now vast quantity of magazine images, I first chose the background, which I believe was from National Geographic, and then found myself adding statues of men. When I found the little guy in the corner trying to escape, I had a theme!

Doorway

For our second PS challenge, we chose "doorway" as the image to work with. I love the multiple doorways of this old ruin. An old photo of my daughter from camp added to the sense of multiplicities. I threw in an altered quote of T.S. Eliot.

Meg's Birthday Card

I made this card for Meg while she was at Mardi Gras and I was remembering how much fun I had the year that I went with them. I found an image I liked of a jester and cut out pieces to construct him. The hardest thing was getting the right size. Too big and it became much too large for a card, too small and I couldn't work with the tiny pieces. This one was just right. I was delighted when I went looking through my stash of stuff to find something to make the balls on the hat and skirt to find the perfect glue-on gems.

Marketing Fakarts

I designed this fake company one night in a fit of disgust at all the cliches I was seeing in Somerset Studio and Cloth Paper Scissors magazines. I was going to put a lot of work into making actual "artwork" that would demonstrate all the cliches and then send it into to Somerset Studio, but I decided it would be hard to tell the parody from some people's art. Instead I dashed off this flyer and sent it to my sister, thus getting it out of my system.

Tilting@Windmills.Gov

I was cleaning my work room and came across this piece that I made awhile ago. I can barely remember working on it, but I suspect I was more motivated by the political message than I was to make art. Since little has changed politically since then, it still seems relevant. I can see that I was also experimenting with using gel and metallic pens on black.

Half Full/Half Empty: A Tale of Two Glasses

For Sharon's birthday, I made an 8"x9" card/booklet out of paper, fabric and fabric-paper. I had participated in several discussions recently about optimism vs. pessimism and I wanted to do something on that theme. I chose the opening paragraph from Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities where he contrasts five opposing statements. I took the 5 postive ones and put them on a page with a large sun. The background substrate was paper-fabric covered with Lutradur. The sun was made of many fabrics stitched on. I also used stitching to provide details. The negative statements went with an old gnarly tree in the moonlight, again made of fabric on fabric-paper with stitching for details. For the covers I sewed a half red, half blue fabric background and sewed on a cardstock title. I attached the two pages by sewing them both to a link of chain at three places. I'll let you decide, "Is the glass half-full or half-empty?"

Balance

I've been wanting to use up some of my green collage elements and also wanting to do a collage about balance. Voila! Synergy!

Antiquity Challenge

To help me learn Photoshop CS5, my sister Sharon challenged me to produce a piece that included "antiquity" images that each of us chose and then used with a background of our own making. I welcomed the challenge in order to learn some new techniques, and I thought I welcomed the theme because I have used antiquities many times in my art (mostly in soulcollage). Interestingly, she and I independently chose images from Central American cultures. Since I wanted to use my own photo graphs for backgrounds, culling through years of my pictures of trips through Mexico, Honduras and Turkey was overwhelming. But I learned a lot about blending modes and adjustment layers. After spending way too many hours struggling with it, I finally decided to call it done so I could move on to my next project. Thanks, Sharon, it was fun!

What to do?

I made this soulcollage a couple of months ago when I was going through a hard time and wasn't sure what I wanted to do. The statue of a woman pondering somethings so deeply inspired me to express my own indecision and ambivalence. All the images are taken from magazines (mostly advertisements or National Geographic). Working on this helped me get through a difficult time in my life by focusing painful feelings on a creative process.