Digital to textile: eight views

Betty Amador

2011-12-18T15:14:00.000-08:00

Family Farm

This is my final challenge piece, which interprets the photograph at the top right of this blog, and depicts a scene on the family farm of Pamela Klebaum's husband (see the photo at the top of the righthand column).

I started with this drawing:

 I made some of the fabric with glue resist. The piece is appliqued, and I quilted it all by machine.

---posted by Betty Amador

Loris Bogue

2011-08-31T10:34:00.000-07:00

Sometimes our textile work moves at the speed of a glacier, yet there comes a time when it's finally finished. And after all, one year is nothing in glacial time. This piece of mine entitled, "Rear Window," is the last of my "Digital to Textile: Eight Views" submissions, due a year ago.

The final photo was one from Pam Klebaum, who gave us a photo of an old truck sitting at the farm where her husband grew up:

I cut a small window out of a piece of cardstock, turned the photo, and came up with what I considered a pleasing composition:

Since I love the simplicity of the Japanese aesthetic, I decided to give the piece an Oriental flavor. The circles in the upper right are from a black piece of fabric that I discharged, and the fabric on the left is a wool tweed. The rest are cotton. I added some hand stitching to define the edges and machine quilted along the long lines to hold the piece together.

Rear Window
16.5" x 17.5"

This has been a fun challenge for me. It would be gratifying to see all the pieces exhibited at once with their respective photos. I think the viewers would enjoy seeing the interpretations of the black and white photos done by a group of very talented artists.

Betty Amador -- Loris' challenge photo

2011-04-08T11:14:00.000-07:00

Loris' wonderful photo of people ascending stairs at the Getty Museum inspired a lot of images for me, and it took some time to finish her piece. Other deadlines got in the way!

Here are some of my preliminary sketches:

My final piece combines elements of these sketches:

Here is a detail:

---by Betty Amador

Carolyn Ryan

2011-03-26T10:01:00.000-07:00

My final piece for Pam's bold and emotional photo is a playful balance of geometric shapes and curved lines. I stitched around the circles for dimension, and abstracted the tire and parts of the truck bed as I expanded my search for a complete composition.

Karen Rips

2011-02-23T09:29:00.000-08:00

Pam's photo choice was so wonderful, I had lots of ideas of what to work on. I cut a little viewfinder and narrowed down an area as I talked about in my last blog. I had a lot of bleach discharged fabric that felt right for this piece, so I started playing around with them to get the look I wanted.

I added some hand stitched circles and knots, and a little machine stitching to emphasize the marks on the bottom piece.

Pamela Price Klebaum

2011-02-17T10:04:00.000-08:00

This was my turn to provide the photograph that would be the inspiration for the group's challenge this time 'round, and I chose a quiet vignette I had found on my husband's family farm some years back.

The myriad shapes, lines and textures appealed to me, but I found that I was too close emotionally to the subject to work with the image -- dear family history kept visiting me as I tried to create, sidelining my focus.

I decided to look at the image as an abstraction, and honed in on one area that offered a wealth of possibilities. Here it is:

I painted this image digitally, and altered the overgrown foliage, containing it in a sphere-like shape. This was starting to look like some abstract moon-set. I painted the "sky" to the left of that new moon, using warm colors to reference the warmth of such a scene, adding flecks to create texture.

The remaining shapes, now vestiges of the old tire in the photo, became the foreground earth. I repeated some of the red from the forms above these, and layered that with a cool blue-to-purple hue. My digital image was finished. Here is the file as it looked on my computer screen:

The purple seemed too strong, so I pulled back on the intensity, meandering into more blue. The piece needed a home, so I added a large black border. I printed this on a cotton sateen.

The stitching is both spare and dense. The image felt minimal and uncluttered, so I only highlighted the shapes with thread, emphasizing the curves of the sphere, as well as the vertical lines that were once the weathered wood of the old outhouse on the family farm.

My goal with the vertical stitching in the black surround was to add vibrancy -- a lot of energy seems to arise from the areas where the lines of different colored thread overlap, a contrast to the quiet image in the center.

In the end, I still see the farm in this piece, and I like that. A lot.

Karen Rips

2011-01-26T13:36:00.000-08:00

For Pam's photo I saw lots of different areas I wanted to play with, so I ended up cutting little windows of various sizes in cardboard and moving them around the photo until I hit just the right area for me to explore. The photo below is really dark, but if you look closely, you can see part of the tire and the back of the truck.

I really like the lines here and started pulling out some fabrics, not necessarily to imitate what I saw, but instead provide a nice contrast in pattern.

What I have going on above is just a start with some black and cream color fabric with a little blue thrown in. Not necessarily my final piece, but worth studying on the design wall.

Carolyn Ryan

2011-01-24T09:54:00.000-08:00

I used a monoprint technique to explore shapes and colors in Pam's intriguing photo. I saw several opportunities to play wavy lines off straight lines, and circles emerged from squares. I kept the palette warm and playful.

I worked on the tire to evoke a sense of movement, and carried that undulating line through to the section beneath. For the final piece, I'll add more hand stitching, and touch up some of the shapes for more dimension.

Pamela Price Klebaum

2011-01-21T08:56:00.000-08:00

I provided the photograph for this last round of our photograph challenge in the Digital to Textile group. I took it some time ago in the nether regions of the family farm in Washington where my husband grew up -- note the German translation of "outhouse" on a background scene.

I chose this photo for multiple reasons, but paramount was the diversity of line and texture the snapshot offers. We presented our interim work this week, and many of us focused on those two qualities.

Here is the entire photo, with a black box around the area I started with:

Using Photoshop, I colored the foliage, and brought the grain of the old wood forward. I then separated each line segment of the tire, and gave each different color and texture, working in a warm palette primarily, with smidgens of cool color.

At that point, I felt the piece seemed choppy, and I could not locate a satisfactory focal point. So, I created one! I took the pumpkin-and-spice colored foliage and wrangled it into a sphere-like shape. Now the scene struck me as some surreal landscape. Yes!

At the meeting, many of my group-mates thought the piece had an Asian feel. Oh, yes, of course I was striving for that!

I will print this on inkjet-ready paper-back cotton sateen, layer it, and then decide how I want to stitch it. My goal will be to highlight the texture of the piece, as well as the strong lines.

Working with my own photo was quite lovely. My quiet time in this solitary endeavor was laden with good memories and sweet anticipation.

Loris Bogue

2010-12-29T16:48:00.000-08:00

Sheer Determination :: 23" x 18"

Since this was my own photo, it seemed time to finish my piece during this quiet time after Christmas. I had thought I would use stencils and paint and do repetitive shadows of figures climbing the stairs. For reasons I don't remember, instead of painting, I pulled an assortment of sheers from the drawer and began using my stencils as patterns to cut them up.

After some fusing and applique stitching, I "pillowcased" this piece and called it finished. Now on to Pam's photo, which is the final piece in our current challenge. . .

Pamela Price Klebaum

2010-12-27T09:34:00.000-08:00

"Up" 13" x 15"

An overwhelming sense of movement was suggested by both the figures and the staircase in Loris' photo of the Getty art museum. I made a tight crop of the image, and then digitally removed much of the detail.

In this photograph, the figures, all older, seem resolute and focused as many hold on to the rails as they climb the stairs. Art awaits above.

A spare amount of transparent stitching outlines the figures and the grids that contain them.

Those grids had inspired an earlier piece, which I blogged about at month one. To finish that one, I trimmed the outside edges off the sheer overlay. I encouraged the threads to fall where they may.

Here it is sans explanatory text...

"Grids" 14" x 16"

I do like the interplay of the sheer and the underlying image in this piece, but I'm not sure I like it better with the outside sheer edges removed.

I can't decide which of these two pieces I like better (or worse). This is a testament to the power of Loris' photo -- a real gem.

Carolyn Ryan

2010-12-21T19:15:00.000-08:00

Below is my final piece for Loris's dynamic photo. This is a woodcut of a section of the photo, with my own design in the background. The finished block was brayered with block printing ink, then printed onto stretched cotton. The textile is a beautiful hand-dyed piece Loris gave me as a gift earlier this year. I may do a little stitching on the piece - I'm not sure yet.

Here is a closeup of one of the figures. I intentionally cut away quite a bit of the block, allowing lots of negative space so the movement and colors of the textile could show through and contrast with the black elements.

Below is my woodcut in progress. I just love using the woodcutting tools, and watching the design come up! The paint brush is for brushing away the wood chips as I work.

Karen Rips

2010-12-18T14:34:00.001-08:00

I had a lot of ideas for Loris's photo, and I spent time with my tracing paper drawing the different lines in the image, then laying them over each other until I found something I liked. Once I had the drawn image, I decided on these colors, for no other reason than I liked them together. I thought about making this in seperate pieces, then sewing them together, but I like the idea of whole cloth, plus I wasn't sure how to make the black lines work in piecing, since they don't go to the edge.

I dyed the cloth by masking off the areas I wanted, painting the dye on, then going over it with a screen I had to give the textured look to it. Before putting the dye on, I painted soy wax for a resist where the circles are. After washing it all out, I went back and painted the red dye in the circle area. After machine stitching the whole thing to add more texture, I went in and did handstitching to outline the circles and lines.

Loris Bogue

2010-11-28T13:13:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I just get flummoxed by a challenge. Carolyn's photo is one of them. My first attempt was based on reinterpreting a Matisse painting and was rushed by the impending deadline of our monthly meeting. I didn't like it at all, so went for a "do over."

Seeing that several of my "co-artists" have used a more literal approach, I decided not to fight the composition and just see what the fabric said to me. I pulled some of my fragile fabrics (read: those which melt at high iron temperature), cleaned the bottom of the iron a couple of times, and followed the basic shapes of the photo.

The base is white batting with a sheer grid fabric laid over it. Then I laid on some heavy upholstery fabric, yarn, some sheer fabric with fuzzy roses, covered it all with tulle, and machine stitched it into a grid. Voila! A 15" x 15" sort of monochromatic, "Victorian-meets-gypsy" piece:

Original photo:

paula chung

2010-11-27T09:31:00.000-08:00

I found Loris' photo special for two reasons: I was accompanying her at our Getty Museum visit and the image is so interesting compositionally. I love the architectural background, the negative spaces, the silhouettes and figurative references.

I wanted to simplify the image even more and tweak it in Photoshop, attempting to boil it down to shapes with little reference to place. I had heard a jazz pianist once say, it's not the notes you play, but the ones you don't play that's important.

Here's the image I'm hoping to stitch:

Carolyn Ryan

2010-11-23T13:49:00.000-08:00

Loris's image gives me a sense of movement and isolation: I'm going to go with those two sensations in my design. I isolated one figure from the stairway. He represents how I feel on a stairway - head slightly down, lost in thought, chaos of sound and movement all around. I will repeat this one image in my composition.

