Notan, Gallery Exhibits, & Scrap Starters

Last weekend at CQFA, we did a mini workshop on considering the Japanese concept of Notan in our designs. Here are my workshop results completed with free hand cut paper and glue.

I gallery sat at the Cinema Place Gallery in Hayward for their Abstract Exhibit. It is a nice selection of both two and three-dimensional work. There are three other quilters plus painters and sculptors in the exhibit. Chabot College also has an exhibit there this month. The work in the Chabot exhibit is mostly representational, and is an impressive display of drawings, paintings, and sculpture.

Wanting a small project I could do in between my current watercolors, I thought I would try completing a small quilt started with small scraps. I saw this idea on Franki Kohler’s blog. Franki was inspired by an article by Jenny Bowker in Machine Quilting Unlimited (May 2011.) Here is my start. The idea is to use the small scrap as in inspiration for the quilting design, and then to expand the design into the plain areas of the quilt with free-motion quilting. I am already thinking about how I might add paint to parts of the quilt.

Self Portrait Workshop

Caroline Ogg and Bron McInerney led a mini Self Portrait workshop at our CQFA meeting this morning. There was a lot of nice work this morning. I just took a few photos.

This is a sample Caroline did in a previous class. Can you tell she adores cats? I especially like her creative use of fabric for the eyes on her portrait.

Bron did a portrait of her friend. She traced the major shapes from a previously done watercolor, and used the tracing as templates to cut the fabric pieces. The necklace is bits of shell on a string.



Julie’s portrait is all in blues and greens. The fabric outlining her eyes is peacock feathers, and the white of her eyes are clouds.

I was afraid to start cutting directly into my fabric, so I spent the time sketching from a photo. My plan was to trace pattern pieces following the outline of the shaded area. It was good to get some drawing practice in, but I think I may start over by tracing over the actual photo to get a more accurate image.

Strange Birds & Other Things

The tie dying party last April left us with a few extra shirts, so Camilla invited a few more friends over last month. I tied a shirt into a spiral this time. I thought I had used plenty of dye, and ended up with more white than I expected. Next time I will know to use more than seems necessary, and work it into the folds a bit when the fabric is tied up thick.

Camilla spent one week of her summer afternoons at Art Camp. They completed several fun projects in bright, cheerful colors. The instructors put the results up on their website. You can see Camilla’s work here.

I went to my CQFA meeting yesterday morning. We spent a good part of the morning doing some planning for an exhibit we are putting together which will be showing at the San Francisco Main Library next Spring.

After lunch, Sonja Jeter led us in a short workshop about working in a series. Our first task was to pick some colors, and write down vertical and horizontal objects we see every day. Then we painted backgrounds on index cards.

Sonja passed out a handout with a little cartoonish bird on it. Draw it about thirty times. Easy enough, but wait, you must draw it with either your non-dominant hand or with your eyes closed. I tried some both ways. Either way takes the pressure away from trying to create perfect copies, which was entirely not the point. Some of the birds looked more like fish than birds, but each bird was unique and had personality.

We chose some of our birds to trace onto tracing paper while incorporating the vertical or horizontal surfaces we had written down earlier. Birds on a fence make sense. Birds on a bed seems a more random idea, which I resisted at first, but it became an interesting little drawing.

We glued our tracing paper drawings onto the backgrounds, and then painted them some more. The cards with the larger birds are drawn directly onto the backgrounds, because I ran out of tracing paper. These were mostly done in an hour or so during our workshop, I added some more color when I got home.

These are just little studies, and I have no plans for developing them into larger pieces. But it was great just to have permission to play for an afternoon, and maybe I will bring some of the processes over to future artwork. Sonja suggested that the technique we used with tracing paper could be done in fabric with organza overlays in place of the paper.

Abstract Portrait Completed

I have completed the abstract portrait which was started in my class with Pamela Allen.

I like how the tree came out. The leaves (or blossoms?) were originally roses on an upholstery remnant. I used a bright pink thread and dense quilting to brighten them a bit more. I left the branches unquilted, which gives them a bit of dimension.

Black and White Quilt Completed

I have finished the black and white quilt that I started in Pamela Allen's class.

I have had a design idea in my mind for a month without time to begin it. I think I will need to put it off some more while I get other less exciting things out of the way. I also need to plan my exhibit space and talk for the Piecemakers Quilt Show in May where I will be one of the featured artists.

In the meantime, I will be finishing up the other quilts that I began in Pamela's class. They just need quilting and binding.

