I am told that the blog has been fixed and will now receive comments. I would love to hear from you. Please give it a try. If you want to leave a comment and find that it is still not possible, please email me at Leni@leniwiener.com and let me know. (if the link doesn’t work, please copy and paste the email address–I am still learning how all of this works!)
Sorry about that!
I have heard from a few people that they have tried to post comments and were unable. There is something going on with my blog set-up, but from what I understand from my son (my web guru) it isn’t so simple and he is working on it. So please, don’t give up on me–I really DO want to hear your comments. As soon as it is up and running, I will post so you know.
so sorry.
I didn’t get too much time to work on this yesterday, so this morning I spent some time on it. I started with a little tweak of the sideways facing foot–it just didn’t look right to me. Although it looks better, I am still not certain it won’t be changed again. But I needed to step away from that for now and moved onto the guitarist in the background:
I am putting that tree quilt behind me while I let my ideas about fabric weaving percolate in my head. For now I am back in my comfort zone, working on another fabric collage. This will allow me to accomplish two things–first it will get this out of my head where it has been nagging for a while, and secondly, it will allow me to clear my mind a bit so that I can formulate more specific ideas about what I want to do next.
This piece came from a video of a Flamenco dancer my friend, Sandra shot in Spain recently. As soon as I saw it I knew the fabric in my stash that had to be the skirt. There is so much movement in the fabric, and the light and dark look very much like the moving ruffles.
On another note, I discovered quite by accident that MOMA (the museum of modern art in NYC) is opened on Monday. Not the perfect day to go as every tourist in the city has discovered the same thing, but none the less, worthwhile. My friend, Eileen and I were not able to get into the new Van Gogh exhibit, so we wandered through the permanent collection. Despite having seen the permanent collection many times, I discovered lots of things I hadn’t really noticed or focused on before which relate to what I am working out in my own art. Now that museums allow photos in most galleries (hooray!) I took lots of photos and have lots to absorb. I am working out in my head a new direction for my work, and will share those photos and my new pieces as I sort them out.
Where ever you live, get out and look at art! Especially looking at different media will influence you in ways you can’t imagine. No matter where you are, there is someplace to see some sort of art. Take an hour off from your day and do it. It really gets your creativity working. I went with my friend Eileen (a very talented ceramicist–check her out at www.eileenbraunceramics.com) and interestingly, we often responded to the same pieces and saw in them ideas to play with in our very different materials.
I got the idea to try weaving the background, controlling placement of colors. Although I do not adore this final quilt, I do like the idea of the background enough to play with it. This is often how a series develops– exploring an idea or technique until the seed develops and grows into something that is uniquely your voice. Right now it looks too much like piecing, and like ribbon weaving. But I want to play with it. Check back to see where it goes.
To finish and complement the trees, I need to audition backgrounds to see what I like. I find that the easiest way to make a decsion is to use my digital camera to record the possiblities and then I can compare them.
My initial thought is that I do not want to worry about the path and the other trees in the background, but to make the background less realistic. I have decided to start by looking at both hand-dye and hand-dye lookalikes to see if I have something that works.
This fabric is close to the photo in that it is red and green, although I wanted more green and this is more red:
By adding another piece of the green to one side, I have gotten the balance closer to what I envisioned:
But I decide to look at other colors that may not be true to the original photo: the purple surprises me, I like it more than I thought I would:
The yellow looks a little over-powering:
more orange–this fabric is very bright and seems to fight with the trees:
more yellow? this fabric is maybe too realistic for the more graphic trees:
finally, more green, which is more naturalistic:
I am not loving any of these, so now I am considering “creating” the look myself using fabrics so I can control color placement. Feel free to post a comment and let me know what you think.
I am finally back to making art quilts! This photo was one I wanted to translate into fabric:
I decided to move away from a realistic depiction of the photo and use this as an opportunity to play with some black and white fabrics I have been collecting. What I thought was so lovely about this tree is the contrast in the bark, something I could duplicate using different “values” of black and white fabrics.
It did not take too long to get to this stage:
Using only a few fabrics, I have made an interpretation of the tree, not a photo realistic copy. You can see that although the fabrics are all black and white, that they “read” as different values–light, medium and dark. I love the horizontal stripe fabric with the little circles (on the left) which looked to me like birch bark, and the darkest fabric (on the right) with concentric circles which looks like knots in the tree.
Having pinned these all into position on my design wall, I am ready to glue them together and decide on a background.
On another note, I was surprised and pleased to see my quote and a photo of my piece “endless dance of the ponytail” in the online “Craft Report”. Check it out at: http://www.craftsreport.com/images/insight/fiber/Insightfiber.pdf
I am moving on from this thread painted pillow project, the next entry will be about ART quilts again.
You can see the close-up of the thread painting and how the result is the look of embroidery. I am happy with the thread painting, and now want to give the design the look of trapunto.
Trapunto is an old technique, the name means “stuffed work.” Often seen in antique quilts, the traditional method was to put batting and backing on the quilt, make a small incision behind the area to be stuffed, and to gently push batting into the area–giving the motif a raised look. The cut on the back would then need to be stiched and another backing applied.
My cheater method for trapunto is faster and easier. I start with two layers of traditional batting on the back of the motif. From the front, with a clear (in this case smoke clear) monofiliment thread on top and a color that will contrast the batting color in the bobbin, I trace around the outside of the design.
Now that I can clearly see the outline on the back, I carefully snip any batting that is outside the design and remove it:
The batting only remains in the area behind my design, which will give me the desired trapunto effect on the front.
I will post a picture of the finished pillow when I get back to it. Now, on to my next art project–a stylized fabric collage of trees.
Leni
Since the weather in the Northeast today is cool and raining, I decided to begin my thread painted pillows with the fall fabric from my stash. The fabric is beautiful, but on closer inspection, did not have a clearly discernable design that I could use.
So I decided to employ a “broderie perse” method to begin. Broderie Perse is a fancy term for fussy cutting–that is, I cut out certain elements from the fabric and rearranged them to my liking on a black background. I like this design, and think it will look great when threaded–like embroidery.
Not my most aesthetic challenge, I need to make something for a charity auction and have decided that thread painted pillows might be the most appropriate choice. I plan to start with an existing fabric and “thread paint it in” so that it looks like amazing embroidery. These are the three fabrics I pulled out of my stash as a starting point. I will probably cut pieces out from each design and apply them to a background so that I control the look of the pillow. Watch for their development.
fabrics for thread painting