Below is my sketch of the shards and swirls of sound in the environment.

Maybe the chaos can be represented using the loosely colored images below. I might do some stitching, and use this monoprint as a background for my repeating figures. My next step is to actually create the composition.

Pamela Price Klebaum

2010-11-20T11:46:00.000-08:00

Several aspects of Loris' challenge photo made me think of the picture Carolyn gave us last time -- both images have a foreground image layered on a background that contains grids. As well, the foreground images are partially defined by highly symmetrical grids -- in the current photo, the railings of the staircase.

In the textiles in the first photo above, a layering of lines resulted by stacking some fabrics I had created using disperse dyeing techniques. In the process, one image is transferred to two separate pieces of fabric at the same time - a sheer and a solid. The result is two copies of the same image.

Wonderful permutations result when one places the sheer image in reverse over the opaque one. More permutations arise when the sheer is permanently pleated in some fashion in a heat press.

So, here's what I have done so far. My original image had a series of parallel lines --with red, yellow, orange, blue in the composition (in first photo, it's the layer with small solid white borders). Its companion piece was printed on a sheer, and then placed in reverse on top of the original image. Voila, the result is an interplay of parallel lines and colors.

I added some more texture and movement by pressing the sheer in a way that would cause it to fold out from the underlying textiles. Layers, depth, the mysteries of...that transparency thing I got hooked on for my last challenge piece!

I placed this all on some red felt, for now. I used parallel lines of thread to attach everything -- initially, I thought the threads could represent the people, all going up, attached to the wires/threads of their Getty Museum audio headsets. That sounds a little too art-y, though. Let's just say the threads are more grid lines.

Anyway, here are some pictures that show the dimensions of the piece. I am not at all sure that I will stick with this for my final challenge piece, but as always, it's fun to play.

Pamela Price Klebaum

2010-11-01T13:38:00.000-07:00

Oh, my, did I learn a lot from this challenge piece!

As I wrote in my in-progress-blog-post, the multiple grids in the challenge photo were my inspiration for this piece. Here is a crop from Carolyn's photo:

This time I departed from my approach of creating digital images inspired by the photo, printing them, and experimenting with stitching. For this challenge, I wanted to use only the shapes as my starting point.

I embarked 0n an adventure in transparency. Inspired by the beautiful Korean pojagi method of patchwork (click to see examples), I dyed oodles of small pieces of silk chiffon and organza. I tried to create pojagi seams, but they ended up far less beautiful than the original style -- but swell nonetheless. Here's a picture of one:

I made many many mistakes along the way, but I am finding that mistakes are a really good thing -- and they lead to the wondrous "Aha!" moments that inspire me to exclaim aloud in delight, even when nobody is round to hear my glee.

Here's my finished piece, up on the design wall:

I loved dyeing the silks -- I used ColorHue dyes I had learned about in a workshop with Glennis Dolce. My fave piece is the large pumpkin-hued patch at the upper right. There is just a suggestion of red throughout the fabric, and it shimmers just so. (You'll find out why I used such a large piece there in a moment!)

So, this piecing took me for-ever, and I think I rejected more seams and color combinations than I used. But I just fell in love with the luminosity of the textile.

Since the grids in the photograph were in layers, I thought it might be interesting to layer a fused glass piece on top of this silk grid. Using the photo as inspiration, I designed my glass work. Here it is before it went into the kiln:

...and here it is two days later, when it came out (and after I drilled holes in it for mounting)!

So, here comes another challenge. How am I going to mount these two transparencies? I prepared a piece of Plexiglas, drilling holes in it to allow me to attach the silk and the glass. I also needed holes for attaching a heavyweight fishing line for hanging the piece on the wall.

And here it is, all tidily mounted...

...or is it so tidy? It turned out that mounting transparencies is a nightmare. Though I use transparent fishing line, the holes in the Plexiglas can show through the silk as well as the glass. Here is where the biggest offender was, one of the holes I had drilled for the hanging wire/line:

I will have to design for this when I use transparent materials in the future.

Two things, though. I discovered that I love love love working with transparency, and that I double love love love layering transparent fused glass with transparent textiles!

Betty Amador

2010-10-30T15:03:00.000-07:00

This is my final piece for Carolyn's challenge. There were so many wonderful shapes to choose from that it was a difficult task. This time, instead of applique, I decided to use oil paint sticks.

Although I felt I had a rather limited palette, I went ahead anyway. I machine quilted the entire piece, but added a few appliqued arcs to fill in some empty spaces, and I think it helped to hold the piece together.

Here is a detail shot:

Carolyn Ryan

2010-10-25T10:30:00.000-07:00

My final piece for this challenge is my clay monoprint on Pellon, using pigment-colored clay slip as "paint."

I was attracted to the saw blade shapes in the photo, and saw a pair of running legs in the wheel shape, so I created a bright abstract, using the golds and greens to support the reds and push them forward.

I learned a good lesson with this piece: if you rub and scrub color hard enough over the surface of Pellon, random fibers rise up! In the future, I will use my tried and true bottomweight cotton/ poly blend for monoprinting.

paula chung

2010-10-24T09:20:00.000-07:00

In viewing Carolyn's photo, there were so many interesting shapes to tantalize the mind. After a great deal of time, I narrowed down my selection to the obscure shapes in the background--the windows. I liked that they were vague and really not part of the narrative of shapes.

I wanted to repeat the vertical rectangles, so I used some black fabric that I knew discharged to white. I used a bleach pen, making rectangles throughout the piece. Unfortunately, the pen didn't bleach to white, but was close enough. Then I used my favorite palette: a secondary triad of violet, orange and green silks. I tore the fabric to have a worn or rough appearance and stitched them down with different colored threads. The piece was then pillowcased, as I usually do.

I've entitled it "Windows"

Karen Rips

2010-10-22T14:19:00.000-07:00

In my last blog post, I talked about the process of making this piece, but I hadn't decided if I should add more interest in the upper left side. I drew the design I liked on a piece of acrylic and pinned it up to try it out. I decided I liked it , but not in black, it was a little to harsh.

I ended up stitching it with top stitch thread in the bobbin, which I hand wound. I used a tan color, which didn't show up at all , then went back and used a dark brown fabric pen to emphasize the area. It's one of those pieces where you need to get closer to see the stitching, which is not really what I wanted, but I'm done with it now. I used matte medium to seal the piece, as I wanted to keep the clay contained, and mounted it on 1 1/2 inch canvas.

Jayne Larson

2010-10-18T12:25:00.001-07:00

Carolyn's photo presents a visual feast of shapes and layers. From her photo, the layers and grids became my inspiration.

I found many grid patterns to play with in my playbox of stencils and monoprinting tools:

Additionally, there's everyone's favorite, construction fencing:

I even found some grid type machine stitching which I had played with in a Bob Adams workshop. I really liked trying to use the machine to create a hand-stitching look and texture. Below is a detail:

My mind was busy playing with possibilities of layering stencils, paint, and stitching grids.

And, almost at he same time, my home computer contracted a bad virus and had to go into the computer clinic for radical, emergency surgery! In the process of cleaning and organizing computer software, cords and wires(zillions!), I found an interesting old circuit board of uncertain origin:

Without my computer, many connections to the outside world seemed cut and I had lots of "free" time. I have become so addicted to the technology of email and the web. It brings images of a web that ensnares us. Technology, machines, the grid.....

and to the rescue..... a virus.... bugs.... boro!

Here's my first attempt, using hand-dyed fabrics, shibori fabrics, indigo dyed fabrics, a commercial batik and some cut-outs from a Boro workshop with Yoshiko Wada.

Betty Amador

2010-10-06T16:57:00.000-07:00

Today I cut my drawings to see how they would look. I rather like the results, but the photo doesn't do justice to the actual colors I used. Now for more experimentation.

I made the piece above with paintsticks, using the shapes in my drawings. I tried overlapping colors, trying for transparency. Sometimes it works, but the bright red and yellow didn't seem to work.

The last photo is another drawing I made based on the shapes in the photo. Next is a photo of one of my first drawings based on the photo:

And here is a drawing I made a few months ago and it sort of has the feeling of Carolyn's photo, so that's a start.

Pamela Price Klebaum

2010-10-02T12:43:00.000-07:00

When I was a child, my two heroes were Evonne Goolagong and Van Cliburn. Goolagong, an Australian aborigine, was a grand-slam-winning championship tennis player who was famous for extended lapses of concentration during matches. The press deemed these mental sojourns to be "walkabouts," a reference to a male aboriginal rite of passage that included wandering in the bush.

In this current challenge, I've been on a walkabout.

Normally, I turn to Photoshop to examine the challenge photos closely. Here, the only shapes that caught my eye were the leg-like figures in the circle. These evoked Leonardo's famous drawing of the vitruvian man, which depicted the symmetry of human proportions.

Here I have overlaid the photo's shape on da Vinci's drawing:

I was going to draw a woman in the circle and proceed from there digitally, as is my wont.The problem is, I have drawn a lot of nudes and printed them on fabric, and while I will do more, and thoroughly love that process, this incarnation of that approach felt stale and hackneyed.

So, at our in-progress meeting, several of the members of the group spoke about how they liked the grids in the photo. I had liked the windows in the recesses of the photo, with the grid of metal mesh enclosing the artwork in the foreground (I assume that this is a photo of a large a metal art piece). Grids, grids, grids, I was thinking.

And then we had a horrific heat wave, and my husband pulled out the filter on our one little room air conditioner:

A grid! With lots of arcs and angles created by the accumulated dust! I played with this image in Photoshop, and came up with these two possibilities:

For a day or two, I liked these, I really really liked these. And then I thought, grids, pojagi, grids!

Pojagi is a Korean wrapping cloth, used in ceremonies and for wrapping precious gifts. They are usually made of silk. Pojagi is characterized by beautifully stitched enclosed seams (click here to see examples of pojagi). To me, these hearken to grids, in a most elegant and ethereal manner. I have been entranced by this art for some time, so now is my chance to try it out. Pojagi = grids = challenge piece!

Pojagi seams are similar to French seams. As I did not grow up sewing (remember, tennis and piano, not stitching), I had no idea how to sew anything other than a quilter's 1/4" seam, let alone how to join two slippery pieces of silk chiffon in the fashioning of a French seam -- which to me looked well nigh impossible.

Well, I went to our local purveyor of textiles at Baron's Fabrics in Camarillo, and a modern miracle ensued. Not only did the store's owner help me personally, he had one of his employees, Gina, sit down with me for at least a half hour and demonstrate, on my silk, how to sew this seam, as well as how to finish the edges. No charge. And Gina put off her lunch break to help me and would not postpone the session, even though I offered to come back later.

Grace, it seems, still exists, as does superlative customer service.

