A silk screened image

Here is an easy way to use a silk screen. I printed a picture of a crow from my computer onto copy paper and cut out the image. I placed a piece of previously hand dyed fabric down, put the paper (cut out) image on top, laid the silk screen down on top of everything and screened the image with thickened dyes. I covered with plastic, rolled it up and batched. This image was done on plain white fabric. OK so I'm not a great documenter.

Later I used fabric paint in a plastic applicator to “attempt to” draw another crow next to the screened crow image after the fabric had been washed and dried. The lines came out too thickly for my taste so I stopped and used free motion to finish the “sketch”. I also free motioned details on to first screened image. I added some text and quilted.

 This could be used as a gift idea to make a "silhouette" of a pet or grandchild and stitch details and use text to personalize

Thread sketching

I have been sketching again since I started watching DMTV.  Just the other day I was think of turning one of my sketches into a thread sketch. Wasn't I surprised to find one of the talented women whose blogs I follow did just that. Sandra from the Netherlands did some interesting sketches of a boat using three different techniques. I did a thread sketch of a raven (so what's new) and then attempted to paint the sections like Linda Kemshall does. I don't think mine came out very well. I decided to try it again but this time leave just he thread. So here are my two attempts at thread sketching.

The first I traced off my pencil sketch with water soluble pen and washed. The second I traced in pencil but haven't yet removed the pencil. I think I will continue to explore this technique more.

The muse was dancing this week

After a month of being in a rut, not creatively, but kinetically, I have made three quilts. Two are quilted and bound and today I will quilt the last piece and pillowcase it. First I think I should say a few things about kinetics. Judith came over this Saturday and we just jumped in with both feet experimenting with new techniques. I had had all the supplies needed to do these techniques but it was being able to hold someones hand as we both jumped off the cliff that was needed to take a thought and then take the action to make it real. Thank you Judith.

I finally used that beautiful sky fabric to make and finish "Vernal Pond". I had dyed the fabrics I needed, cut three stamps for the grass and had all the ProFab paint anyone could want. I just couldn't jump. I think the work Judith and I did really helped push me off the precipice.

We had done some silk screening at Kathy's community center mid-winter and I didn't know where to go with the pieces I made. "Fly Away" is what came out.

I dyed some green fabric for a quilt about bees. It was NOT the color I wanted but I loved it. It was a yummy olive green color. I took part of it and over dyed it. Now it was darker olive green - even yummier but not the color I wanted. Well, I took the olives (both) and teamed them with some lovely purples, lavender and pinks for a representation of what I think of as Spring! I just stared to improvisationally piece these colors with a vague idea if where I was going. I just wanted to make some improv squares or should I say squarish.blocks of spring color. I will be quilting this today with both tight machine quilting and a looser hand stitch. Meanwhile you can enjoy the fabulous colors of spring...

Image that I silk screened onto fabric

Image on another fabric with words, hand stitching and a mother crow calling sketch then painted (outline) with free motion sketched details.

                                                              Vernal Pond

                                                                Vernal pond detail

                                               Improvisationally pieced  "Spring Nine Patch"

Obsessed by a book

As Judith pointed out in her comments about my book obsession, this is so not me. I don't usually like paper and I really don't care for collage. So what happened. I was bewitched by Linda Kemshall's "Friday Night Fix".
I'm sure this isn't the greatest altered book in existence but I sure got sucked into it and had a ball.

Here is my book with only 2 pages left to alter:

This is the cover. It, as are all parts of the book, painted with gesso. In addition is watercolor paint and a stamp I hand carver of a feather in gold paint. We'll see  this stamp again.

Inside front cover. Not terribly creative but it's black although not from a crow.

All of the pages are groups of 3, either hand stitched or machine zigzagged then gessoed. All pages were also colored with watercolors and many also had oil pastels either under the watercolors as a resist or on top of the watercolors as a design element. This page is a photocopy of my favorite crow picture. I adhered it with gel medium and cut a window on the facing page.

