A very quick post to document my progress on the index-card-a-day challenge.
The prompts for the week were storm, chandelier, bench or wood, yearbook, yellow, vitrina (display case) and guitar. I am intrigued by the way the guitar card came out. I simply played with individual shapes from an image of an electric guitar, this is a technique I’d like to explore more someday.
Another successful week for me in week two of the index-card-a-day challenge:
The prompts were: goggles, macaron, sapphire, palm, tapestry, balcony and thread. I’m not sure if “macaron” was supposed to be macaroon, the cookie, or macaroni, so that card became a combination of both, plus a new word I learned in the process. “Macaronic,” ironically, means, “involving or characterized by a mixture of languages…”It also has an obsolete meaning of “mixed or jumbled” according to the 1962 Webster’s Dictionary that I used in the collage.
Normally, I do not advocate the destruction of a book, even to use in a piece of art work. After all, isn’t writing a form of art? A book, even though existing in many copies is the art of the author. I consider the monetary and cultural value of the items that I repurpose. In the case of this dictionary, the value was about nil, especially since the text block was ripping away from the spine and had some water damage. In this case, better to rip it up for collage than throw it in the trash.
Check back on Friday this week, as on Thursday, I will be attending an art exhibit that I will review here.
Today’s post is a tough lesson in the reality of learning a new creative skill. A lot of what gets made is not very good. It is very difficult to admit that something (or in this case, three things) that I’ve spent a lot of time and materials on, is rubbish. But there are a few positive things to take from this week’s work. One, I finished three 8 X 10″ pieces. Two, I tried some techniques that have potential. Take a look:
I love the hand stitching that I did on these, and I am pleased with the effects created by the machine couching of the funky yarns.
What keeps tripping me up is the final assembly and quilting. These three pieces were pillowcase bound and then lightly quilted to secure the layers. I ended up with some lumpy areas and wavy edges. The last one was especially troublesome:
These are just not up to my creative vision, and certainly showing my lack of technical skill. Even though they are three strikes, I refuse to be called “out,” the only way I can get better with my quilting skills is to make more. The really bad thing is that the color combination is making me crave Neapolitan ice cream!
Where is 2019 going? It is April 2, and I am looking at my list of goals and looking for evidence of progress. I am not finding it. Sadly, I have missed all of my planned entry deadlines, but I still intend on finishing the collages that I started or planned… someday.
I have written about this before, but I will keep bringing it up, being creative is not easy. I struggle to balance creative time with everything else in my life, and the creative time itself does not always go well. Most of the fabric collages that I make go through an incredibly ugly stage that I have to fight through to keep working on them, and eventually, they usually work out in the end. When I reach that halfway point, it is a huge challenge for me to keep going, and I often have to put the piece aside for a while. This leads to missed goals and deadlines, but I am not letting it discourage me from learning more and trying to continue in my creative journey.
While I am grumbling about my lack of progress this year, I must address my plan to create an 8 x 10″ art quilt each week for the year. No, that project is not going as planned. I have managed to finish this little riot of texture:
I am going to revamp this project slightly. In hopes of helping myself with this goal, I am going to attempt to give myself more direction and go back to the projects that I have flagged in my collection of Quilting Arts magazine, and use those as a means to create the 8 x 10s and reach two goals at once – the regular production of small pieces and trying all those techniques that piqued my creative mind. I’m off to figure out the first project. I think I will start with the earliest issue.
I still have not made any progress on the pieces for fast approaching deadlines. The 3-D entry is not going to happen, at least not for its intended show. I’ll keep working on it and use it for some other show entry. I have not made a single stitch yet on the two Upcycle entries. I’ve simply allowed myself to be distracted by other ongoing projects, so at least I am getting back into a creative groove. One of the things that I have made progress on are some of my mini quilt collages:
The fabrics in these three “sketches” are scraps of my own hand dyes in the “Madri Gras” color blend. The one on the far left was stamped with antique wallpaper pattern stamps and acrylic paint, then embellished with funky yarns. The center one has strips of silk scraps to create a very skewed frame to the composition, then I seed stitched all over to secure the top two layers before pillowcase binding it. On the far right, trial with using embroidery stitches to create textural interest in the solid colored shapes. I still need do some final machine quilting in all of them.
I have no idea what I will work on this weekend, and I think that I am going to scale back to posting once a week until I get some issues worked out with the back end of this site.