Black and Yellow

I got the idea for this piece in Rayna's class but didn't end up using any of the fabric I made in the class. I had been messing around with some yellow fabric, and when I came home I started using some bleach and some overdyeing on black, and then I found a piece of silk I had that was the exact shade of yellow I needed, so I painted some black on it. The whole piece kind of came out of nowhere, and once I had the initial design done, it sat on my wall for several days. I liked it so much I was afraid to do anything else to it, but now I think I will start some stitching. I did some rows of machine stitching to the right of the big yellow part just to see if made any difference, and it does when you are close to it. So now I'm back to studying it, afraid to do anything else, but I will probably add some hand stitching somewhere.

In the background

I finished this piece several days ago, and thought, I'll just mount this with a piece of black fabric behind it and be on my way. Wrong. It looked horrible with black fabric behind it. I began to search my stash for the appropriate piece and could not for the life of me figure out what it needed. I tried matching the fabric in the piece, I tried grey, I tried brown, nothing worked. I ended up getting out my dyes and I dyed 4 different backgrond pieces, Nothing. Then I started overdying. My friend Paula http://blog.paulachung.com./ is a master overdyer as you can see from the backgrounds of her pieces. I dyed this background four different times and each time it became richer and richer. When I held this piece up against it I knew it was perfect.

Rayna class

On the third or fourth day of class, Rayna had us do an exercise in abstraction. She passed out a photo to each of us and we had to take a part of that photo and make something unidentifiable with it. Thes are the results I came up with (the photo is in the middle). I have grown to love abstraction and I want to take this further, making fewer and fewer lines and distorting them more. I came out of this class with a great appreciation for what Rayna does, as it's not easy to make a pleasing composition. She gave us the tools to start on this, including a fabulous list of thoughts and ideas to consider when your working on something. I'm not going to publish that, you need to take a Rayna class to find out.

Rayna day 2

Today was the second day of a 5 day class with Rayna and the pictures tell the story. This first piece was made by Pam Klebaum http://pamprice.blogspot.com/ and she tells the story on her blog of using Elmers washable school glue gel to make this screen. I agree with Pam it has Frank Lloyd Wright overtones.
This piece below was made by my friend Florence.

I don't think Florence would mind my saying she works along quietly at her space and produces the most amazing things. When she shows up to our monthly meetings and pulls a little something out of her bag, we all hold our breath.

I'm not sure who did this, but I love the colors. It was done using masking tape on a screen.

And this piece has a bit of history. The artist's name is Sue and she lives in Santa Barbara and had a house burn down in a fire last year. She saved a piece of her old door, clamped it to the table a screened several pieces from the remains. I hope it becomes a series.

Rayna class

Yesterday was the first of a 5 day class with Rayna Gillman at our local quilt shop The Quilters Studio in Newbury Park. We started the morning off with gelatin prints which I have tried before but never liked.

Here's Rayna painting away on the mold I made for her. Unfortunately, I don't follow directions well, and I doubled the amount of water in the recipe, so Rayna and I had molds that cracked right away, instead of well into the day!
Here she is appling paint to the jello,

And here she is pulling the print off. I'm liking this method a lot better now that I've seen it done correctly.

Rayna is the messiest teacher I've ever taken a class with (including you Kerr) and it is really very fun to just throw the fabric around, glop paint all over and make a big mess (I'm still wearing my gloves though!)

fooling around

My friend Pam gave me the book "Stitching to Dye in Quilt Art" by C. June Barnes and I've started fooling around with the exercises. Typically for me, I did a couple of the easy first exercises, then skipped right to the good stuff in the later chapters. June takes various fabrics, stitches them together with wool batting then dyes them and throws them in hot water to shrink them up (this is a very simplified explination of what she does). She adds a lot of interesting touches such as putting buttons under the surface then stitching around them, adding pleats, zippers, boning and other impliment to alter the surface, then adds hand stitching to finish it off. This is so much fun, and for a novice like me, you never know what you will end up with.

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Identity

Check out the new reveal of our group http://www.twelveby12.blogspot.com/. This time the theme is identity and we have some very different responses.