The first photo above shows some silk chiffon that I have dyed shibori-style, using methods I learned in classes taught by fellow Digital-to-Textile-r Jayne Larson, and Glennis Dolce. Step one, check. Silk fabric is ready.

Now I will start to construct my grid-piece. I hope to use those fancy seams. My thought is to make a companion piece out of fused glass (with a translucent grid design) and incorporate that into the work.

Wish me luck!

Carolyn Ryan

2010-09-26T11:00:00.000-07:00

Since this is my photo, I naturally started out trying too hard to make something really cool. I cut out the shapes I liked (below), I enlarged them, I reduced them, I put color behind them, I put a grid over them...and no cohesion emerged.
Then, I isolated just three shapes, hoping to morph them into a mysterious design - nothing - no creative flash.

Then, a breakthrough! I took a mono printing workshop, and I used two of the shapes in the 14x20 print below. I brought my custom stencils to class - just hoping. I printed on white Egyptian cotton, and I'm really happy with the intense colors, and the composition.

I intend to stitch on this piece, but I don't have a strong feel for the finished look yet. My favorite section of the print is the closeup below. Those "legs" are hurrying off to somewhere, or maybe trying to escape the chaos?

Loris Bogue

2010-09-25T11:40:00.000-07:00

Being that I like high contrast, Carolyn's photo appeals to me. There are so many ways to deconstruct the pieces and rearrange them. Although I'm not sure where this is leading, I painted some primed canvas with watered down acrylic paint. Then, using a tetrad color scheme of yellow/red and blue/teal/violet, I pulled some fabrics from my stash. I will let this roll around in my brain for awhile and see what inspires me over the next few days. . .

Karen Rips

2010-09-23T19:20:00.000-07:00

I love Carolyn's photo choice for us to work with and I've already jumped in and put together something I really like. I started with the piece in the lower right side which I made in the clay print class I took with Carolyn this summer. The clay was crumbling despite various efforts to fix it to the fabric, so I ended up painting it with matte medium to hold it in place. I added some deconstructed screen printed fabric, and some shibori I made in the Jan Myers Newbury class last year, and then finished off with a bit of rust dye sheer I had.

In trying to decide how to quilt it, I looked at the photo again a remembered the grid pattern it, so decided to use that. Machine quilting over clay is not the easiest thing. I had thought it would be no problem with the matte medium on it, but the clay was pushed into my machine by the needle and I ended up with lots of dust in my poor Bernina.

The grid worked out really well, but I thought something was missing in the upper left. I took another image from the photo and drew it on a piece of acrylic I had, and I'm trying to decide if it belongs in this quilt.

What do you think?

Fifth Challenge

2010-09-14T11:52:00.000-07:00

paula chung

2010-09-04T08:31:00.001-07:00

Win Some, Lose Some.

Well, all challenges are not equal. Gwen's was interesting because it dealt with an image of her mother when she was a nurse during the war. I wanted to show the lively personality Gwen reported and the many people she touched.

I chose to do several images of her mother in bright colored, thick thread. Unfortunately, I chose a background that was too saturated, so my thread work isn't as visible as I would have liked. When having this critiqued in our group, the consensus was to leave it as is. I had wanted to add another image in green.

So, there you have it. Gwen's mother peeking out from behind the background of a potato resisted silk.

Betty Amador

2010-09-01T13:41:00.000-07:00

P.S. The Bernina now has a new problem. The pressure foot won't stay up. It was not broken when I brought it in for service a month ago. So back to the shop it goes!!!

Betty Amador

2010-09-01T10:52:00.000-07:00

This past week I finished quilting Gwen's photo challenge. I decided to machine quilt, as I got my Bernina back from being serviced. The hand applique took a long time, as I am sure everyone realizes.

Jayne Larson

2010-08-27T08:33:00.000-07:00

Just posting the final image (above) and a detail (below) at this time. I will come back and add more pics and process description when I get back from the northwest.

Betty Amador

2010-08-25T16:30:00.000-07:00

Three weeks ago my wonderful Bernina went kaput. So that meant I would have to hand applique this piece if it was ever to be finished. Today I completed the hand work, my machine is back, and I am finally 1going to machine quilt it. Check back in a few days to see the finished piece.

Carolyn Ryan

2010-08-23T15:07:00.000-07:00

My finshed piece, created from Gwen's photo of her mother, is titled "Transition." You can check my blog entry on July 28 for details about the creation of this window to other worlds. I knew fairly early in the process that I wanted to use a photo transfer technique in the piece, and I stood the original photo at an angle and reshot it to get the perspective you see here.

I auditioned many background fabrics before I realized that a recent print I created using the clay monoprinting technique might just work. You know that moment: You think to yourself "No, don't even go there," but you give it a try anyway, and - Wow, it works!

You can check out Karen Rip's blog if you are interested in more details about clay monoprinting.

Karen Rips

2010-08-21T10:30:00.001-07:00

This piece based on Gwen's photo of her mom is done, except for a bit of editing. I went abstract with this idea, as I couldn't come up with anything realistic, not knowing her mother. When I heard she was a nurse, I started thinking about some of the things nurses use in their daily lives and the stethoscope came to mind. As you can see from my previous blog, you can see I tried variations of this, but nothing really excited me.

When I thought about the basic shapes of the stethoscope, I thought of the circle, the line and the u shape that goes around the neck. I pulled all my circle fabric, hand dyed and commercial, then found some stripes I've collected over the years.

This all came together really quickly, then I hit a wall when I did the handstitching. I like the oval shapes on the yellow fabric on the right, but I'm not happy with the u shapes in the center yellow. This is where my critique group stepped up to the plate with some great suggestions, which include switching to an orange thread like the strip third in from the left, maybe over stitching some of them in black, and making them more random, bigger, smaller, different angles, all to add interest to the center.

I don't utilize critiquing as much as I should, tending to show finished pieces at the meetings. I'm not sure why this is, as the comments are always helpful, so maybe in the future I'll start bringing some unfinished work in.

Pamela Price Klebaum

2010-08-20T10:14:00.000-07:00

"Likeness" 24" x 14"

It's a dicey proposition to work with a photo of a friend's mother, but this was our challenge this time 'round. More than that, instead of the usual one photo, we were provided two, each from times past when amateur photos were regularly grainy, making features difficult to discern.

In concert with the previous challenges, our eight members embarked on wildly different paths, some anchored in these indistinct images, some inspired by the fact that this was a member's mother, who was a nurse in her youth.

I took a serious risk and decided to attempt a portrait in glass. My previous glass portraits have never been based on a "real" person, so failure in those glass pieces would only be evident if the piece just did not work as an artistic rendering of a face.

I reviewed some work I had done in my Head Drawing and Head Painting classes, focusing on the relative proportions of the face. I pored over the two challenge photos, looking for the contour lines of discernible facial features. I studied caricatures in The New Yorker, seeing how artists exaggerated the lines of features to portray faces while using only a minimum of line.

I chose to use amber glass, a warm tone that reflected both the overall feel of the photos, as well as the hair and skin tones of the photo subject's daughter, our challenge member who supplied the photos. Here is the piece as it sat in the kiln, awaiting its two day cycle of heating and cooling:

Hoping against hope that this piece would not fracture or otherwise misbehave in the firing process, I then designed the supporting cast for the piece. I captured the head portions from each photo, and transformed them using some Photoshop filters. I made a piece of fabric to use as a backdrop for the piece, alternating between amber and black-and-white in the rows of portraits:

The image that I used as a reference to create the glass portrait was then printed on Lutradur. Since both the glass and the Lutradur are transparent, I needed to back them with something that would prevent the photo grid from appearing behind the pieces. Linen seemed an appropriate textile, as one of the photos shows Gwen's mom in her nursing hat.

I placed small pieces of batting behind each 'cushion,' and frayed the edges to soften the look:

Though all elements of the piece are finished, I now need to mount them. I will drill holes in the fused glass, and attach all to a piece of Plexiglas. This presentation method has worked very effectively in past pieces in which I have melded fused glass with textiles.

Working with the portrait of a friend's mother was an intense and emotional experience. One always wants to do well, but here, the stakes were much higher. I am looking forward to receding into anonymity.

Betty Amador

2010-08-06T16:58:00.000-07:00

Initially I was fascinated by the hands in the photo. So I made a drawing of her hands. I do not know how I will approach this color wise. I also did two portraits of this photo in two different color combinations.

The left side of the portrait is sort of cubist, the right side is more rounded and softer, I probably will go for the first one as it has greater color contrast. I think I will also include her writing on the top of the photo.

Fourth Challenge

2010-07-29T06:40:00.001-07:00

Pamela Price Klebaum

2010-07-29T06:39:00.000-07:00

This is such a radiant image of Gwen's mom. I am currently working on capturing its essence in what I hope will be a portrait-study. As the photo has such a low resolution, my progress has been slow.

My method is one I used in a previous work -- capturing the image in multiple media. In my earlier piece, I started with a sketch of a newspaper photo, translated that sketch into a fused glass portrait, and then used that portrait to create another image in fabric:

The quiltlet and fused glass became a part of an art quilt. Let's hope I can do justice to this sweet image of Gwen's mom.

Carolyn Ryan

2010-07-28T09:58:00.000-07:00

This project has revealed the challenge of balancing my emotions with artistic restraint. My instinct is to wish Gwen's mother well on her journey, and to portray the idea that she is still of this world.

In the first image below, I drew a "portal" [from a window catalog], cut out the two "doors" and bent them back, photographed this 6-inch model to create perspective, traced over the lines of the portal using a black chalk pastel pencil, then reverse transferred the black lines onto a piece of hand-watercolored cotton. I tried to vary the black lines, to create a sense of fluidity between two worlds.

This portal section will be sewn into place on a background to be determined later.
I will print a mirror image of Gwen's mother, then create a photo transfer for use in the final design.

Below is the model I shot for perspective. I used glue stick on thin cardboard so the portal would stay put while I photographed. I placed a small image of the figure on the door of the portal, so I would have the correct perspective to use later for photo transfer.

Below is my starting point. Just a window design with possibilities!

Karen Rips

2010-07-27T13:05:00.000-07:00

Gwen's photo's of her mother were a real challenge for me, because I've never met her, and didn't know if what I chose to do would be a true representation. I remembered her mother was a nurse, so after a suggestion from Carolyn, I started thinking about nurse related implements. I came up with a thermometer, a cap, a blood pressure cuff, and finally a stethoscope.

My first idea was to have a stethoscope winding around the edge of a piece with the circle being the focal point. I found some old commercial fabric I loved (I think it's Lonni Rossi) and thought it would be perfect. I made these images on paper, not wiling to cut into the actual fabric. I'm glad I did because they do nothing for me. The commercial fabric, beautiful as it is, really dominates this.

