..and then wait 72 hours.

So today, I painted my Fabric for my piece.

I used acrylic, simply because it was easier.  I intend to do a lot of free motion embroidery and the stiffness helps with that.  The piece at the top was an extra piece that I put all the leftover paint on.
When they dried, which was not long as it was very hot today, I stencilled the feathers.

I used shiva sticks to do the stencilling, although I could have just used paint.  The one on the left was my scrap piece and I thought it looked a bit like monet's waterlilies, so I added a bit of paintstick to make it look more like it!

And now.  Wait 72 hours.  I put quite a bit on, so although stencilled images can dry quicker, I will wait the whole time, 'till tuesday, just to be sure.  and then I'll be doing a lot of stitching between then and the due date.

Charms, Feathers, Mardi Gras!

Thank you Lisa!  I’ll admit that this one was indeed a challenge.  It had me stumped for the longest time. I mulled it over, sketched ideas, set it aside, and cogitated further.  What do you do with all of this?

At last!  One week prior to reveal day I had my idea.  It would need cutting, fusing, and embellishing.  Yup!  I took your beautiful hand dyed fabric pressed it to Misty Fuse and slashed it apart.  It looked like this when I was done.

Next I chose fabric that would act as a canvas for my idea.  Using a stencil and some Shiva paint sticks, I created a border.

A few more pieces had to be cut; some of them fussy.

Now it was a matter of arranging all of the pieces, fusing them to the background and doing some FMQ stitching to hold things in place.

With everything now “stuck” in place there was no turning back.  Embellishing was the next order of business and your charms and fibers fit in perfectly.  I added some additional items, some hand embroidery and some fancy machine stitchery.  You can hop over to my blog and see more process pictures.

So what do you think?  Does this remind you of Mardi Gras?  

from that first lullaby

that your mother sings, music is part of our lives - it's woven into our fabric. 

We live with nursery rhymes, TV jingles, theme songs, camp fire singalongs - we can't escape!  We turn the radio up when a favourite song comes on, so we can belt it out along with the radio - right?  I know I'm not the only one that does that!

Right through our lives we are surrounded by music.  Anthems at the beginning of sporting events. Graduation ceremonies - all that Pomp and Circumstance.  Weddings - that first waltz, right through to a funeral march.  Even nature - bird songs, whale songs, the lovely musical sound of a waterfall.  It's all around us, and in us.

I started out doing some weaving - 

thought that would work, so I created some fabric paper by gluing some sheet music to a piece of muslin.  I spritzed it with some ink before the glue dried to give it a bit of colour.  Once it was dry, I sliced it up and woven it into a piece of satin.

I had some fabric with music on it so I pieced it  with some random fabric to make my piece bigger.  Next step was to create a stencil using freezer paper, and then using paint sticks, stencil a treble clef on to the fabric

I also quilted a woven area into one section.

I needed something more with the treble clef, so I painted some fusible interfacing, cut out some notes and stuck them on.  Decided they were too black so rubbed them with a little paintstick to tone them down a bit

then finished it all off with some quilting - the words "Music - Woven into the fabric of our lives" and a few extra notes and treble clefs

Do you have music in your soul?

Post Script

Thanks to all of you for your kind words after I posted my latest almost-done challenge quilt!

I have to say that being OPEN and honest has been rather invigorating for me and has caused my creative mojo to runneth over!  I spent almost the entire weekend creating!!! I didn't even get dressed yesterday because I was so busy!!! What a wonderful feeling!!

So now challenge #11 is done!

"EXPOSED"

 and a close up of some of my embellishments...

Full Disclosure (almost)

Sorry I am late posting!  Life is full! I just returned from having lunch and shopping with my oldest daughter who is away at college about 1 1/2 hrs away. As I returned home, I snapped a few shots (texting while driving is illegal but they have not outlawed snapping pics while driving... yet!). 

Driving on the OPEN road and enjoying views of the OPEN sky! Wish I had thought of that sooner!!!!

Anyway, in the few years since we began this group, we all have found that one of our Tangled Textile challenges tends to speak to us more than some of the others and creative juices just flow.  However, since last summer I have had a lot of difficulty producing finished work for our challenges,  much less any art at all. It has been really frustrating!! In years past, making art had been a creative outlet.... an activity that I enjoyed. But it seems that recently when I do finally come up with ideas, I have had a particularly difficult time getting anything on the page or the fabric.

For our latest challenge, I actually began a project (#1), got some technique ideas from a book, enlarged the "pattern", cut out all the fabric parts and began arranging them.  But as I looked at the work-in-progress on my studio floor (where else?)

..and it sat there for a few weeks (!), I could not complete it... so it was tossed.

Discouraged and running short on time....I perused my photos. Project possibility #2 never really got off the ground but involved one of my favorite photos from this summer. 

 

And then amid the chaos of my mind and my heart, an idea was born. However, this idea which involved a weekend (last weekend to be exact!) of hand dyeing, hand applique, machine sketching, embellishing .... meant that I would be exposing a part of my life that I have kept private FOREVER....

Merriam Webster defines exposed as, "1. open to view, 2. not shielded or protected."

But I kept working on project #3 because my heart said, "sew what you know." 

