Instant Gratification-Discharge Dye with SoftScrub

By leslie | June 26, 2010

Discharge3

I needed some instant gratification of the fabric kind today. So before sitting down at the sewing machine, I took a big scrap of Kona Black Fabric from my current quilt project out to the picnic table in the back yard. I put on some rubber gloves. I put down a piece of plastic to protect the table.Then I went to town with a bottle of SoftScrub and a foam brush.

Discharge2

Yummy orange and reddish brown color in minutes.  (More reddish than these photos show.) When finished, I plunged the fabric into a bucket of vinegar water to neutralize the bleach. A quick bucket wash and ironed dry.

Discharge1

I think it took longer to photograph the fabric than to create it.

Posted in Artist's life, Pretty things, Surface Design | 1 Comment

Intentionally Imperfect and Unresolved

By leslie | September 21, 2009
Conversational Composition Stage Six

Conversational Composition Stage Six

You can read about my design contributions to Terry Jarrard-Dimond’s Compositional Conversation project over here on Terry’s blog today.  The photo above is the “final composition” I mailed off to Fulvia Luciano last Tuesday. Rather than pile-on some additional fabric figures, I ended up really thinking about the formal elements of the composition, and how I might use the existing elements to create support and structure for the eight artists to come.  I found it very difficult not to “resolve” the design, and thus made imperfection and lack of resolution one of my goals.  Not as easy as it sounds.  I hope at least I contributed some structure to the ground.  We’ll see if any of this remains eight weeks down the road.

My experience as an artist participant in the Compositional Conversation project has proven to be much richer than I had expected at the onset of the project.  The hands-on design part was fun of course.  But reading Terry’s blog with the artists’ excellent descriptions of their design processes, conversing with artists and readers via the comments, and having e-mail access to this talented group have given me so much to think about. Great food to bring into the studio and feed my art life.

Posted in Artist's life, Designers you should know, Quilts | Leave a comment

Quilt Galleries Added

By leslie | September 21, 2009

I’ve finally added some gallery pages to this blog.  They can be accessed via the tab above, or from the pages menu over on the left.

Thank goodness for Wordpress and Wordpress plug-ins.  I was able to put together a couple of small quilt galleries and post them on a new page without much fuss.  The most time consuming portion of the exercise was locating all the photos, and preparing a formatted for the web copy of each in Photoshop.  There is even a cute widget for the right column that displays three random pics every time the page is refreshed.  Fun.

Currently I am designing a portfolio website for an artist friend, and I spent the weekend playing with the various web photo gallery tools out there right now.  Lots of great stuff, but none of it seems to work with Adobe Dreamweaver very well.  It’s especially distressing to own all the latestCS4 tools and learn from the Adobe forums that Bridge generated photo galleries can not be “easily” incorporated into Dreamweaver pages.  Nor, according to the forums, is the “Create Web Photo Album” feature of Dreamweaver recommended by the Adobe Dreamweaver engineering team since apparently it has been many years since this feature has seen any “love”.  Importing any of the cool Fireworks Galleries also appears to be a non-starter. So I’m on to third-party tools or coding up something myself.  Flash is a non-starter for this particular website. Web design should not be so hard in 2009.

Posted in Girl geek, I ain't no PhotoShop expert | Leave a comment

Not to scale

By leslie | September 18, 2009

Bernina-and-zucchini

We recently added a new cat to our household as a companion to our favorite tabby.  This full grown little girl is tiny, under six pounds.  She is seen here on a dozy afternoon with a freshly harvested GIANT garden zucchini.  (Photo taken by my spouse). The two cats seem to be getting along well, playing together with increasing frequency, and recently spotted sleeping on opposite sides of a king sized bed.  No doubt they sleep with one eye open.

My husband has a collection of names he collects for our cats.  Some of them have tracked my artistic journey and love of all things fiber.  Contenders include “Thrum” and “Heddle” from my days as a weaver.  But this little girl was christened with a reference to a more current obsession, “Bernina”.  Meet Bernina, here shown exploring my studio.