I wasn't happy with the whole design, so I thought about it some more, and tried to break it down to the simple shapes involved in a stethoscope.

You have a circle,

a straight line, and an egg shape at the top. I pulled all my circle fabric, and I have a lot. I added some commercial line fabric, and I'm stitching some egg shapes onto it. It won't be revealed for a few more weeks, but I'm very relieved I came up with something I like. Sometimes when you have a challenge you're uncomfortable with, you're forced to dig a little deeper to find a solution.

paula chung

2010-07-25T09:35:00.000-07:00

Gwen's photo of her mother presented some challenges. I had never done a portrait before and wanted to continue my exploration of embroidery. Since the photo was very old, the resolution was difficult to work with and there was obviously some wear & tear--which makes old photos even more precious.

I worked with the photo in Photoshop and came up with an abbreviated, simplified version.

Gwen's mother had been a nurse and touched many lives. She was a charismatic person that was adored by all. In order to convey that, I decided to used multiple images stitched in bright colors.

I first did a flour/water resist on silk and dyed it with turquoise thickened dye. Then I began tracing the designs by color, starting with blue then yellow, red and finally violet watercolor pencils--a big mistake! When I pressed fusible interfacing onto the back, the steam took away some of the markings, especially the yellow.

But I forged on. I re-marked the yellow, then began stitching with topstitch threads. Starting with blue, I stitched all the design, then went onto yellow, red & violet. As I progressed, the design seemed to get more abstract as I went--mainly because the tracings had been different for each color & some had rubbed off, or were placed on top of each other. I made a strong effort to keep the shape of the face the most similar, because that's where the eye is attracted.

Stitching was really hard because the lines converged. I discovered I had made even another mistake--tracing red on light turquoise became violet at places, thus getting the red lines mixed up with the real violet lines.

And of course, after I began stitching the violet, I realized that it was too close to the blue in hue. I had originally wanted to use a kelly green, but was unable to find that shade of topstitch thread.

So I'm adding another image & will stitch it in green. I will have to dye the thread it if I can't locate it. Isn't it always that way?

Loris Bogue

2010-07-24T17:09:00.000-07:00

Gwen changed things up on our group this past month by giving us a photo of her mother, a departure from the photos of inanimate objects we've been given in the past. I love doing portraits in fabric; however, this one didn't lend itself to that, since the photo was lacking in detail. I also guessed that other artists had picked up on the hands and how beautiful they looked, so I didn't want to risk duplicating (competing with?) someone else's artwork.

After watching one of my favorite new shows, Work of Art, The Next Great Artist, I thought about how the artists tackled their assignment to do a book cover. The winner was also my first choice, and it was obvious to me why he won.

His design was simple;
it contained something unexpected;
it did not represent anything literal;
and it evoked an emotion.

As I fell asleep that evening, I thought about nurses and what represents a nurse. The idea hit me, and the next morning I awoke and finished the piece, entitled, "NURRRRRRSE!!!!"

NURRRRRRSE!!!

13" x 19"

Jayne Larson

2010-07-22T14:59:00.000-07:00

This project has definitely had a life of its own. So it is no surprise that the result ended with ragged edges, fraying threads and a skewed trapezoid shape. I'm not even sure that it is finished - someday it may call me to do more stitching, or to unstitch certain parts - we''ll see.

Meanwhile, the picture below shows selecting threads to use for the stitching.

And below you can see a detail with the stitching and the interesting marks and shapes that the nui shibori process created on the fabric. I chose a simple cross stitch, not wanting the stitching to dominate the shibori pattern. I varied the size of stitch, weight, type and color of thread to emphasize different elements of the pattern. I ran the stitching off the edge, which continues the flow of the pattern's movement. For the edge finish, I turned under the backing fabric and left a bit of the black batting to act as a frame.

Although I have labored over each step of this project (including selecting the photo for the project inspiration), in the end, the simplest solution was the best and won out. That may be the real lesson of the entire process....

Pamela Price Klebaum

2010-07-15T18:28:00.000-07:00

Fish Story
18.5" x 32"

The machine quilting lines in this photograph seem to have taken on a life of their own, undulating like a plaid polyester fabric does on a TV screen! I would like to say that this effect is present in the piece, and it is meant to subtly depict the concentric waves around my carp...but that would be a real fish story! (Oh, you didn't realize that was a carp? More on that later...)

The conception of this piece came as I manipulated Jayne's picture in Photoshop -- a method many in our Digital to Textile group use, all to wildly diverse ends. Here is an early version:

Each colored shape was made separately, and then I experimented with overlapping them. I came up with this, which I printed on cotton sateen:

I cut out the cotton image and fused it to a large piece of black silk habotai:

You can see that the cotton-printed-colors are not as vibrant as those in the digital image. I was using an earlier version of the Jacquard FabriSign fabric for inkjet printing, so I hope that in the future, those colors will retain their saturation when I use the newer version.

I also played around with printing each colorway of my image separately on pieces of organza. My thought was that I could layer these, and thus achieve some feeling of depth. Not so. The white in the organza was too tightly woven, and prevented a sufficient 'reading' of the colorways as a whole, blocking out as well the black silk habotai underneath. That was an expensive lesson...

I like the figure itself as an abstract form. It can be interpreted as a fish (carp?), and I did hand stitch a clamshell pattern on the figure, as a way of tipping my hat to possible fish scales...

I also stitched over some areas that could be read as eyes...here is a close-up of the lower portion of the abstract image/fish/carp:

I used many different colors and weights of threads to make the quilting lines. As I ended up really liking these lines, I made the piece larger than I had planned, to include more of them. I also placed the image/fish/what-ever off-center, so as not to have a possibly boring symmetrical composition.

Loris Bogue

2010-07-08T08:12:00.000-07:00

After looking at my piece on the wall for awhile, I decided that the object in the middle needed to be grounded (click here for previous post). So I took all the pieces off and rearranged them so that part of the abstract went off the page.

Then I quilted it using what I call "bug body," a variegated metallic Madeira thread that I learned to love in Ellen Anne Eddy workshops, and named it Collision of the Milk Trucks. The fabrics include silk, velveteen, brocade, cotton, and inkjet printed fabric (Jayne's photo).

Collision of the Milk Trucks
24" x 24"

Detail, Collision of the Milk Trucks

Betty Amador

2010-07-01T11:28:00.000-07:00

This is my finished quilt for Jayne's challenging photograph. I wanted to repeat the stripes of the pier and the circles. I also somehow saw a tree in this picture, which was most intriguing.

Since the wood comes from a tree, that is what I wanted to sew into this piece. My task of representing the stripes in the photograph was made easier by using some old Michael James fabric, which is sort of 'cheating,' but heck! Who wants to do all that work when it is ready made? Here is a detail shot:

So that's it for now!
---Betty Amador

paula chung

2010-06-28T10:52:00.000-07:00

Working on Jayne's photo has been wonderful. I again tried stitching with DMC thread on a linen/rayon blend. As I mentioned before, I had tweaked the photo in Photoshop. The new design looked like paths so its titled "Journeys".

This project stimulated an exciting opportunity for me. I am in the process of developing 15- 20 embroideries for a solo show in the spring of 2011 at the Lake Tahoe Community College. So you never know what a challenge will produce.

Karen Rips

2010-06-28T09:10:00.000-07:00

I love the photo Jayne chose for us to work with. The lines and shadows and spaces are wonderful. In deciding what I wanted to do, I realized I wanted something unrecognizable, I just wanted to concentrate on lines. I narrowed and blew up a piece of the picture that I thought was an interesting area, then moved on how I wanted to represent it.

I have never really worked with canvas before, and this was my opportunity to experiment. I used a piece of my dye table dropcloth, painting it with blues, yellows and reds, then cutting it up. I zigzagged the pieces together, originally using just the blue and yellow, with lots of red and black stitching, but it lacked something. I added the strips of red and called it a day. Canvas is wonderful to work with, although painting on it is way different than painting on sateen, the fabric I normally use. It's rougher, and takes longer to absorb the paint. One thing I did like about it is the wrinkles, which really show up in the blue, adding some unexpected texture to the piece. I will use canvas again in future work, in factit i ideal for the construction series I'm working on.

Gwen Mayer

2010-06-26T13:36:00.000-07:00

Hooray! Here's my final piece for this project!

Carolyn Ryan

2010-06-25T20:55:00.000-07:00

Above is my final piece for Jayne's project! I last blogged about this piece on June 4th, and I've made changes to design and thread painting ideas since then. Let's call this piece
"Block Prints With Grid and Color." The basic components you see above are:

1. a base painting of wide colored curves using brayered block-printing inks onto white cotten
2. five block prints on colored fabrics, from a linoleum block I carved, inked and printed
3. a unifying grid print using several odd shapes of non-skid carpet rubber, which I inked and used to print directly onto my design

If you look at my June 4th blog, you'll see that the five block prints just floated on top of my painted background. I integrated those blocks into my final piece by printing my grid shapes over, under and next to the blocks to pull them back into into the surface. I used some of my extra ink-printed fabric for the one-inch border.

Jayne's photo made such a strong statement of line, I went with that movement right away. Sometimes I overthink a project, and I'm glad I went with my first impulse on this one.

Jayne Larson

2010-06-22T11:04:00.001-07:00

At last - you are hearing from me.
This has been a challenging challenge for me and writing about it has been hard too. Maybe its because I find myself getting more and more engrossed in each challenge, maybe its because I like the abstraction of this photo and have a hard time trying to express or interpret something more about it.

I was first drawn to this photo because I love the light and shadows. The positive and negative spaces really jump back and forth. I also love the strong line of perspective that leads you off the page - there's a mystery there....

My first approach to this challenge was to play in the computer. I used several filters from Photoshop and Corel Painter. Here are some of the results:
above is a woodblock filter version

looking at shapes
looking at lines

combining shapes - I like the movement here....

a new combination......

Okay, by this time I had dozens of versions floating in my head.......time to play with fabric!

But first , we had some nice warm weather, let's dye fabric....

and we'll dye some yarn to use with the fabric....

I was really happy with the results from my dyeing and just positive that I was off to a great start on the project. With my hand dyed fabrics spread around me I sorted and stacked, folded and unfolded... but, it wasn't coming together. Back to the stash.....

And it happened, as it often does for me, a piece of fabric became the catalyst for my project.

paula chung

2010-05-31T19:54:00.000-07:00

Jayne's wonderful photo inspired me the minute I saw it. I was immediately struck by the simplicity but complexity of it--so much pattern, repetition, changes in value. I knew I wanted to try to play with the photo in Photo Shop, so attempted my meager skills to develop a design that spoke to me.

In playing with the image, I realized it referenced roads. Life is so interesting; its malleability. Throughout our lives, we have been faced with decisions, some huge in importance and some miniscule. But when we examine our journey, it is fascinating that we end up where we are and wonder how that journey would have changed with different decisions.