This is the next page with the window now framing the photo copy and with the turquoise and copper page showing through the piece of paper I cut the opposite image from. I used gel medium to attach and when dried an, over wash of color to coordinate.

Over the prepared page I gelled strips of fabric with crows and ravens embroidered on them. What can I say? I just adore crows and ravens.

This is another photocopy of a crow I saved from a car ad over 20 years ago.

This page was a "save". I had done a crow's head and I ended up not being happy with it so I carefully cut it off of the page with a razor - not so easy to do after using gel medium to adhere it down. I over painted both pages with black watercolors. On one page I had previously used grey pastel to make O's and on the opposite page X's. Then, after the save, I used gold paint with O's, X's crosses, solid circles and the journey symbol. It was a great "save".

These two pages are among my favs.

I had made a tree stamp from a sponge at Charlene's house: one of the FIVE. On the facing page I cut 3 windows and stitched around them with a deep metallic bead. In the right center is a strip of painted tyvek.

On the next page spread, I took those stitches with green beads. I love this treatment and repeated the tree stamp. What fun that was.

I know Linda and Laura love to draw and I spent one night doing three sketches of crows. This sketch I painted in with watercolors and added clouds with pieces of dryer sheet cut like mosaics. This page was tissue paper gelled down and partially over painted with green.

These pages were really fun. I took my hand carved stamp and covered it with wet tissue paper. I used a stiff-ish paint brush to force the tissue into the crannies of the stamp giving it a 3-D look. I over coated it with gel medium and when dry, black watercolors. Then before removing from the stamp when dry, I scuffed a copper paint stick over it to making the image really stand out. On the opposite page is the same stamp with gold paint. Directions for making hand carved stamps from photographs are in a tutorial on my blog.

These are two more of my hand carved stamps on a page with watercolor paint and melted crayons. Interesting effect.

This is another page I really enjoyed making. On the left is a sketch I did of a crow and I cut tiny bits of black tulle into triangles and adhered them over the sketch to "color" it. The branch is in bronze tulle. The opposite page is another piece of painted tyvek with gold, green and blue oil pastels.

This is a copy of a page I did for the "Sketchbook Project" now touring the US. The center 2 pages were painted with black watercolors, cut into wing shapes and stitched with "feathers". On the background pages are stamped CAW.

This spread has an old map of Rome with crows (another hand carved stamp) flying over the city. I went to art school for one semester in Rome in '66.

This page was prepped with acrylic paints. I think I bit too vivid. This is another sketch cut and gelled down and over painted when dry with watercolors.

The left page has strips of painted tissue, lamee' threads gelled down and covered with painted tyvek. The right page was a piece of copy paper with dimensional paints covered with tissues then watercolor painted. A top coat of gel medium was added and more lamee' threads to glitz it up.

 

This is a length of 4" wide silver metallic stripped ribbon stamped with my stamps and acrylic paint.

These are the images inside the back cover of the book. Again, the stamps are in black acrylic with some gold paint and a gold sun.

And finally the back cover.

I have two more books with pages stitched, gesso applied and watercolor tinted ready to go. I may need an intervention....

Distracted

This month I decided I wasn't even a little interested in doing Inks on our challenge blog, "And then we set it on fire" I promise this is the only month I will give myself a pass.
An explanation of what I've been up to is that I have been totally distracted by Linda Kemshall's "Friday Night Fix". In addition to all the other great shows on DMTV, Linda has added a feature on learning how to do little 5 minute creative bits whenever you can squeeze them in. I have become obsessed with my projects because they can involve any media I want to utilize.
We have been making an altered book. First, let me tell you I have no, and I mean zero, interest in PAPER. I know many people who love paper like one of FIVE, Marcella Christenson, but that is not me. Well, this project/distraction/obsession is much more akin to the Sketchbook Project I was involved in earlier this year which is currently touring the country. Every week, Linda gives "the next step" so I have been blindly following her down this road to altered book mania. We are now at the point where we are actually doing art work on a page. She talked about "framing" and creating "niche's" on a page or pages. This is the first page I've finished.