Berninastudio

Posted in Artist's life, Err-other | 1 Comment

Compositional Conversation

By leslie | September 10, 2009

CC-Sneak-Peak

A nicely packaged bundle arrived in the mail for me yesterday containing something special. This week it is my turn in the fantastic group art project, Compositional Conversation.  Compositional Conversation is the brain-child of Terry Jarrard-Dimond, an award winning artist who creates moving and muscular textile constructions in her South Carolina studio. Terry blogs about her life as an artist here.

I met Terry a few years back in Ohio at Nancy Crow’s Art Barn.  Terry was downstairs doing a master class/independent study thing with Kathy Loomis under Nancy Crow’s brilliant and exacting eye.  Meanwhile I was upstairs with 19 other students trying to get my head wrapped around the notion of line, and shape and gesture in Nancy’s week long Curves and Circles class. Having the two master quilters working in the Barn was amazing.  And I think it had the effect of raising everybody’s game that week.  Some wonderful work was created in an extremely special environment.  I have stayed in touch with Terry and several of the other artists I met that week, and gleefully celebrate from afar their many artistic accomplishments since our first introduction. Several of these artists are taking part of Compositional Conversation.

The participating artists are: Rebecca Howdeshell, Beth Carney, Shelley Baird, Gayle Vickery Pritchard , Judi Hurwitt, Leslie Bixel, Fulvia Luciano, Marcia DeCamp, Marina Kamenskaya, Paula Swett, Valerie Goodwin, Kathy Loomis, Leslie Riley, and Terry Jarrard-Dimond.

Terry set some ground rules for the project, and started it off by choosing a background and adding an element to the composition.  The composition then goes to spend a week with each artist who will shape the composition in some way. Each week Terry documents the conversation between the artists, and posts photos of the current state of the work, thoughts and process notes from that week’s artist, along with a mini artist’s profile. We are on week 5 now, and I have too say it has been not only fun, but incredibly eye-opening to get a view into the design approaches of these working artists.  Read all about Compositional Conversation on its very own blog. The project will continue into November of this year.

Posted in Artist's life, Designers you should know, Pretty things, Quilts | Leave a comment

Girl of my dreams

By leslie | September 4, 2009

My new Bernina 820 Sewing Computer

Meet Bette.  Bette Bernina.  Otherwise known as my brand new Bernina 820 sewing machine computer.  I don’t usually name inanimate objects.  But this one seems to have a Bette Davis, take no prisoners sort of way about her.  Plus I watch a lot of old movies on TCM while sewing.

Did I mention I’m in love?   And that my dear spouse is off the hook for birthday and anniversary presents for quite some time? I met her at the California State Fair in Sacramento.  It was love at first sight. That long, lovely 12″ arm, that industrial hook, the super sized bobbin, the dual feed…..  How could I resist?

We are still getting to know each other, Bette and I.  But now that I have the threading/tension issues in check thanks to this helpful post, things are going very well.  It’s a fast machine, and I like that.  I’ve been doing a little piecing and experimenting with decorative stitches that I am unlikely to ever use again. Thought I would start slow. Next chance I get I plan to layer up one of the many finished quilt tops that I have hanging around the studio, and put some pedal to the metal.  Vroom.

Posted in Artist's life, Girl geek, Quilts | Leave a comment

Fire on the Mountain

By leslie | August 19, 2009

Fire on the Mountain

The Wanderer. Success through smallness.
Perseverance brings good fortune
To the wanderer.

A week ago, we were lying outside trying to get our fill of a spectacular meteor shower, when our neighbor, Bill, phoned to say someone had reported seeing a fire on our mountain.  We ran around with flashlights in our fists and our noses in the air searching for a sign of smoke.  Eventually a handful of neighbors spontaneously gathered at the end of our long driveway, all noses pointed west.  Every once in a while there was a whiff of smoke. Nothing much, just a touch of autumn in the air.

We ventured up the hill to stand on yet another neighbor’s new wood deck and look out towards the ocean, to Bonny Doon, where a wildfire was shooting orange flames so high into the sky that you could almost feel the heat from 20 some miles away.  It was quite an image.

The fire on our mountain was a false alarm, but the fire on theirs was quite real.  That fire, known to the media as “The Lockheed Fire”, is still buring, one week later.  Though today was the first without the smell of smoke in the air, and tonight we can sleep with the windows wide open to the nightime forest sounds. Life returns to normal at our mountain top home.

