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.

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.

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.

Have you checked out Spoonflower, a site where you can upload your own fabric designs and have them digitally printed onto fabric?

I made this small quilt using one of my beta tester swatches of Spoonflower’s first printed fabrics on Kona cotton.  Spoonflower has subsequently switched their print stock to Moda cotton (Bleach White from the Bella Series) which has a softer hand and a smoother surface, and have plans to support other fabrics as well.  I know I’m interested in printing on both home/dec. weight fabrics, maybe a cotton linen blend, and onto silk.  I’m sure many other crafters/artists are too. 

I’m very pleased with the quality of the Spoonflower fabric for quilting.  Using standard quilting techniques I torture tested the Kona printed swatches to the best of my ability.  I washed and ironed them.  I put them in the sunshine for actual cats to lie upon.  I sewed them with denim needles and free-motion quilted them heavily with cotton and rayon threads.  Short of burning the stuff, I worked it over pretty well. Basically this fabric performed just like Kona.

Here’s a picture of the back of a quilt…so you can see I REALLY quilted the stuff.  No problems.

Channeling my inner Harriet Hargrave,  I even took specific notes on my experiments:

• Machine wash – wool cycle with synthrapol
• Machine dry – low/gentle heat to damp dry
• Ironed – hottest Cotton/Linen setting
• Original samples: 20cm x 20.3cm
• Washed samples: 19.1cm x 20.1 cm
• Shrinkage: 4.5% width (weftwise), 1% length (warpwise)
• Hand:  Before washing the hand was waxy, the fabric smooth with a spacious threadcount.  After washing the hand softened, it wrinkled a bit, the weave structure tightened and there was minimal fraying.

Most impressive is the color.  The colors on my swatches are very saturated.  Nice saturated colors on 100% cotton fabric that is reasonably lightfast and washfast, has a soft, non-waxy hand and can been ironed, sewn and quilted with good results.  I have been studying digitally printed textiles for over a decade and I have seen many failed experiments in the color department.  The ink-jet printing process inherently makes it difficult to get good color without sacrificing some other desired characteristic for quilt fabrics.

I’d say the Spoonflower fabrics are a winner.  Much nicer color results than I have been able to obtain shoving fabric sheets through my desktop inkjet printer to date, and the resulting fabric is wash and light fast.  Since I’m more of a Pimatex than a Kona person in general, I’m excited about the switch to Moda cotton, which I suspect will perform even better for my quilting needs.