The crow on the left is a photocopy which I carefully cut from printer paper and adhered to a "prepared" page with gel medium.That page was prepared with gessoed pages that had been stitched together with zigzag stitching on a machine and colored with pastels, paint sticks and watercolor paint. On the next page (now opened and acting as a frame), I cut an opening to act as a frame. I then stitched the "window" with black embroidery thread. On the right page I used gel medium to attach a square from the paper I cut the crow from. THAT page was also stitched, gessoed and I used copper paint stick and turquoise watercolor paint which shows through the paper opening, creating a mirror image. I applied gel medium over the paper and some of the turquoise paint became re-wetted and bled (on purpose) onto the white copier paper - kind of unifying it and marrying it to the book page.
To make a long story short, I have four books going at the same time so I can do more than a one minute process at a time. Some of the gessoed pages have pastels or paint stick along (and acting as a resist) with the watercolor paints. On some, I just have watercolors and other I covered with tissue paper, scrim or used dryer sheets before painting on the watercolor paint to give them a base coloring.
I'm sure I will recover from this process and go back to actual fabric. I have been planning and doing some color work with my new quilt, "Where have all the flowers gone?" I'll show you the quilt soon. This book can't last forever....or can it?

The crow feather quilt is done and up

I have just finished the crow feather quilt I have been working on. I photographed it hanging on nails on the barn door.
I want to talk a bit about the techniques I used on each of the panels. Most of the techniques I used I learned from viewed Lyric Kinard's DVD "Surface design sampler platter"

This panel was started with a solvent transfer. The crow image in the center was first copied on a copier which used carbon based toner. .I darkened the image using a black fabric paint pen. transferred the image to a piece of plain muslin, untreated, using Citra-Solve. I then used Heat n Bond on the back of the image to fuse the image onto the black background. Then I scanned three crow feathers I had been keeping tucked in the sun visor of my car for a few years. I printed the image on a used dryer sheet that was ironed on to freezer paper. I stitched the dryer sheet on top of the crow image and used two crow stamps I hand carved (see last tutorial for directions). Then a stenciled on the spiral shape using a stencil I cut from an Avery Note tab. The paint was latex pearl white metallic ( their name for it) This process will be covered in my next tutorial being posted in a few weeks.

 

This panel was done using a solvent transfer like in the first panel. I then stamped crow images I hand carved using ordinary latex craft paint. I double hand-stitched around the image suggesting air currents which ravens glide on. The thread was a heavy turquoise metallic.

This photo was taken before the quilt was assembled but looks better than the outdoor shot. For this panel I used a light table to trace the images of two of the feathers onto untreated muslin. I used a permanent fine point Micron pen. Then I free motion stitched over the ink lines and did some free motion details inside the feather with turquoise tinsel thread from Coats and Clark called Glitz. It was a dream to sew with. I then used ink to stamp a commercial stamp with feathers on it in the lower right corner and ink stamped one of my crow stamps on the upper left. Probably won't do that again.

For the top boarder of the quilt, I laid out a strip of black fabric after attaching the three panels with 3" strips. I eye balled where the centers of the panels would fall on the top boarder and stamped my feather stamp using light silver metallic latex craft paint. I later hand beaded the shafts of the three feathers with a unique black bead that is black and coated with clear glass giving it that unique metallic look.

I stitched the panels and boarders together with batting (warm n natural) and black backing and hand beaded all the boarders. On the upright boarders I used glossy black bugle beads in the "Chicken Scratch" pattern. and the upper and lower boarders were done with random gloss black and the black crystal beads I used on the feathers.

 

This is the quilt hanging in very poor light in my foyer. I decided to use black fabric tabs to suspend the quilt from a tree branch. I think the crows and ravens would approve.