“Fire on the Mountain”.  The phrase kept surfacing in moments of private thought. Then I remembered it the hexegram from “The I Ching: Book of changes”.  A book I explored decades ago when searching for some signposts to the path before me.

“Fire on the Mountain.  The Wanderer.  Success through smallness.  Perseverence brings success.”

I have a glimpse of the wisdom of this now.

It is the artists life.

A bit of inspiration, fire in the belly.  A bit of imagination, the mind wanders from idea to idea, color, content, form, function, concept.  The jumping off place. Then the work.  One step at a time. Line by line. Cut by cut. Stitch by stitch. The smallness of it.  The tedium.  The being present. The letting go.  Every moment leading to something.  Through perseverance.  Success.

Fire on the mountain.  A reminder to be grateful for what I have.  Fire on the Mountain.  A reminder that the journey of life is long, and that its course is completed with many, many small steps.

Posted in Artist's life | Leave a comment

Making Fabric

By leslie | February 14, 2009

Very busy of late. A period of upheaval and transition.  But I know this throwing things up in the air bit often provides fodder for sustained periods of creativity later on.  

In stolen moments I have been playing with scraps of hand-dyed fabrics.  Some of my own cottons mixed up with bits of silk leftovers from Connie Tiegel.  This blue fabric has a water feeling.

This green construction suggests a mossy forest or bog.

 (The fabric marked with x’s is another Connie Tiegel scrap.)

These fabrics are destined to be cut up and used in larger constructions, a series of landscape quilts I have had in mind for sometime.   I’m very curious to see how the velvets and gauzy silks hold up to my construction techniques for curved lines and shapes.  If they don’t fall apart too much, it could open the door to adding another textural dimension to my work.

Posted in Fabric design | Leave a comment

The Golden State

By leslie | January 26, 2009

Last weekend looked like this.

One of those glorious indian summer days that always seem to be ordered up by the chamber of commerce for California in January.   I snuck off to the beach and caught this golden sunset over the Monterey Bay.  

Life in the real world is impeding my progress in the virtual one.  We are in the midst of moving, and boxes line the hallways, and are stacked high in the utility room.  Yesterday I packed up my “studio library”, which includes hundreds of art and textile related books.  I have several interesting ones on fabric design and textile printing.  One that caught my eye is “Design Your Own Repeat Patterns: a quick and easy approach” by V. Ann Waterman.  I must have bought it years ago for a class, as the price is marked $3.95.  Much easier to do on the computer these days, but good to know how to build a repeat pattern with paper and pencil as well.  Makes me itch to get creating.  But I resisted the tempting butterfly stickers, leaves and flowers of the pattern workbook, as I must resist most things textile related until we are settled into our new home.  For now I’m happy to have a bit more space in the studio and the dreams of more art time when moving is done.

Posted in Err-other, Fabric design | 1 Comment

Lions, tigers, & color management…oh my!

By leslie | January 12, 2009

This week’s winning Spoonflower fabric is by Rachel of MammaMade fame.

 

© MamaMade. used by permission

© Mamma Made Designs. Photo used by permission.

 

Rachel has been posting extremely detailed tutorials on designing fabric using vector art created in free software tools like Inkscape, a new SVG authoring program (shameless plug for SVG, a web technology I worked on years ago).  In fact, she details her complete design process for making the Lion Fabric pictured here.

Many of the principles she discusses like choosing a color palette, considerations about your design before you begin drawing, rotating images to make tiles, etc. are useful regardless of the software design tools you like to use.  

Personally, I’m not so big on trying to calibrate your monitor, or attempting to get a color managed workflow when printing on textiles.  Without ICC profiles, you are kind of stuck.  Even with ICC profiles on common printers, it’s complicated.  Rachel’s experiments sort of prove my point. Though she does end up with the makings of a great color swatch book.  

I’m more inclined to stick with using colors specified in the Spoonflower color palettes for Photoshop, and swatching my designs before printing yardage.  I’ve had very good results so far.

Posted in Common sense color, Fabric design, I ain't no PhotoShop expert | Leave a comment