Art + Quilt Exercise 1

I'm involved with a small group of fiber artists here in Indianapolis. As a group we are going through Lyric Kinard's new book "Art + Quilt Design Principles and Creativity Exercises"

This is a very exciting process for all of us.. Below I have posted the pictures from my 1st excercise working with just black and white photocopies of fabrics that create texture. While I have a few favorites, there are few I find kinda..boring.. but you have to get by the boring ones to grow and develop the amazing ones!

Stiching is done on Drop cloth

The Stitching is complete on the Drop Cloth Piece.. How exciting.. not to just do a simple binding and and lable and its ready for showing!

The bottom 2 pictures are close ups. I used about 15 different threads in the stitching in this piece.

Viva Las Vegas!

Wow... I had an amazing time in Vegas! Great Gambling, Good friends, and a great time! This is a picture of Kevin and I on Fremont Street.. The evening light show every hours is incredible to watch! Definitely a part of Vegas you have to go see!

This was our Grand Canyon Tour. FYI If you ever go to Vegas... DO NOT book your tour through the casino or hotel... Book it online... Hotel wanted over $200 a person and we booked it online for $83 and it was the same company!

We signed up to go on the sky walk! This was on an Indian reservation and the sky walk goes out about 70-75 feet out from the canyon wall.... Sounds cool huh? until you look down and realize your walking on 2" of glass! Yes I hung on for dear life and screamed like banshee. But it was a once in a lifetime experience so I had to do it... not bad for a person that won't go over the 2ND step on the ladder!

Update on Drop Cloth Piece

The stitching is coming along nicely for the "Drop Cloth" What I find really cool is I'm using almost every color of thread I own... Which is not a lot and actually went out to buy a few more colors.. I felt I needed some turquoise in the coloring. Also I'm finding its taking longer than I thought to stitch it... 1) because its heavily thread painted, 2) in some cases I'm going over the stitching twice to give a thicker line and 3) doodling via stitching takes so much longer than doodling on paper... you can erase on paper, but on fabric its hard to erase when some of the background of the color is paint based and not dye based so therefore, once that big eyed needle pierces the fabric.. the hole remains.

I'm feeling really good and I keep hanging it up in my office and I think it will be a very nice addition as I slowly remove the Soutwest based theme artwork I currently have in my office.

Thats all for now...

starting to stitch Drop CLoth

I've decided to call this one Drop Cloth..

well because, thats what it started out to be. I enjoyed using some of my specialty stitches on my machine to raw edge applique the individual pieces on top of the piece. Then I have decided because reall the the piece was developed by accident, that I'm just going to Doodle with free hand stitching. I'm changing thread color constantly and just playing with it.. I think that will help the piece far more than being precise in my quilting stitches which I despise doing :) So here are some follow up pictures. I have a commitment to the small art group that I'm in to have this completed by our meeting next Monday night! Thank goodness it wasn't due tonight!

New Book to Review "Transparency in Textiles"

I ordered this book from Amazon and recieved today. From the reviews on Amazon "there were 2" I understood this not to be a technique book.

I have been drooling over this for the last few hours. While it is not technique specific it has a lot of how to's in the book. The inspiration is amazing and as I"m working more and more with sheer type of material I think this book will come in handy may times over.

If your working with anytype of sheers this book would be worth the investment in my opinion.

If you get a chance take a look at Dawn Thornes website at http://www.dawnthorne.com/ Her work is quite inspiring!