So I'm entitling it "Journey" and hoping to stitch it with black perle cotton size 12 on a linen/ rayon blend, then mount it onto a stretched canvas. We'll see how it goes.

Loris Bogue

2010-05-30T10:42:00.000-07:00

As usual, I took this month's photo and scanned it into Photoshop to see what interesting patterns I could make with it. The b&w scans weren't too promising, so I recolored the pattern as below:

I then pulled a pallette of fabrics to go with my favorite, the top left square (TLS). I used cottons, silks, and velveteens, as well as fabric squares I printed using the TLS.

Then I decided that it would be fun to build a Cubist piece, the way I did in a Pamela Allen workshop last January, where we used a little square taken from a Cubist painting and built on it to make our own Cubist piece.

This is my work in process to date. As you can see, I laid out a similar background in both pieces, then built on the TLS fabric squares. I'm not totally enamored with the boxy thing on the left, so I plan to rework that part of the composition.

Click here to see finished piece.

Betty Amador

2010-05-26T15:36:00.000-07:00

Our new challenge photo had some very interesting lines. I somehow was reminded of trees. I like the contrast in Jayne's photo. I turned it several ways to see how I want to orient it in my fiber piece. I plan to use gradations of several colors in my piece.

It is a very simple photograph and sometimes this can be more challenging. I hope I can come up with something engaging.

---by Betty Amador

Gwen Mayer

2010-05-24T08:38:00.000-07:00

When I got Jayne's project photo, my first reaction was to the movement I saw. I made six copies of the photo, and played around with making an abstract design.

What came out of the playing, I somewhat liked, but as I studied my design, the curving white lines reminded me of arches, which I've always been drawn to. The arches, then, brought to mind photos my husband and I had taken on one of our trips to the Dominican Republic with my brother's family.

I opened my DR drawer and found the pictures. And lo and behold, there was a wonderful photo of my nephew standing at open French doors of a colonial building with lots of light and shadows. Et voila, my mind made a connection between the contemplative stance of my nephew (who is normally in this mode as he is a bio-engineering Ph.D. candidate at Georgia Tech) and the arches. I mention this info about my nephew because the shapes in the arches make me think of what he might see under the microscope when he is studying the nervous systems of snails, shrimp. etc. Now I have to figure out how I want to transform my mock-up into fabric.

---by Gwen Mayer

Carolyn Ryan

2010-05-22T10:14:00.000-07:00

My materials and tools for this project are: block printing inks, freezer paper, brayers, my carved linoleum block printed onto hand-painted fabrics, and thread painting (undecided).

The curved lines of Jayne's photo pulled at me, so I started out with a palette of black, silver, red and deep gold (above) and tried to create curved lines by laying down pieces of thread over brayered inks on freezer paper and pulling a monoprint. I wasn't happy with the result I got - it looks a little too contrived, and the lines are too jumpy. I got better results the second time around, by painting my curved lines with the brayers and discarding the thread lines idea (see two images below).

I carved a linoleum block in my printmaking class this semester, and hurray - the printing inks transferred well onto fabric. This image is a reduction of an 18x24 drawing done in my Life Drawing class last semester.

I want the block prints to move along the curves of color, so this is one possible composition. My group suggested that I try blending the blocks into the background more, so the colored borders around the blocks prints may have to go.

I practiced some thread painting, to see if these lines enhance or detract from the flow of color. I'm thinking that the thread lines moving out into the white border area might add movement, but I'm not sure yet!

Karen Rips

2010-05-21T13:59:00.000-07:00

Jayne's photo is so full of possibilities that I had a hard time narrowing down what area I wanted to work on. To me it's all about the lines, so I decided to trace some of the areas until I came up with something I liked. The photo below shows my initial tracing.

After deciding on the area I liked, and the lines I wanted to leave in, I moved on to color. I knew I wanted to use a lot of machine stitching in this piece, and I wanted to play around with different colors to emphasize areas. I went back to the tracing paper and used marking pens to figure out which colors I wanted to use.

Now I needed to move on to line. Straight stitching, curved, short bursts or long. I know they all make a difference and I referred back to Jayne's initial photo to guide me. This picture is hard to see, but when you look at it closely, you can see the lines I drew in it to get a rough idea of how I wanted to stitch.

Finally, I needed to decide on the fabric. I have never stitched on canvas, but wanted to try,and this project gave me the opportunity. I took my drop cloth off my wet table and painted it blue and yellow, which were the colors I had decided to use.

That's all for now. I've finished the piece, but won't reveal it until next month. Stay tuned!

Pamela Price Klebaum

2010-05-21T13:23:00.000-07:00

Two images have emerged from my adventures with Jayne's photo for this challenge. Several of us used Photoshop to play with the image, and of course we all came up with wildly different interpretations -- thus some of the richness of our joint enterprise.

Though this image (created from the lower third of the photo) is abstract, good old Gestalt's principles of perception might cause our brains to experience this as a wildly colored carp. See the black eyes near the lower tip (that would be above its nose)?

My original thought was to print this on cotton sateen, but I think I might separate out each color element and try to make a thermofax screen of each of these elements. I would make registration marks on my base cloth and then screen the successive colored layers. Sounds like a plan.

Another image is also a possibility, but at this point is a distant second...

I can see some heavy stitching on this that might make it sing glorious songs. But, then again, maybe not so much. As usual, stay tuned.

third challenge (click to enlarge)

2010-05-04T08:22:00.001-07:00

Gwen Mayer

2010-05-04T07:15:00.000-07:00

I like the shape in this piece, and I am sure it will show up in more of my work. I also enjoyed making the discharged fabric I used for the background, so much so that I used some also as backing fabric.

The title of this piece is "Trilobite Galaxy."

paula chung

2010-04-25T19:46:00.000-07:00

It is so exciting to see how my wonderful group has interpreted my photo of a chair taken at the Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art (LACMA). The pieces the members of our group have made are very diverse, fun and exciting.

As mentioned in previous posts, I've been trying new techniques and approaches that I don't normally use. My intention here was to simplify the design and attempt to abstract it. I wanted to use a simple palette as well, relying on a secondary triad using greens, violets and oranges.

In our other challenges, I had attempted thread painting, so wanted to try quilting closely, in a parallel fashion (it wasn't as easy as I had thought, as you can see).

I hope to continue to abstract this image. We all have good intentions, right?

Jayne Larson

2010-04-25T16:46:00.000-07:00

Finished?... maybe... maybe not...
After layering on the paint, the stencils and the sheers, my last layer is thread. I'm using simple stitching, by hand, and I could continue to add more and more, and would like to. But I stopped at this point ,for now, to show the group at our meeting. I think there is enough done to show. I only put a temporary backing on the piece, so I can easily continue add more stitching. I love the meditative action of hand stitching and it was fun layering color upon color, but it goes pretty slowly! I am not satisfied with it as a composition and I think that more stitching, lots more stitching, would help develop a composition. However, since time is limited, maybe a smaller piece or a section of the whole would make a more successful composition? The whole piece is 20 inches wide by 15 inches high. I have played with my computer and cropped the whole into some smaller sections, which I do think work better. By selecting just these small sections, the scale of the piece changes and makes a viewer come closer. The stitching becomes more interesting and important as a design element. Look below for some of those crops.

A long thin shape might be interesting...

Even closer in ....

Possibly a collage of several of the sections?...

I do have some ideas to carry this further....we'll see!

Carolyn Ryan

2010-04-22T16:49:00.000-07:00

The first photo above is my finished piece for this challenge. I incorporated the diagonal lines and the dots of light from Paula's photo into the mask-like face of this desert dweller. I then created her orb from the same section of the chair. The robe of the main figure is inked, then painted with watercolors.

I tried several different color combinations for the desert dwellers, before getting comfortable with a blend of the hues in the landscape. This unites the figures with their environment, and gives the viewer [I hope!] a sense of cohesion and calm in an unreal setting.

Above is my finished piece again, with my small mock-up to the right on my design wall. A mini version is great for designing a larger piece, but as the scale grows larger, the empty spaces require more detail in the composition. In this piece, I resisted the urge to fill up the desert, and instead placed two more rock formations in the lower front to pull the space together.

Pamela Price Klebaum

2010-04-22T11:15:00.000-07:00

Paula's image featured many areas where parallel lines intersected with broad sweeping arcs. I saw this interplay as well in the lines of Frank Gehry's magnificent Walt Disney Concert Hall. I went to Los Angeles to photograph it, and for this challenge, cropped one of those pictures to accentuate those wonderful intersecting lines.

I then digitally colored the photo, using both Digital Painter and Photoshop, attempting to create an abstract image that at the same time retained some recognizability. That image was then printed on inkjet-printer-ready whole cloth cotton sateen and machine stitched with monofilament in the bobbin and on top. The pigment inks used are archival.

Gehry's construction uses metal panels, which form seams on the exterior of the buildings. These 'read' as lines, both parallel and arced, and were the guidelines for my stitching in all areas except the (orange!) sky:

The sky-stitching was designed to be a continuation of the arc-and-parallel line motif in Paula's photo and in the buildings themselves.

I am pleased with this piece. Working this close to abstraction is quite a departure for me, and I must say, that feels refreshing.

Karen Rips

2010-04-22T09:10:00.000-07:00

Last night we revealed our new fiber art at a meeting at Gwen's house. She served a wonderful cassoulet, and during the cocktail hour we were able to share the different methods we had used to interpret Paula's photo. This picture Paula picked was so wonderful to work with, and there were so many possibilities, that I spent most of my during the last few months just isolating different areas to focus on. I never did find that one area, but I kept the stripes and circles in my mind and came up with a design I liked. I knew there were several ways to execute this, but I had recently read a post on Diana Parkes blog, http://dianaparkes.blogspot.com/ (posted in February), about painting the dye onto the screen, letting it dry, and then giving it a few pulls to print the image. Now, I have done this before, but when I was thinking about how to make this piece, this technique slipped my mind. I thought about piecing it, or just painting it on, but this is what I ended up doing.

It worked out quite well, and to finish it, I just added some stitching, including the french knots around the circles.

Loris Bogue

2010-04-18T10:17:00.000-07:00

My abstract is complete. Click here to see my previous posting, which shows the pattern I developed for this piece.

I decided to use varying colors of thread to stitch close, parallel lines in each section of the abstract. One particular area, the large green at two o'clock, is actually one piece of hand-dyed fabric, stitched to make it look like several pieces. This was an experiment in abstraction, thread and fabric interaction, and I'm pleased with what I learned.

