Zoe's Birthday card

It's been a long time since I've posted anything.  Actually, I haven't even been making much of anything.  I thought if I forced myself to post this card I made for my daughter-in-law's birthday back in December that it might put me back in the habit.

I made the city skyline by sewing pieces of batik fabric with squares onto card stock.  I outlined some windows and doors and sewed on a moon.

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.

Tractor Collage

This was a birthday "card" for my brother-in-law. Recently when I saw him on his little tractor, it reminded me of the big tractors I loved in my childhood. So I constructed him one by using some of my large stash of magazine pages cut into appropriate tractor parts. I expecially liked the tire made from chainlink fence and a mudhole. The background is a photo/acrylic paint transfer. I mounted the tractor on top and coated the whole thing with several layers of gel medium. The border is cardstock with holes punched out.

Crossword Puzzle Pieced Wallhanging

I made this small (33x33) wallhanging for Alan for his birthday, partly because he loves crosswords but also because I have been collecting way too many black and white fabrics and needed to use them. Piecing went easier than I thought it would and it actually turned out looking like the puzzle I modeled it on (called BTW New York, New York). My friend quilted it for me because I don't have a walking foot for my machine.

Book - Nudes in a Plain Brown Wrapper

I started making pages for this book nearly a year ago. I stopped for several months while I worked on some other projects. I was stymied by how I would construct the book so I decided it would be the project I would take to Ohio to get some help figuring it out with my sister. After finishing all the pages of nudes, I decided to sew all the pages to a large piece of heavy pellon and fold it into eight pages. Before sewing onto the pellon, I painted it with various mottled colors of acrylic paints. The pages were made using various multi-media techniques - computer graphics, transparencies, collage, transfers, stamping, etc. Most pages were a mixture of paper or tyvek and fabric or lutradur. The cover was fabric-covered book boards. The pellon pages were sewn onto the covers' end-page fabric which was then glued on.

Terri's Echo Quilt

This is a small (17x17) wallhanging I made for my friend Terri. I used five pictures that I had taken near our cabin at Echo Lake. I printed them onto fabric and pieced them with other fabric scraps that I already had.

Diane's Birthday Purse

I made my friend Diane a purse for her birthday out of the sunflower fabric that I bought while we were shopping together. I didn't have plans for the fabric so after she admired it, I decided that I would make something for her. I added other fabrics from my extensive collection of scraps. The purse is a simple rectangular lined bag, but it does have some good pockets, including the cell phone pocket you can see in the picture. (The brown rectangle with a circle on it.) I think I like the piecing I did on the other side even better, but the pictures of that side are too blurry.

Drum set for Bruce

I made this drum collage for Bruce's birthday. (Bruce is the mover and shaker of my husband's band - Odd Man Out.) Inspired to try making "paper fabric" (a technique where layers of paper are glued to a fabric substrate), I used that for the background. It wasn't entirely successful; I believe I may have used too much water mixed with the glue and the fabric really puckered on the back. Then I sewed the fabric drum set on and stitched the supports. On the back, I photoshopped a message onto cardstock and attached it by zigzagging around the edge.

Sharon's Birthday Food Book

For Sharon's birthday, I made her a fabric book of food quotes. It's not really quite a book since it's only four pages, but I made the binding large enough that either she or I could insert another signature of pages if we wanted to. The first page is a collage of magazine images mounted onto Tyvek that had been painted with acrylics. I then sewed that onto fabric. The second page is a magazine image that was transferred onto Tyvek with acrylic paints and then sewn onto fabric. The third image is a collage of red and blue/green magazine pieces in the background. Superimposed on top is a transparency sewn onto the paper and then the whole thing is sewn onto fabric. The fourth image is a stained glass window that I made on Photoshop with two stamps. I then printed the image onto a transparency and colored the back side with ink. I sewed it onto the paper background and then sewed a border. Constructing the whole thing with fabric was a challenge, but I think it worked.

Lambent jitters

This is a wall-hanging I made for my sister-in-law to make up for forgetting to make her a birthday card last year. It was inspired by a vision I saw briefly of reflected street lights out a bus window one night when we were visiting her in Colorado. I knew that it would be abstract as I was planning it, but I didn't realize how far it would go from what I saw. Her birthday isn't until next month, but I think I can count on her not seeing this blog entry. Hope she likes it.

Guitar quilt

I was working on this wallhanging off and on for about three years. I was inspired by Juan Gris' cubist paintings. I didn't want to copy his painting, but when I tried to do my own cubist composition I was daunted. I would take out fabric and play around with it for awhile and then put it away in despair. It ended up more closely following his composition than I would have preferred, but I did have fun trying to use the fabric and stitching to make it more "mine." But the best part is that it is finally done and I can move on to something else.