Back from teaching at Haliburton!

Here are some picks from this very productive week with very productive students at the last week 30 June to 4 July.
I was very impressed with what was accomplished by this first Quilting By Design group.
Haliburton School of the Arts
They handled a lot of challenges with interest, curiosity and good humour. Monday at noon, black & white designs show up on the wall.
Monday afternoon they worked their designs into more complex compositions.


Some turned their design into repeat blocks.

Tuesday was all about colour.
Below is a thumbnail sketch for a composition.

Tuesday afternoon they painted fabric as needed.


and that included marking fabric with coloured sticks.

Then, once coloured fabric was on the table there was no stopping the design action...


Smiles appeared. All this surface design aside, I believe that fabric artists are happiest when we are at the machine sewing! By Thursday sewing machines were whirring, some with the dogs down and some up.


Here is a shot of our room during the Thursday afternoon studio visits.

Above is a finished composition on the wall - binding on and signed by the artist.
It is seen here with it's original black and white studies.


Here is another finished quilt seen with original black & white sketches.

By Friday everyone in the group had an original quilt finished, some had two quilts and sketched ideas for more.

What a week... and what a terrific group!

Quilting by Design at Haliburton School of the Arts

Ok, I have just heard from Sir Sanford Fleming college AND I am now in teaching mode.
I am readying up for a week-long teaching gig at the Haliburton School of the Arts.
June 30 to July 4 -
I am excited not only to be teaching, but this will be my first visit to Haliburton, Ontario. I hear that the school location is BEAUTIFUL and prime Toronto cottage country.
Bring camera...

The focus of this class will be on how to get an art quilt off the ground, out of our heads and onto the wall. I plan to serve up many many exercises to help kick-start a creative process that will produce results: we will play with positive & negative space, split shapes, paint fabric and paper, express mood, emphasis, depth and perspective with colour value and temperature, create texture with chalk, paint sticks and thread. All fibre... all week.

This should be fun for all.

midnight garden...sorta

Well here they are -- altogether on a dark background (dark mulberry hand-dye) that lets their individual colour modulations peer through. This piece is off to the shop. Hopefully Jennifer can add some finishing touches. I think that it shows what can be done with Angelina fibres, which was the purpose of this piece in the first place.

I plan to pick more of this stuff as I am now addicted to the immediacy and forgiving nature of the 'hot press' process. I think that a lot more can be done with this stuff, but I have to stop. I have just received notice that my class at Haliburton is a go!!
Alright! Given that I love to teach almost as much as being in studio, I am looking forward to this week-long session later this month.
Gotta go dig up my class notes...

A new header for the blog

My my, it has been a stretch....
Activities occur but don't get recorded -- that's how it goes sometimes with a blog like this one. Perhaps this new look will inspire more posts.

On the other hand, a lot of activities have been recorded on my other blog. We have just wrapped up this year's Art in the Islands Retreat for Fibre Artists and we are gearing up for next year's event, it should be even more fun!

Now that I am back in studio, I still have a couple of quilts to ship off, and one more class to teach in Haliburton Ontario later in June, then some quiet time to work over the summer months. Here are a couple of items currently on my table:

This past winter I treated myself to a felting machine. This piece was done with craft felt and dyed cheese cloth needle punched from the front AND the back - very different effects. This machine is an amazing piece of technology that can transform all sorts of fabric - usually the ones that would not make it into the studio, in fact the slinkier and sleezier the fabric (ie. slinky glittery knits, lames etc) the more interesting the transformation. On a painted canvas base the effects can be are magical. I am not done yet with this new tool...

These sewn strips are samples of dark brown hand dyes and black cottons and rayons discharged with bleach (coppery red) and thiox (grey, yellow and green).

These are more samples that I discharged and timed - 5 to 15 minutes.


And here is what is on my desk! My ever cheerful finger puppets.
Did I make them myself? No- no-noo - - Bought them in a shop.

The stitched line

I just had a message from a fellow quilter State side, Pam Rupert.
Pam is the creator of PaMdora whom you no doubt you have heard about and seen. Just in case you haven't, PaMdora (Pam's alter ego) resides on big supersized quilted cartoons depicting the perils she runs into as she makes her way through a funny series of circumstances. In case you haven't seen the latest, here is her QN entry for 2007,

Gee... quilted cartoons, who'd have thought....? Brilliant!

Anyways, these days Pam is also looking into Artist Statements, and has asked me to elaborate some more on what I said about the stitched line on my website and show some examples. Happy to do so Pam!

I find that the quilting world (industry?) is supplying us all with a LOT of embellishment gizmos, tools threads, ribbons etc. There is nothing wrong with this stuff but we may be in danger of losing our way with our work if we are not careful about looking beyond the glitz before incorporating these into our work. Remember tyvek...?




I buy this stuff as often as anybody else as I love to muck around with new goodies. They are fun to play with and I love to make small studies to explore their potential. But they get parked over in a corner of my studio where I can watch them until I am ready to 'press them into service'. By that I mean I have no intention of ever using them as embellishments.


I find that it is much more powerful to work with the expressive qualities of these items. That usually needs a bit of thinking before acting.


The stitched line, be it cotton thread, couched wool or silk floss does not appear on a piece unless it contributes to the overall design of my composition.












For me, the design rules what is used in a work not the ingredients.

Any thoughts?

Work Underway

A sample of stitched resist done in San Antonio.

Here is what's on my front burner these days

1) Group show: Seven Threads Studios at the Britannia Gallery in Ottawa, ON - 1 -31 May, 2007
2) Open House Studio Tour as part of the Thousand Islands Arts (TIA) group, also in May

3) Fibre Art Retreat organized by the Seven Threads Studios at the Glen House Resort in the Thousand Islands, 20-22 April, 2007

Yikes!




Back in my dye lab, here is a shot of my new work surface.
A 4'x 6'piece of plywood, covered on both sides with polyester felt, stapled and duck taped around all four sides. This allows both sides to be used, and the top slides easily across its two supports - the sink counter edge and an old microwave cabinet on the other side that just happens to be the right height.
Even though this is a small space, I still have access to both sinks when needed.

N.B. I Still haven't painted the room yellow yet. black stain on door still there from my dye spill a while back.

I covered the felt with with poly cotton sheeting as it doesn'tbond well with dye but absorbs wet under the art work (plastic would cause puddling). The sheeting gets tossed into the wash regularly. This large surface allows me to work with larger pieces of wet cloth when stamping, silk screening, stencilling, or foiling, etc. - is much more efficient than what I had previously.
It can also be removed and stored vertically when I want it out of the way.



Small sample showing two dye baths, wrapped, scrunched, stamped, and thermofaxed.

Below is a larger piece 60"x 72" just out of its first bath. This is a 2 yard piece from a bolt of Hathaway shirting. The Hathaway Factory in Prescott ON was closed Christmas week three years ago putting 140 people out of work. I was lucky enough to come across a 100 metre bolt of 60" light blue shirting. I would have preferred white, but the light blue is almost as good. It has a satiny shine to one side and loves all kinds of MX dyes. More of this panel to come.