For larger view, click here.
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Pamela Price Klebaum

2010-04-17T09:43:00.000-07:00

Several thoughts are popping up during the meditative process of quilting. As I gaze at the quilted parallel lines in this piece that represent the metal panels in the Frank Gehry building, I see more clearly the visual link to Paula's photo. (Yippee!) My inspiration was the juxtaposition of curved and parallel lines:

It is thrilling to see my first exercise in working with abstraction come to some sort of fruition, except...well, let me ask this. What do you think of that jagged line of quilting pictured above? It looks odd, yes?

It's actually part of the structural design of the Gehry masterpiece. In that section of the structure, the metal panels are staggered at marvelous angles. In the building itself, the line is elegant, understated. In my digital rendering, the line is understated as well. However...

When the line is quilted, it is partly obscured by even monofilament (clear) thread, making it appear that the line was not on the building itself, but was just added as a quilting design element:

Proposed solution: stitch slightly parallel to the line in the image, so the viewer doesn't think that I made up some jagged design of my own to this acclaimed masterpiece (what tomfoolery that would be!).

Here is an area where I have tried out that approach. Though not clearly visible in the photo, the quilting is parallel to instead of directly on the line in the fabric. Voila, Gehry's magic comes through. The line shows. Mission (almost) accomplished.

Our group 'reveal' is next week. Excitement mounts!

Betty Amador

2010-04-15T09:03:00.000-07:00

Quilted, done!

Jayne Larson

2010-04-13T22:24:00.000-07:00

I love Paula's photo because of the many layers of texture, light and shadow. And, since polka dots are one of my favorite motifs, I couldn't resist the opportunity to play. I selected the section shown above from the full image to really focus on the dots. I especially like how the dots change in emphasis and value. For this project I also chose to brighten up my palette and, as you can see below, I may have gone overboard with the color! Inspired by one of my favorite artists, Pacita Abad, who uses bold color in paint and stitching, I started by painting broad diagonal stripes of color on two different canvases (one shown below).

I wanted to use dots and circles of different colors across the painted background to see if I could create some type of depth and movement from the interaction of the colors against each other. Below you can see my stenciling technique underway.

The picture below shows the second of my two canvases, where I just painted dots freeform over the diagonal background. I chose to use the two canvases, to give myself more options for playing. Having two pieces going at the same time also meant that I could work on one while the other was drying.

I liked the transparency that I was getting with the Versatex screen printing ink that I painted with. The detail below shows the transparency effect and some of my preliminary stitching.

Still working on the second canvas, I stenciled more layers of circles. You can see in the following photo that I was playing with the negative and positive dot shapes.

Since I liked the transparency, I tried using some sheers which I fused with Mistyfuse.

I'm not sure where this is all going, but I am enjoying the process and the color!

Carolyn Ryan

2010-04-13T17:19:00.000-07:00

My first post for "Paula's Project" was on February 16.
Second post: I'm working with the idea of a desert scene for this piece, using the mysterious hooded figure I discussed in my Feb. 16 blog as the focal point. I really wanted to create a more abstract design, but the figures kept pulling me into the desert - so here I am!

Above are the rock formations which rise up out of my landscape. Their main purpose is to encircle the figures, and give them stability within the composition. My next step here is to thread paint the rocks and create some texture and shadows before placing them on the desert floor.

Above is a mini-mockup of my desert scene. The large figure on the left is holding an orb, made from part of the chair seat in Paula's project photo. The face is fashioned from that same seat. I was going to watercolor the sky, but my art group friends convinced me to keep the strip look - and now I really like it. It balances well with the large clusters of shapes within the landscape.

Here's what my design wall looks like today. I rejected the "rock" fabric you see on the lower right - too bold and too gold! The desert floor is also too gold, so I'm going to use a warmer-toned hand-painted fabric instead. I'll ink my figures, using a calligraphy pen and permanent ink. When they dry, I'll add just a little watercolor wash here and there to the robes. I need to think about colors, so the figures don't disappear into the desert sand!

Gwen Mayer

2010-04-03T16:25:00.000-07:00

I might be calling this piece "Trilobite Galaxy!" Inspiration was the chair seat in Paula's photo and the background fabric that I bleach-discharged. The fabric reminded me of outer space, and the chair seat fascinated me.

For some of the 'trilobites,' I played with photo transferring using gel medium for the first time. I will now play some more with stitching of some sort.

Pamela Price Klebaum

2010-03-17T12:01:00.000-07:00

Initially these curved lines in Paula's photo suggested a human form to me (see my last post), but over time, the abstract nature of the shapes resonated more. I realized that working with a human form was my artistic "comfort zone," and if I were to truly make this a challenge, I would have to take on the abstraction of the photo straight-on and sally forth.

Well, the sally forthing took me on a strange path indeed. Several weeks ago, I wanted to photograph Frank Gehry's masterpiece, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles, some 70 miles away. So at 8:15 on a Sunday morning it was yours truly on my mission, and one other soul who must have had the same idea, and we had the grounds all to ourselves.

As I later perused my photos, one looked very abstract to me -- and the abstract shapes also hearkened to the lines in Paula's photo. Though I did not take these photos with Paula's challenge in mind, the synchronicity of seeing the abstract shapes in her photo and mine was delightful.

Here are both the initial photo, and my first pass at digitally manipulating it (lines are marked to show the similarities with Paula's photo):

Lots of sharp angles and sweeping curves, adjacent to the parallel lines of the panels in the Gehry structure -- wonderful! I had to balance the saturation in the sky and dark face of the building, and did not like the black in the glass structure in the middle of the photo. Here is what I came up with:

To contain the composition, I changed the values at the bottom, and in the circular shape at the lower right. The image seems more balanced now. That blotch in the glass tower looked like a black hole, and it looks better with continuous glass.

The digital image has now been printed (31" x 24") on cotton sateen.

Our Digital to Textile group met last night, and the consensus was that I should quilt this in clear monofilament. Since I have never done this before, this will be a double challenge. So, I am off to sally forth yet again.

Normally we would be finishing our challenge pieces this week, but since our group members have had other deadlines, we extended this challenge one month. So, see you in April!

Betty Amador

2010-03-05T10:05:00.000-08:00

This is the second half of my Paula's quilt. Now I will begin to quilt it and then it is finis.

Betty Amador

2010-02-23T17:15:00.000-08:00

This is my sketch for my piece based on Paula's photograph. The picture below shows how I have interpreted the sketch with fabric.

Loris Bogue

2010-02-18T21:18:00.000-08:00

In my continuing effort to learn abstraction, I decided to put this photo into Photoshop and run it through one of their filters to make what is already abstract even more abstract.

Using the "cutout" filter, I came up with the design below, which turned soft curves into points and straight edges. Then I adjusted the color palette until I found one that I liked. This became the pattern for my piece.

Click here to see the completed piece.

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Pamela Price Klebaum

2010-02-18T12:34:00.000-08:00

This new challenge photo (see the original in the top right column) struck me as both spare and lyrical at the same time, two qualities that might seem to rarely exist together. I was struck by the quality of line -- two types: a predominance of soft curves flowing into and out of each other -- these curves are then echoed in a harmony of positive and negative dots; accompanying these shapes are several series of parallel lines.

What this did not suggest to me was the technique I had used in my last two challenge pieces, that is, to digitally alter the photo,including adding color, and print it on whole cloth, then stitch it.

In Photoshop, I outlined some of the the photo's curves, and my mind was immediately drawn to the similarities of line in the female form. I went back to my life drawing books, and read, read, read, re-studying proportion, anatomy, pose, in my semi-obsessive ways, sketching to see where these lines might take me. Here is a sample pose, where I have isolated some lines that, to me, are evocative of those in the photo:

At this point, I don't know how (or whether!) I will use this image in my piece. As I have been studying and sketching, I have also been playing with my new birthday toy, a Babylock Embellishing machine. I am well into breaking at least 4 of the 12 felting needles, and have this to show for it (well, this is a piece of what I have to show for it):

How am I going to marry these two parts? Well, I have lots of ideas about that. First, I have to figure out how to replace those needles, and I have to do some more sketching and thinking. So maybe another interim post is in order. Anyway, this is an intriguing endeavor and I am enjoying it immensely.

Karen Rips

2010-02-18T11:16:00.000-08:00

When I first saw Paula's picture I thought, I'm not going to use the dots, they are way too obvious. Of course, then I couldn't stop thinking about the dots. I have in my possession a lot of dot fabric and I realized I like them so why not?

I moved on to trying to isolate an area of the photo that was simple enough to include lots of dots without being too busy.

I finally settled on the stripe with the dots in alternating areas.

What I'm think about now is how to put this together in an interesting way. I'm thinking about what colors to use and I'm trying to figure out if there is some way to make this whole cloth, with screenprinting, and maybe some discharge dyeing.

paula chung

2010-02-18T09:12:00.000-08:00

For this project, I wanted to try something abstract. The photo was already pretty abstract, but I wanted to narrow down the shapes and have the design be more about their relationships.

I rotated the photo, then in examining it found a few shapes that were interesting.

I wanted to find the "sweet" spot, where the shapes seemed most to relate to each other. I simplified and narrowed down the shapes that I wanted.

I had wanted to use a secondary triad color palette, so chose violets, greens and oranges. I dyed and overdyed silk for the background & main element--the circle. I wanted these colors to be more complex, since they were the largest in size. I found other hand-dyed silks that worked with them, to form that triad.

Now to quilt.

Carolyn Ryan

2010-02-16T10:17:00.000-08:00

Paula Chung's intriguing photo for our new project is full of steel and curves, light and shadow. Above are my first attempts to get something on paper. I often put together a border of some kind, and then almost never use it. Maybe it feels comforting to start out controlling all that random, empty space.

I usually find many ways to avoid the first creative step - must have another cup of coffee, should take a walk before it gets too hot, need to organize my Sharpies. You have your own favorites, I'm sure.

Once I have some lines and form to look at, my right brain takes over, and The Adventure begins. With this project, I got a break: Paula's image connected with a drawing I've been waiting to work with, and as you can see below, a face and an orb appeared.

I had to create a believable hand coming out of the robe, so I had a friend shoot an image of my hand holding a ball. Then I was able to capture the correct angle of the hand and sketch it onto my figure.

I have created multiple sizes and groupings of this figure, plus reverse and negative images, but the composition remains vague, because I don't yet know who she is. I'm waiting for the story to emerge.

second challenge

2010-02-04T08:12:00.000-08:00

(click to enlarge)

Betty Amador

2010-02-03T07:03:00.000-08:00

My initial conceptions of this challenge piece were far different from my final quilt. My early drawings of the still life photo seemed too academic.

I painted three versions of the bottle shape with Dynaflow, using a sort of a watercolor technique. On one of the pots, I added more detail with a Pigma pen.

The piece in the upper left corner was stitched on my sewing machine, using a hoop to keep the fabric taut. I then appliqued the circle to the quilt.