What I know is depression.... since I was about 12 years old.  Over the many years, I have been prescribed a variety of medications, I have graced the couches of psychologists, social workers, psychiatrists, a mental health worker at a student health center, and various counselors in many cities. I have read books about self-acceptance, hope, healing, agreements and I still have many more books to read. And yet, for some reason,  melancholy hangs on.

And sew I am......

EXPOSED

Well, it is not quite done!

So I will post again when it is complete!

The Right Key

Initially drawing a blank on where to go with this one I went for a drive to the park, passed several homes, and an industrial park.  Sat on a bench for a while and came home, passing that same industrial park.  This time however, I noticed a locked gate and thought, “you'd need the right key to open that one.”  Bingo.  An idea was germinating.  I had some painted fabric that resembled an industrial park and looked like this.

I cut it in half and used the lower half, hoping it might work to represent a chain link fence.  Keys? I gathered up old keys around the house.  Will they work?  How will I portray them?   Using a stenciling technique, I traced them onto freezer paper, cut out the shape, and pressed the resulting stencil to the fabric.  With Shiva paintsticks I got the images of keys onto the fabric.  I also remembered a pointillist technique I had learned.  I found an image of an old key and went to work.  This just might work.

 

 

I went on a hunt through antique stores, thrift shops and found an old skeleton key and decided that I would do a rubbing.  I didn’t like the result, so I set the key aside. The piece needed some hand stitching along with the machine quilting to add what I thought would give it some depth. 

 

 

 



It still needed something else, but what?  I added just what an old key would need; keyholes.  Next, I added the keys.  Everyone needs THE RIGHT KEY to open something, don’t they?  There you have it. 

 

 

Aaaaaaand bringing up the rear (literally!)

Just like most of our other Tangled Textilers, I had a really tough time making this theme, "blue", work for me.  Well, truth be told, I did a lot of work on this challenge!

I will leave the gory details about this looooong, draaaawn out process of getting to my final piece to my own blog (but that post isn't written yet!).... suffice to say that there is a story!

After much deliberation, I was inspired by Neil Diamond's song...Forever in Blue Jeans.

And after much embellishment (a rather new technique for me), I was finished....

"Homage to a Clothing Staple or Yes, Neil, Forever in Blue Jeans"

There are some tags from jeans... both retired and still on bodies!

 

Stenciled, painted, embellished word and more tags...

   

The said rear pocket - which is actually at the center of the basic

 log cabin configuration of the quilt- 

that's not to say that the rear is always at the center!!!

   

Some buttons from the fly fronts and 

from the suddenly out-of-commission pair of my overalls (oh that was sad when it happened!)

 

And there is my attempt to honor Neil, himself...

And the straps from said sadly missed overalls.

Now I am totally exhausted. Off to rest up before the next challenge is posted!

I am finally ready to....

Cutting it close, as usual!

A long way up

Ah well, like Beverly, my idea didn't quite come together the way I wanted it to.  I was beating myself up about it and then I had a very serious talk to myself and said that as I am always spouting off about serendipity and mistakes being a good thing, I should be really happy.

Here is "Up in the milky way"  I think my problem with it is that it is so monochromatic - which as you know is not me, however there are lots of sparkles, more than are shown in the photo. I used  the technique of quilting densely first, then painting.  This gave me the background.  The milky way was originally stencilled in with a silver shiva stick, but I really did not like it as the contrast was too stark, so I scribbled all over it with a variegated blue and white thread  (scribbling being my mode of quilting in the background, too)
Finally, (I thought it was final)  I added iron on rhinestones for the stars.  I was actually very accurate about where I put the stars, using star maps and my own observations late at night to place the major stars, because this is actually what I see most nights when I look up.  The sky is full of stars because there are few lights out here in the bush at night to interfere with the view of the sky.
Anyway, I had bound it and was "finished" and decided that the contrast was still to high, so I began adding hand stitching, seed stitches and cross stitches. 
One thing I am learning about myself is that I actually like to hand stitch and doing the fiddly bits.  Once, I was a bit of a purist and did everything by machine, but hand and machine work both have different textures and work together well.
The contrast is still too high between the sky and the Milky way, but like Beverly, I might still add a bit more stitching, because as I was adding the stitches last night, I was liking the quilt more and more.

Look Up High!

"I made you a Kite so you would have to look up."  -Source unknown

Thank you Janet for a tough challenge. It took me a while to come up with something that I thought would be interesting and out of the ordinary to portray.  I Googled "look up" and as expected, I was presented with pictures of  people looking up into the sky, at the ceiling, into stadium stands, you name it, everyone was looking up.  I asked myself "what could everybody be looking at up there?"  Then I came across the quote above and had my "aha" moment.   I decided that I would try a technique that I had not used before. 

So this is my attempt at "look up".  I used fabric paint to create the background sky, stenciling with shiva paintstiks for the treetops, and dimensional raw edge applique for the kite tails.  I wanted to make the clouds fluffly looking and thought of needle felting, but didn't know how.  So I "looked up" a friend who had some knowledge about needle felting. She very graciously made a sample for me and I incorporated it for some of the clouds.  It is difficult to see these details in the picture., but you can check them out on my blog.

This challenge stretched my imagination. It gave me a chance to use materials and techniques I do not usually use.  Thank you Janet for atough but inspiring challenge theme!