Online Class Week 3 – Another Portrait

Week 3 of my class with Pamela Allen continues, and I had a chance to try a self portrait again (this time with a more abstract approach). I wonder if this attempt is more “me” than the more realistic attempt. My husband, who tends to favor more realistic art, surprised me by saying this is one of my better quilts. I am still deciding about it.

I have the eyes left to do. I was going to add them with the quilting like Pamela did with her Coffee Break quilt. But now am thinking this quilt might need eyes which will show up a bit more. I will need to experiment with making eyes, and see what seems to work.

Week 2 Continues & Painting Embroidery Floss

My landscape is halfway stitched. Some of my fabrics are a bit tightly woven, making it hard to needle through especially where they are doubled.

I didn't find a shade of floss I was looking for at home (maybe I'm just to picky, but I made up my mind what I wanted). I like variegated floss, but hate how most commercial variegated threads go from bright saturated colors to almost white.

My solution was to paint some of my lighter colored floss with Setacolor paints diluted a bit with water Wind in a loose skein, dab the color on (a bit darker at one end of the skein), blow dry, heat set with the iron. Now I have "hand dyed" floss which was ready to use in about 20 minutes. I suppose you might call me color obsessed.

Online Class – Week 2

I spent two days in Capitola this weekend at a retreat with my CQFA group. It was an enjoyable weekend away, and a chance to get to know the other in the group better.

I packed a small bit of my blues and greens which fit in the large suitcase (it’s hard to pack fabric when you don’t know what exactly will be made), so I could work on lesson 2 in my online class with Pamela Allen. The assignment this week is to do a quilt in a limited color palette (either complementary or analogous). This is the landscape that resulted.

I was attempting to put a plant in the foreground, but wasn’t sure what it would look like. I sketched some leaves from the silk plants at a restaurant that evening, and came back after dinner to make the leaves.

I have begun stitching on the tree.

It's a bit intimidating to begin a quilt without any idea where I might take it, although the hesitation mostly disappears after I have a few fabrics down. I've been enjoying doing the lessons and learning a lot from both the doing and seeing what others are doing.

Pamela commented about landscape being usually oriented in a horizontal format. I didn't think about this landscape being vertical. I seem to have a strong preference for vertical formats, and have made the conscious decision to make vertical landscapes in the past. I think maybe if I had made the same thing horizontally, it would give more importance to the land and the water and give less important to the tree. Which gave me a "what if" thought:

It’s fun to play with things on the computer sometimes to try out ideas.

Progress on the Black & White Still Life

I made some small changes based on comments I received from Pamela and others and have begun the stitching on my quilt.

The stitching is taking more time than I usually like to spend on handwork, but I love the texture that it is adding. I tried to make a join in the white fabric inconspicuous with regular sewing thread, but instead switched to off-white embroidery floss and a herringbone stitch. It seemed to be making a little landscape out the window, so I added another more horizontal line of herringbone just above the join for a horizon.

The idea of a windmill (another wind machine to go with the wind chimes) near the horizon keeps nagging me. It would need to be small in subtle colors to be out near the horizon and not distract from the rest of the quilt.

Class with Pamela - Black & White Still Life

I am taking an online class with Pamela Allen. We will be having 4 lessons over the next 4 weeks. For Lesson 1 we are supposed to create a still life using black and white fabrics. Here it is in progress. Looking at it now, I think I need to fix the angle on the seat of the left chair, and angle the verticals on the right chair so they point toward the center. And I have moved the left cup up, so it isn't in such a straight line with the glass and chair.

Pamela and others have made some suggestions which I am considering, and then I will sew it together today or tomorrow.

Fabric Shopping for a Class with Pamela

I have signed up for a Pamela Allen online class next month. I took a break yesterday from catching up on housework and other mundane tasks to go shopping fabric shopping at the Goodwill store for her class. Large bold prints are on the supply list, which I don’t have a lot of.

Large bold prints in the ladies clothes section seem to be mostly rayon, which I have a particular aversion to, but I did have rather good luck in the men’s shirt department. I found a cotton print shirt, and a silk shirt with lots of wonderful texture. Not quite the bold prints I was looking for, but I fell in love with the fabrics. The problem is I like them a bit too much and they fit rather well, so I may not use them after all.

I also found a Malaysian batik skirt which will not be kept to wear, because I can’t remember when I fit into something so tiny. It came with a label printed near the bottom hem in the back, which got me searching the internet for more info about this fabric. I found this website about Malaysian batiks which details the process by which they are made, and has beautiful pictures.

I went looking through my own things a bit better, and found a couple of cast off cotton shirts and some lightweight decorator fabrics some of which I had over-dyed. I may go searching through the flat folds of decorator fabrics at the fabric store to see if I can add a few more large scale prints.