I fused the fruit down and quilted the entire piece. End of project and on to the next challenge!

Jayne Larson

2010-02-01T11:54:00.000-08:00

From my last post, I did add the painted cheesecloth as you can see above. The cheesecloth added texture and a sense of shadows, which I liked. I ironed freezer paper to the cheesecloth, cut out my bottle shape and sewed the freezer paper/cheesecloth down. Then I had to tear away the freezer paper - it was only slightly tedious - and the rough edges fit in well with the loose threads from the frayed silk fabrics.

While it had been enjoyable to play loosely with the shapes, muted colors and values, playtime was done and I needed to make some decisions to move toward finishing. Two problems came forward which needed resolution. One, the composition seemed "muddy," especially in the left half of the image, where I wasn't very happy with the way some of the shapes interacted. Two, I really disliked the dark "chess piece" shape in the center. Using my photo images, I tried cropping the image, like the example below:

Photoshop also let me try reversing the two sides of the piece, see below.

I even tried looking at the image upside down. But it was hard to decide to pare the image down to a smaller size. So, I decided to go ahead and quilt it and see if I could use thread to blend the dark piece and add definition to the muddy areas.

After quilting with many different threads, I looked at it again:

And I set up a cropping station on the floor....where I had some good light.

The composition of the whole just did not work for me. So, I cropped into the piece. Below are two halves for consideration.

And the winner is......
I like the sense of light and space.

This project was an interesting exercise. Isn't it fascinating how we try to make something work even when we know that it doesn't. I enjoyed the process, but in the end, I needed to arrive at an image that satisfied me. Betty's bottles and vases reminded me of images by Giorgio Morandi (Italian painter, 1890-1964) and my simple image, if smaller, follows that inspiration.

Paula Chung

2010-02-01T09:01:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I'm experimenting with different approaches of applying images onto fiber. My original approach, one I have been using for five years now, has been to applique hand & commercially dyed silks together to form images of flowers. My floral images attempt to express the human condition through a flower's life cycle.

My first thought in trying new approaches was to use thread. I've been studying oil painting

and wanted to see if I could duplicate the format of layering color by using thread. The first image, that of a Japanese cemetery, I chose to do minimal stitching and let the forms do the expressing.

In this present challenge, I have used thread to create the forms, but did extensive stitching to convey the primitive, hand-carved aspect of African masks. Various thicknesses of threads were used, as well as different thread coloring methods.

Here is the final piece:

This has been a great experience, but one I won't be duplicating anytime soon. I think I'm on to exploring more techniques!

Carolyn Ryan

2010-01-31T17:25:00.000-08:00

I love the volume in my pottery shapes to the left of the central vase shape in my finished piece. In fact, now that I am viewing the photo close up on the screen, I see a much better composition in the left hand two-thirds of the image. Do you agree? Our group has discussed the issue of letting go of mediocre compositions, and finding the courage to cut and rearrange after we really want to be finished. I just might do that with this piece.

I did quite a bit of painting on the flowers and stems, and I really enjoy using paint for shading and highlighting.

Pamela Price Klebaum

2010-01-28T09:36:00.000-08:00

Textured Vessels

17 1/2" x 27 1/2"

One of my favorite childhood books was "Cheaper by the Dozen," a tale of a dozen-child family headed by parents who were both time-and-motion-study experts. Their goal was that the brood waste no motion, no moment, no opportunity in the search for economy of movement and maximum proficiency. (Editorial note: the 1950 movie based on the book is hilarious and true to the text; the 2003 version is neither.)

So, having revealed this sweet remembrance, one should surmise that efficiency reigns high in my list of mantras.

This piece flew in the face of that mantra. I started the threadwork on the far left vessel, and soon found that staccato bursts seemed suited to the shape --

Connecting these thread-bursts would have been the logical thing to do -- no need to bury the threads, a much faster execution time. However, I wanted to use many colors and types of thread -- variegated, cotton, matte, polyester, all in varying hues. If I stitched one type of thread where I thought it should go, before stitching down the areas in between, I risked ending up with a piece that would defy flattening and would wave like Old Glory in a hurricane.

So I threw my effiency mantra out the window.

As I progressed to the image of the bottle, a different style of stitch emerged, tailored to all those wonderful curvy crannies and color gradations caused by the translucency of the green bottle and the red-rust vessels lurking behind it.

Though this piece took me an inordinate amount of time, I feel it was worth the investment -- not because I think it is a fantastic work, but because I learned oodles as I made decisions on stitch design, color, texture, and line. I was so stimulated by the process that I found myself wanting to arise at ungodly hours just to be able to sit with it, stitch, and fully engage the right side of my brain.

In putting the three layers together, I was so eager and distracted that I put the backing piece on upside down. Oh, well, efficiency maybe is not always commensurate with art-endeavors.

Karen Rips

2010-01-28T09:00:00.000-08:00

This is such a wonderful photo that Betty gave us and I think the possibilities were endless. As I said in my last blog, I had decided to try using water soluble pigments to print the pottery images. I did this with some of the pieces, the ones with the orange and yellow backgrounds, and I liked the results. For the two pieces with the blue background I wanted something a little more random looking, so I decided to try monoprinting. I already had the negative shapes cut out of the contact paper, so I just laid it on the fabric, painted fabric paint on a piece of plexiglass, and ran a comb through it. Then I flipped it over onto the fabric and pressed it in. This was really fun and I think I like the results better than the water soluble pigments, although I think there is a place for both in this kind of work. This piece turned out way more traditional than I had expected to do, but I like the way I was able to fit the shapes together into a nice composition.

Loris Bogue

2010-01-27T23:00:00.000-08:00

I love a good puzzle and when one comes along, I can't stop working it until it's solved. I don't know if I'm an overachiever, a never-satisfied artist, or just indecisive. But who cares? I now have an actual "series" as a result.

My original piece, even though I set it aside for being too similar to another's, needed to be completed, primarily because I used a piece of my deconstructed silkscreened fabric in the background that was just too good to waste. I added some hand embroidery, but this time, echoed the vases independently of the positions of the fabric ones. The piece is quilted around the large shapes, and a series piece is complete (called #2 for the reason explained below).

"Betty's Vases #2"

34" x 18"

My second endeavor for Challenge #2 involved using rusted fabrics, as I showed in an earlier post. However, I couldn't figure out how to assemble them, since the pieces are about the backgrounds, not the objects.

Knowing that there was a call for entries for a show sponsored by Rust-Tex, due in January, I decided to push myself to complete the piece and submit it for the show. The blocks were unsuitable for a combined still life, but I found a way to simulate one with a suggested table line across the lower three vases. The connecting strips are a commercial cotton that repeat the sketched motifs and suggest a window in the background.

Even though this was my second "Betty quilt," it was finished first and became "Betty's Vases."

"Betty's Vases"

20" x 19"

Now to go back and finish the Parcheesi piece that I showed in my first post. I added some colorful tokens in the shapes of the vases. They were fun, but a little too animate for me: "Still Life with Suckers"? I don't think so.

So my tokens received an overhaul, a little paint, and a little less animation. Hand embroidered lines provided all the movement needed, and "Betty's Vases #3: The Challenge Result" is done.

"Betty's Vases #3: The Challenge Result"

20" x 14"

"The Big Reveal" postponed due to weather!

2010-01-21T08:26:00.000-08:00

Normally, our Digital to Textile group would have shared a sumptuous potluck dinner last night and then revealed our results of the second challenge, using Betty's photo (column right) as inspiration for our separate works.

Yesterday we had flood warnings and, in my little area, a tornado watch (who'd a thunk it?). We have postponed our soiree until next Wednesday, January 27. Stay tuned!

Pamela Price Klebaum

2010-01-10T11:35:00.000-08:00

I think I'm in love. And it's expensive.

I printed my original image

on an inkjet printer-ready Jacquard cotton sateen, the first time I have used this fabric type. Then I bought oodles of thread -- variegated, cotton, polyester, King Tut, Queen of Threadpainting Hollis Chatelain.

Then I started to stitch.

It's not threadpainting. I wanted the image to show through and be the star, not the thread -- so I took a more spare approach. I stitched what feel like staccato bursts of line, a method I started in my last challenge piece. I'm calling it "thread-sketching" -- it's not highlighting and it's not emphasizing anything, it's just using the thread to play with line, color and texture.

I love it. As this method does not produce a continuous stitching line, yes, I spend a lot of time burying threads. And that makes this method is highly inefficient, which goes against my Navy-ingrained search for motion conservation.

But lookee!

[My last posting on this piece was December 16.]

Jayne Larson

2010-01-07T14:52:00.000-08:00

Betty's photo shows her beautiful and interesting ceramic vases and bottles and I was immediately inspired to use a bottle shape as my main design element. I also liked the horizontal orientation of the composition in the photo. For my first step, I put a 33"wide by 22"high piece of charcoal grey wool blend felt on my design wall to be my canvas and my batting. From the dimensions you can tell that I really didn't plan for any particular size - I could add or crop later. The felt stared at me morning, noon and night for a few weeks, while I was working on finishing up some gift quilts for my nieces for christmas.

Working on one project gives me the time to digest and think about the next project. I knew that I wanted a more subdued, monochromatic color scheme and I had some painted fabric that was calling to me. So I started gathering my fabrics. My original thought was to use some blueish-greenish hand-dyed fabric from a color swatch test that back-fired because the fabric was a poly-cotton blend. Since the poly didn't take the dye, the fabrics were all "subdued" blues and greens and I was thinking of seaglass green for my bottle composition. In the end, the grey-blue hand-painted fabric won over the green hand-dyes because they were more interesting.

The blue-grey color scheme won. (Maybe I chose this monochromatic color as a reaction to the bright primary color quilts that I had just finished or all the red-green brightness of the holiday season) I do love bright rich colors but I enjoyed and looked forward to playing with many different greys in this challenge.

Having more or less selected my fabrics, it was time for cutting and playing with them on the canvas. I cut freehand with a rotary cutter so each shape was a slightly different but similar bottle shape. I was working with the negative and positive shapes and warm and cool tones. In the picture below you can see some fabrics still in the audition stage.

The next photo shows the current stage of the piece. All the fabrics are sewn down. Now I can play with further layering and quilting.

Here's a possible layer (below) - it's painted cheesecloth. Maybe this will make it into the mix.

Loris Bogue

2009-12-31T16:44:00.000-08:00

I've spent the day putting together the pieces for the latest challenge. I've been doodling in my sketchbook for the past month:

I also did the Photoshop thing, as is my habit, manipulating cropped pieces to come up with some designs:

Interesting maybe in PS, but how do I work with these in fabric?

Since everything looked so flat on paper, I decided it was time to dive into my stash and see what I could put together, apart from the sketches and photos.

