Redefined

Portable Picnic

I recently posted about a collaborative project for an upcoming dinner-themed exhibit at an Oklahoma City gallery. Today, I delivered my portion to one of my collaborators (don't we sound like we're up to something?).

The ceramics were made by Barbara Broadwell from Edmond, OK and the pewter pieces by Margareta Grill from Tulsa, OK. The theme of our project is Portable Picnic. Now it's possible for you to have a picnic anywhere, even indoors, including a beautiful view of a pond!

I finished my contributions to the project in less than two weeks, including the groundcloth with the pond scene, one green tablecloth and one beige tablecloth (layered), two green cushions and two napkins. Some parts of the pond scene and several other pieces were sewn about 8 years ago for a project that was never finished, so I was glad to find a home for them after all this time. The tablecloths, cushions and napkins have various amounts of fabric stamping and hand dyeing on them. I had to make them special so, if anyone bought them, they'd actually feel like they were buying things that were one of a kind. Which they are.

Tomorrow, I'm going back to working on Laced. I never thought I'd be happy to see it again because it's been a difficult piece to design and build, but I'm ready to tackle it with renewed enthusiasm. Can't you just hear the flow of creativity being pumped around from one project to another? Glug, glug.

 

Post Rock Country, Kansas

In previous posts, I admitted to having a sordid, yet colorful past as a traditional quilter. Life seems to go in cycles and for some reason, that past has been coming back to haunt me recently. Not only did I just complete a project that harkens back to my "picture quilt" days, but I'm also teaching with and exhibiting some of older quilts. Perhaps I needed to see where I've been in order to appreciate where I'm going.

This is a quilt called Post Rock Country, Kansas, finished in 2000 after about a year's worth of work. Unfortunately, this was back before I had a professional photographer, so the picture isn't very good. However, it is large and quite three dimensional. The spiral at the top is actually a separate quilt, which you can see it in the detail picture. I have to admit that I changed some things about this quilt two years later, after this picture was taken. Most notably, I added a farm out in the field, changed and improved the tall grasses at the bottom and added quilte a bit of shading, especially to the fence posts and field.

The barbed wire started as six different weights of white cotton yarn. I painted the yarn black, then tied knots in it, changing to smaller yarn as the fence went off into the distance.The eagle was threadpainted (entirely stitched by machine) and it was such a large image that it took me eight days to finish. The larger butterflies and other details were created the same way.

I entered this quilt into two large shows that year (Paducah and Houston) and it wasn't accepted into either one. After that, I thought this quilt would stay on my living room wall for the rest of its life, but twas not to be.

First, this artwork was juried into Encrustations, a 2002 North Carolina exhibit for embellished quilts and that show was chosen to be a special exhibit at the Houston show later that year. Ha! Take that, you shortsighted Houston jurors from 2000, it was shown there anyway! I am dancing on your heads.

In 2005, this quilt was juried into an annual exhibit in Ohio. The theme was "Rural Roots and Mysteries" and it won Best of Show. I wasn't creating this kind of artwork anymore, but I was still very pleased that this work was getting recognition. The eagle had landed.

Ready for the big news? Several days ago, the exhibitions chair for Kansas Art Quilters  received a request from the Kansas governor's office asking for ten quilts to display on their walls. Post Rock Country, Kansas is one of the quilts that was chosen for that honor. It will be on display there from December 5th through the end of April, 2008. The funny thing is that I always felt this quilt should be displayed in the governor's office and it's almost surreal to know that it will truly be there. Key the Twilight Zone music, please.

A slight detour into another project

I haven't posted in a while because I was suddenly faced with completing a project in a short time. It's for a collaborative exhibit at Untitled [ArtSpace], an excellent gallery in Oklahoma City. The exhibit, Dinner in the Deuce, will start in January, but I've known about this project since last Spring. Due to situations within our group, I couldn't proceed on my part of the project until very recently. Unfortunately, the deadline for the finished pictures is December 1st, so I was given about two weeks to do my part. Whoop whoop whoop, man the battle stations! Throw all my other projects aside!

I am working with two other artists, one a ceramicist and one who works with metal, primarily pewter. Together, we are creating a picnic dinner by the pond. They are producing the tableware, like the dishes and the teapot, and I am creating all the fabric-related items. My idea was to seat the two diners on a groundcover that looked like a grassy area with a water scene on one side. This is how the groundcover (about 50" x 100") looked as of Wednesday night. Since then, I've added additional detail and right now, I'm stitching the fabrics onto the base. Tomorrow, I'll trim and bind the edges of the groundcover. This weekend, I'll make a separate tablecloth and two cushions.

Now I remember why I don't do picture quilts anymore.
Now I remember why I don't do big quilts anymore.
Now I remember where I hid those two large cabinets full of commercially printed fabric. I plan to hide them again when I'm done.

Laced - Part 5

I have been working pretty hard on this project since I last posted about it, but there wasn't much to see for a while because I was constructing another quilt to function as the background and support for the front. I'm going to show you a few pictures so you can see how it's progressing.

