Tag: 4×4″ squares

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The Index Cards Keep Coming…

I am rolling along with the Index Card a Day challenge.  The prompts for week four were anchor, terrarium, emerald, cappuccino, bougainvillea, souvenir and wind chimes.

I don’t think that the writing that I did on the wind chimes card will show up in the picture.  It reads, “Why should the birds, the crickets and the cicadas be the only ones in nature’s orchestra? The wind wants to join in the symphony.”

Somehow, we have arrived at the turnover of another month, and it is once again time for me to share my 4×4” squares for June.  Partway through May, I started limiting myself to one color for a week.  I continued this single color exploration in June.

Working in a single color made me really pay attention to using different color values – light and dark tints, tones and shades.  Using a range of color values adds more visual interest, just like using textures, or varying shape sizes, lengths and widths of design elements.  I am moving on from my own little color challenge, I don’t know yet if I will work in a theme for July’s 4×4 squares.  I do know that I need to get stitching.  Surf on over here next week for something on the music that rings in my head and my art.

 

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Getting out of 2017 and into 2020

Yes!  I finished the 2017 ICAD challenge, and I am so far keeping up with the 2020 challenge.  Here is what I churned out in the past few weeks to close out 2017:

Week 7 prompts: lyrics, denim or blue, night sky, love, layers, intersection, charm bracelet.

Week 8: sun or moon, swim, adjective, mirror, greetings from…, sepia, ghost or zombie.

Week 9: spring, summer, autumn, winter, sunset.

On Tuesdays through the next two months, I will post my progress on the ICAD challenge.  My goals for this year are to try combining art media and truly explore mixed media more and to make an art quilt inspired by one of my index cards.  Of course, the quilt will happen after the challenge ends.  For my mixed media goal this week, I have combined stamping, collage and lettering; ink drawing and watercolor pencil; fabric, stitching and paint; iron-on thread and paint; collage and watercolor pencil.  The prompts for week one were hopscotch, marigold, album, sequins, 1980s, dreamcatcher and highway.  It is not too late to pick up the challenge, why not give it a try?

Finally, I’m still rolling along with my 4×4” squares.  Here are the ones from May:

Onward to something else on Thursday, see you then!

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April Squares Bring… More Squares in May?

OK, just ignore my poor attempt at a pun in the title!  Another short and sweet today, here are the 4×4 squares that I have stitched this past month:

Out of each group, which square do you like the best?  Which one do you like the least?

How do you feel about the color combinations?  I definitely notice that certain colors attract me on a certain day, but on another day, I wonder what I was thinking.

Do you like the stitch selections that I chose for the pieces?  What stitches would you have used?

If you love hand stitching like I do, I hope that you will try a few squares.  Even if you haven’t done a lot of hand stitching, give it a try!  These squares do not take long to complete, and who knows, you just might discover a new passion.

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Stitching to Music

I will get to the trial piece that I talked about last post – later this week, I promise.  Today, I want to share a couple of  4″ squares that I made while listening to opera.  The Metropolitan Opera is streaming a different opera performance daily during this coronavirus shut down.

The square on the left was made while listening on the radio to the Saturday afternoon broadcast of Puccini’s  Tosca.  The square on the right was created while I watched Dvorak’s Rusalka last night.  My process was to first listen and/or watch for about 15-20 minutes.  Then, I started picking out my fabrics from my scrap stash.  I kept on listening while arranging and rearranging the fabric bits that I selected.  After I had the pieces placed, I listened for another bit of time while deciding how to stitch the square, then commenced the stitching.  Of course, last night I stopped work frequently to watch the action on my computer screen, and made mental notes from some of the stunning costumes.  I finished the squares by the final curtain, but I was certainly not trimming or stitching during the entire opera performance.  Even when I am not trying to multi-task, I spend a fair amount of time on my art quilts in a thinking mode before I take action on them.

Now, I would never expect anyone to correctly guess the piece of music that was playing while I made one of my collages, but I enjoy linking the music that inspired me to the visual art as a part of its story.  It would be fun to get a few other artists together to create their own individual responses to the same piece of music.  Check back on Thursday for my progress on last week’s experiment.

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Scraps, Squares, Stitches

I am addicted to these little stitched squares!  This most recent bunch has turned out very well, I like all of them.  I am still amazed at how scraps can be transformed into little treasures.

In this set of four, I played with making stitch flowers by filling in petal shapes with combinations of stitches, and then tried out a monochrome color palette:

More trials with monochrome, and then I jumped back into multicolor mayhem:

These little squares are a great way to audition color combinations. Think of them as preliminary sketches for larger pieces.  I absolutely love the layers of textures that I combined in the square on the lower left here:

I wonder if the square I make for a given day reflects my mood at the time.  I’ll have to pay more attention to that.