I've become interested in the use of negative space and how it can be as important as the positive space, so I focused in on a deconstructed screenprint I made recently. I thought it might benefit from some sheers overlaid on it, so up it went on my design wall:

From there, I have designed a piece I'm liking very much. It doesn't include many of the sheers, however. I'm not going to reveal any more for now so that the final reveal won't be spoiled! Stay tuned!

*Later this week*

OK, I'm back. I've decided to show piece #1 in what I hope won't become a series. After I placed all the ready-to-fuse pieces on the wall, I realized I was replicating Betty's first piece. And...I was once again concentrating on the shapes.

Since I have another month to work on this, it's back to the drawing board and as Monty Python often said, "And now for something completely different!"

*The beginning of the next week*

Now I've decided to experiment with some surface treatments on my hand dyed fabric that I've been wanting to try. Maybe I'll end up with something I can use.

Experiment #1: Deconstructed Engraving (ala Linda Colsh, Quilting Arts magazine article).

This technique involved making a drawing, etching it into plexiglass with an etching tool, rubbing a silkscreen with Aqua Brique, and pulling a screen with Matte Medium. I have tried this with a Caran d'Ache crayon, but it used up the crayon too fast, and I didn't like the results. This one acted more like a deconstructed silkscreen, in that it broke down gradually, and I was happier with the results.

Experiment #2: Rusting fabric. For this experiment, I ironed freezer paper onto my fabric, soaked the fabric in vinegar, then laid unrolled pieces of #0 steel wool over the whole fabric. The next morning, I had rusted backgrounds for my vases and pots. I think I can do something with these. Perhaps I'll draw the outlines of the objects and do a little shading...

*Week #6:*

Here are a couple of my rusted pieces after thread painting. I wanted them to look like sketches. I haven't had any of the usual problems stitching on rusted fabric, perhaps because I washed the fabric well after rusting, and the rusted areas are not encrusted. Besides, I'm not stitching right on top of the rusted areas so much, but more inside them. Now to continue "thread sketching," then on to a final design...

*Week #7:*

Try as I may, I can't find a good way to put my rusty vases together in an artful way. With these, it's about the rusted background, not about the vases, so overlapping them wasn't going to work. I didn't feel like just adding sashes using fabric that didn't quite match.

So it's on to #3 in the series.

The shapes kept reminding me of tokens in a Parcheesi game. So I opened Illustrator and played with some shapes that could represent the paths on a Parcheesi board:

Since I have a lot of black and white fabrics, I thought it might be interesting to use them in gradation to represent 3D paths coming out of blackness:

Then I will use the vase shapes to make several colorful tokens, add a pair of dice, and hope that I can finish this challenge after having made three pieces.

"Indecision may or may not be my problem." --Jimmy Buffett

Carolyn Ryan

2009-12-27T16:15:00.000-08:00

This project is teaching me some humility. In my first blog about Betty's pottery image, I explained that I used sprayed acrylic paints to create a lovely misty-pink and blue-green watercolor look for a background.

I thought that a structured starting point like a painted canvas would take me about half way to completion of this project - what a clever idea!! The truth is, I am more creative when I start with a blank canvas (so to speak) and my piece grows organically (from an idea) instead of structurally (within fixed elements).

I feel compelled to work with a fixed color palette and mood because I don't want to start over. I began by defining the pottery shapes I saw in the background (above) and soon let go of my idea of working some symbols into the distant spaces. The humility part came in as I just loosened up and made design choices within the reality of soft, blended, tranquil, asymmetrical, low-contrast elements.

Now that I have defined some flower and leaf shapes and coaxed the vase forward with some thread painting, my next steps will be to quilt on a thicker-than-usual batting, emphasizing these rounded pottery shapes. Maybe I can create more interest by shadow-quilting some leaves and stems, and more highlights might expand the value range.

Paula Chung

2009-12-20T10:25:00.000-08:00

Well, they say a challenge should be frustrating, otherwise it wouldn't be challenging. This challenge has proven to be that so far. In choosing to work with materials I'm not familiar with, stitching with heavy threads, I have come across many difficulties: having to color my thread, trying to "paint" using thread, and probably the most frustrating of all things, that stitching with thread is so slow--kinda like watching your toenails grow. I think I wanted to attempt the stitching again, as in the first challenge, because I've been studying painting and I am intrigued with layering the thread, as you do paint--but it's so much harder!

I was immediately struck in viewing Betty's photo, that the shapes reminded me of African masks. I searched the Internet for images and chose 3-4 to work with. I wanted images that show texture when I stitched them, but were interesting in and of themselves. I worked with their positioning, mainly to create an interesting negative space, then worked with scale. Finally I came up with this design:

I traced each mask onto tracing paper and then stitched the lines to show the different areas of color, value, etc. That was another brilliant idea I had--I'd stitch with black monofilament thread, thinking it wouldn't show in the final product; thinking that the shine of the thread would be enough to see the demarcations. Wrong. So I had to restitch with lighter thread.

So, I'm stitching on black raw silk that has been reinforced with several layers of fusible interfacing. I'm using a # 100 top stitch needle with quilting thread in the bobbin to counteract the difference in threads. The thread is size 12 perl cotton, that I've painted with Setacolor, since I didn't want to dye it. That was another problem--I miscalculated the amount of thread I needed. One mask alone took 3+ 10 gram balls! I hadn't painted enough thread and had to attempt to remix the same colors, some successful, some not.

So I keep stitching.

The Next Day:

Well, after much trial and tribulation, here's the piece again. I still have to complete the largest mask, but this will give you an idea of how it's coming along.

Gwen Mayer

2009-12-18T09:03:00.000-08:00

After studying Betty's photo, I found myself again returning to another of my unfinished works. I felt that the shapes in the photo would work with this piece. At this point, I am experimenting with the placement and nature of those shapes.

I am playing with the image of the man -- he is currently experiencing a time of turmoil and challenge, so I want to depict that in fabric.

The umbrella images in the top left are at this point photographs -- I don't know whether I will make them in fabric, but those umbrellas seem to pop up in most of my pieces, so I guess that a safe bet would be that they will appear in this one somewhere.

Pamela Price Klebaum

2009-12-16T10:16:00.000-08:00

It is interesting to observe the tools each in our group uses, particularly when we initially seek to jump from the "inspiration" photo into our own creation. Perhaps "jump" is not an apt verb -- "meander" might better describe the first steps on the path.

I am struck by how little I have known about my work-ways. It is now apparent to me that my work is almost always driven digitally. To those who know me, that conclusion will elicit a Homer Simpsonesque "Doh!" or perhaps an adolescent "duh." Oh well, enough of self-reflection.

I just finished a Visual Design course at our community college, where I learned Adobe Illustrator. I used both that and Photoshop to explore what I might do with Betty's image.

My shape-skeching consisted of outlining the edge shapes of the entire tableau, as I did in the photo above. This form was intriguing, so I played a bit with combining that shape with itself:

This looked a little Frank Lloyd Wright-y, which pleased me, but suggested nowhere to go.

As I loved the design on the bottle, I played a little with that, coming up with two versions:

Nice, but I seem to be working with red-and-turquoise a lot, so I need to experiment more with colors. So...

I liked this, but it seemed insubstantial for a single work. Back to the photo.

Oh, no! I was back to the old color scheme! And I wanted to create my own composition. So, here's what I did...

I reversed the two items on the far left. Then I moved the bottle in front of them, and made it transparent. To get away from my overused color scheme, I then started experimenting with color.

I liked the composition -- somewhat symmetrical, which can be boring, but the diagonal line created by the tops of the two objects behind the bottle gave the piece some dynamics and movement.

I liked the way the colors of the background and those two objects played off each other, but the bottle looked dead. The other colors were analogous, so I thought about using the complement of one:

This worked better -- the color scheme ended up being split-complementary. And since it's Christmastime, the red-green combo is even better! But the now the yellowish background now seemed dead. The answer was texture -- the objects all have interesting twists and turns, but the background was flat and boring.

Untold hours later, I emerged from our computer room one happy camper. In our first challenge, I loved trying to create an image that would take the viewer in and out of the forms, trying to discern whether part of the image was a woman or a part of the graveyard scene. Here, I played with illusion as well -- I wanted the viewer to have difficulty discerning where the lower part of the bottle ended and the other objects began.

So, here is the result of my digital journey -- it is 20" by 30" and has been printed on cotton sateen. I show you here the digital image -- and in a month, it will be quilted and ready for view (click to enlarge).

Karen Rips

2009-12-13T13:00:00.000-08:00

When Betty first gave us this photo, I thought, this is great, more shapes I can play with! As I studied it though, I decided I didn't want a repeat of the first month, where I pick out one shape and develop the piece around it. I decided to break the photo down and look at each shape individually.

I focused in on each shape and tried to decide whether to enlarge them, shrink them, multiply them, turn them upside down, and whether I wanted one as a focal point.

Once I had this basic concept thought out, I have been playing around with how to put the images onto the fabric. I usually fall back on my thermofax machine at this point, but I wanted to try something different. At this point, I'm working on monoprinting (which I don't have a picture of) and a technique I read about in this issue of Quilting Arts Magazine by Susie Monday susiemonday.com, on water - soluble crayon printing.

I have the Caran d'Ache crayons, and I have the matte medium, so at this point in the exercise, I'm just messing around, printing images to see where it takes me.

Betty Amador

2009-12-13T03:36:00.000-08:00

These are my preliminary sketches using the shapes in the photograph. I have juxtaposed the shapes and overlapped them to see what new shapes I can get. I have also tried to get color mixing and transparencies of color.

They all have a sort of a design school quality that I am not sure that I like. I first want to determine the layout and composition and from there, I will decide the colors I will use and the textures I want to add. I will keep you posted on my progress.

Carolyn Ryan

2009-12-05T14:06:00.000-08:00

I've started this "pottery" project by creating some misty backgrounds to contemplate. I used spray bottles (99 Cent Store) and covered an artist canvas in white cotton fabric -fun fun fun! This is what my spare bathroom looks like when I use it as a painter's studio.

I set up my canvas in the bathtub, and used a palette of blue-green, rose-pink, gray and beige, just letting the spray-misted paints swirl and melt into each other. I then held up a loosely-cut cardboard stencil and sprayed in some pottery forms from Betty's photo. It's hard to keep in mind that wet misted acrylics dry so much lighter. By the way, sprayed acrylic paint does not come out of tile grout, unless you wash it down immediately!

I created four different "landscapes" just so I could have a choice, depending on my mood. I had all that extra paint in the spray bottles, so why not!! I like this mountain/sky result, but it's not quite what I want for this project.

Below is the result I like best of the four pieces I created: This loose landscape allows me to imagine what elements might create a feeling of serenity, and consider options for a unified composition. I have some extra painted fabric pieces, so I'll do some thread painting on those first to see if I like more definition.