This first picture was taken a while ago, after I finished the upper part of the shoe. I pinned it to my design wall and laced it up so I could see how it looked. I chose this lacing pattern because it made the colors of the lace more visible and pleasing.

The second picture shows the current state of the project. The upper and inside sections are now basted together, but the tongue and grommeted area will eventually float free. This is now so large and heavy that I did not pin it to my design wall, but placed it on the floor so you could see the whole thing. I had to take the picture while standing on top of my work table with the camera almost to the ceiling. Notice the faint white chalk line on the right side of the upper, which marks the line where I will trim back the side. Rather than trying to make the shoe shape asymmetrical, the curves will be the same on both sides. You can still see a chalk line on the left which was my attempt at a more realistic shaping, but I couldn't make it look right, so I'm chickening out and making them the same. Hey, it's my project.

The third picture is a detail shot. The light part of the background quilt is made of a foam-backed upholstery fabric which looks squishy (don't you love that word?) like the inside of a real sneaker. The two pieces to the side, which are supposed to look like the inside wall of the shoe, are made of the same canvas as the rest, but overpainted with a wash of white acrylic paint to lighten them up. You can see all the basting stitches, which were necessary to prevent the various pieces from wiggling out of place while I worked on it. Keeping everything straight was a real pain in the neck, requiring a carpenter's level and a extra-long measuring tape.

The next step will be to trim the sides of the upper, after which I'll add a white crinkly fabric that will go around the bottom, tapering part way up the sides of the upper, simulating the rubber edge. I purposely left a lot of extra background fabric to provide a base for this white fabric, as it is not as sturdy as the canvas.

The only thing that consoles me in this project is that real sneakers are probably just as hard to make as this one has been. Those workers in China really earn their money. Next time you see them, please tell them that they have earned my respect.

Strange studio things

I use a lot of different materials in my artwork. The problem with this is that I collect a lot of odd items which I'm just sure I'm going to use someday.

Walnut shells - Several years ago, I saved the shells from some walnuts we were eating. Notice that I even wrapped red rubber bands around them to keep matching halves together. I have yet to figure out a use for these, but I have faith that someday I will.

Foam pool noodles - These are my favorite things to play with (except for fabric). I like to have a handy supply available and use them frequently in my artwork. Mostly, I use pool noodles inside of my sculptural pieces because they are easy to carve, lightweight (which helps with shipping costs) and inert, so they will not chemically break down after a period of time. Some of the finished works where I've used these noodles are Knitted, Forest Floor (the mushrooms), Tethered and Transformed. I also used to keep foam pipe wrap, of the type used to insulate water pipes, but my husband came down to my studio one day and asked if I had any. I replied, "What size and what color?". That's when I knew I had gone off the deep end.

Plastic mesh - I have such a large box of plastic mesh that I didn't even photograph them. They come from vegetable and fruit bags, but the biggest are from gigantic 50 lb. bags of peanuts that we buy for feeding the birds. I used some of these in an older work of mine called Premature Robot.

Cardboard corner protectors from picture frames - OK, I threw these out recently, but I kept dozens and dozens of them for a very loooooong time. They would have made awesome plates on the back of a stegosaurus (if I had some inclination to make one). There were so many that, if I had done this, my studio would have resembled an overcrowded Jurassic Park.

Metal springs - Why? Then again, why not?

Giant snail shells - They were originally purchased at a gourmet food store and intended for escargot. I sold the extras a year ago at an artists garage sale, but they lived in my studio for several years, mocking me. I still have the can of snails around here somewhere because no one wants them, despite the $18 cost. Believe it or not, I really did use them in my artwork Forest Floor. As I was using a Dremel tool to drill holes in the edges of the shells so I could sew them down, my son came into the room and asked what I was doing. I told him I was quilting. To his credit, he just shook his head and left the room without making any comments about his crazy mother.

Tape reels from old computers - My husband brought one home from work because they were being thrown out. I convinced him to go back and dig another one out of the garbage because I can really see a very long, skinny quilt rolled up on them some day. I'd say that this was a throwback to my days at IBM, but the computers I supported didn't use tapes.

Corks - I've been saving these for years and someday I'll figure out why. By now, you should be getting the feeling that some of my artwork would probably float on water. And it would.

Chinese restaurant calendars - These cool 2006 calendars were giveaways from our favorite takeout place. They are made of plastic and roll up like sushi rollers. They would make an interesting texture when I was stamping something, but not for use in the main body of a quilt. The takeout place might get orders from some unusual locations if I did.

A very sketchy sketchbook

My sketchbook is mostly filled with columns of interesting words that inspire an image in my mind, generally written during late night drug and alcohol binges. (OK, I'm kidding about that last part, but it makes for a more colorful story in case someone ever writes a biography of my life.) Sometimes I also do rough sketches to record my mental images and end up making artwork based on these. I thought you'd like to see a couple of these sketches and the finished product.

Now you can see why I don't draw for a living. Don't ask me to be an accountant, either. Instead of a starving artist, I'd be a starving accountant, which doesn't sound nearly as exotic or interesting.

Extruded

Prepackaged