Tag: mixed media

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Another Daily Challenge

No, this doesn’t directly involve art quilting or any stitching, but it is all about my ongoing attempts at art journaling.  I am, for the third year, trying to complete the 60 day Index Card a Day (ICAD) challenge.  Check out the link, the artist that puts on the challenge has a great website full of ideas and tips for mixed media art journaling.  While I struggle to journal on a regular basis, I do believe it is a great way for artists and those who want to be creative to work on skills, habits and ideas.

Getting back to the ICAD event, the challenge creator posts lists of themes or prompts for each day of the challenge.  Sometimes, the daily prompt just doesn’t do anything for me.  That’s when I tend to go astray in keep up with the challenge.  When the prompt is something like “meerkat” or “cassette tape,” my mind wanders to things I much rather do, stitching, making a cake, taking a walk.  The first year I attempted the ICAD challenge, it did not go well.  I completed only 11 cards, and half of those were done six months after the challenge ended.

Last year, I fared better; thirty-three cards completed.  These are not intended to be great works of art, and I try to keep the time put into them to 15 minutes per card.  Of course, some take a bit longer, and I still want to fill in the gaps of the cards I didn’t attempt.

Today, I am six days into the challenge, and I have six cards:

Will I keep up the early momentum?  Now that I’ve blogged about it, I hope that I will.  The challenge started last Saturday, so I will post my weekly progress on Tuesdays.

 

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Wisteria, Deconstructed

Behold, the destruction by smashing of a lovely wisteria flower spray, all of the sake of art.  Here is the flower cluster before its demise, I auditioned the placement of it among the impressions of pink dogwoods.

Next, I plucked each floret from the main stem and placed them on my fabric to re-create the arc of the flower cluster as it had danced in the spring breeze on its parent vine.

Finally, the flower, post-pounding.  It created a watercolor paint look, I just hope the blue and purple tones don’t turn brown as it dries.

Next week, will I have an 8 X 10″ piece finished?  Check back to find out if I stuck to that goal, or distracted myself with something else!

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Flower Power

Sadly, I still have not have any success in completing an 8 X 10″ quilt in a week.  I am so easily distracted, and I almost always have to set a piece aside for a while while I think about what I need to do with it.  The whole point of a mini quilt a week is to train myself to think and work faster.  Ironically, that training will take more time!

Meanwhile, I might be inching closer to some quick small pieces to finish.  Now that spring flowers are popping open in great abundance, I have been playing with flower pounding.  Using fabric treated with soda ash and alum, I am literally hammering flowers and leaves onto the fabric, releasing the pigments into the fibers for an interesting variant on dyeing.

A new appreciation of spring

Here are the pink magnolias that resulted in the lovely four-petal flowers in the above image:

This is the thistle-like flower that made the print in the lower right of the first image:

Not all flowers made good candidates for this technique.  As you can see from my little test piece of fabric (lower right), some of my favorite flowers, lilacs and violets were terrible.  The fern leaf was promising, I will try that again.  This is the best of two worlds that mean so much to me, my gardens and creating art.  Of course, some of my art prior to trying flower pounding has been inspired by my garden and wild flora, but this truly combines the two.

There is a book dedicated to the technique, Flower Pounding by Ann Frischkorn and Amy Sandrin (C&T Publishing, 2000).  I have one very big problem with the book – the authors failed to include a crucial discussion of the ethics of plant collection.  Make sure that you are not picking rare or endangered plants, for every one flower you pick, leave at least 10 untouched, do not collect from state or national parks, and make sure you have permission for other properties.

Check back tomorrow for a progress report on my flowers.

 

 

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Still Playing with Crayons

I should start an occasional feature here with the theme, “how did this happen?”

This is a detail of a larger piece in progress that has an interesting story.  Well, nearly everything I make has an interesting story, that is why I create.  Anyway, the base of this piece almost ended up in the trash.  For a while, I was buying a fair amount of box lots at a local junk auction, of which I was interested in only some of the contents.  One such box lot contained a vintage printed tablecloth that had seen better days.  There must have been other table linens in the box that were in better shape.  This one had so many holes in it, there was no way I could re-purpose it into a garment or overdye it.  This ratty tablecloth begged me to give it another chance, and so I have.  One day last summer, I took it up to the cemetery at the top of my hill, along with a bunch of crayons, and started making rubbings of the carvings on the gravestones.  I didn’t stop until most of the cloth was covered in rubbings.

My next step is to start quilting this bit of crayon craziness.  I am going to start with thread sketches of buildings that once stood in the little community that surrounded the cemetery.  Check back next week to see if I actually started any of the quilting on this or the Upcycle quilt.