November Design

Aha, now we have done some totally unrelated techniques, comes the hard part.  Using those bits and pieces to create a textile and mixed media piece.
Here are the bits and pieces we have.

I find that I can think and think, and draw sometimes, but that the design doesn't come together until I start fiddling.  That was the case here.

"inspiration exists, but it has to find you working"  Picasso

This is one of my favourite quotations and is very true here.

Whilst tidying up my workspace, I came across a picture I had seen of different coloured leaves, and that got me started.

So I started with my painted batting.

I cut out some leaf shapes from my hand dyed fabric.

I played with arranging the leaves.  I started with one row of five, but couldn't think of a way to add the folded fabrics, then I hit on two rows.  I have placed the leaves in gradations going in opposite directions.  It was the negative space - that is the diamonds this arrangement forms that made the design.

I added some of the paper beads.

and the folded elements, and I was pretty happy with the design after a few tweaks.
This design uses negative space, repetition, symmetry and colour to achieve its form.

Now on to the stitching - hand first?  or machine, we will see.

Hope you like my ideas for this month's design for my TAMMS project.  I'd love to see what sort of things you all come up with here.

Have fun creating!

Dyeing again

Since I am a little under the weather today, I am going to repost from a year old experiment, which seems to have lost it's photos, but which is relevant to my new project.

surface design - dyeing

I did a little dyeing, spurred on by  design matters videos.  Laura did some gorgeous dyeing and Linda used the fabric to make a small iris applique.
Serendipitously, the day before I watched the videos, I was tidying up and found a large pastel painting of an iris that I had been thinking about making into an art quilt.

 

As you can see, this painting is unfinished.  It also has a little kitty paw print at the top right if you look carefully, lol.  It was done a few years ago and was one of the last things I worked on at Painting.
It is nothing like Linda Kemshall's picture, being about 30 inches square and a different style, but hey I thought I would have a go.
The first piece of fabric I dyed was some cotton, about 2 metres. 
I used exactly the same method as I used here.  The only difference was that I scrunched it up extremely tight into a micowave safe pot.  I usually use glass, because I find plastic melts and wrecks the process and it allows me to check that the bottom fabric is dyed well (underneath).  I then poured the dyes on and made sure they went into the fabric folds by gently massaging.
Because I poured the dye onto the fabric, I could mix the dyes.  I just used a simple, yellow-red-blue sequence like Laura Kemshall did.

Obviously mine is quite different to Laura's for chemical reasons as I don't use the same dyes, but I did get some lovely mixing effects.  The shades are not quite right but the value changes are, so I will begin with these and tweak the shades as I go with some fabric paint and watercolour pencils.
As usual, I made too much red dye, so I also dyed up a batch of  cheesecloth/scrim

-with a little blue to make it interesting.
I also grabbed a pile of cotton scraps and did some greens to use in a landscape 

The green batch had a lot of variation in colour and texture.  This just a few of the scraps.  They were all different pieces of cotton, left over from lots of other things and each piece took the dye differently.  I was very pleased with this lot.  And my evening's dyeing was a great success.
Even hubby took an interest, using some of my left over dye to experiment with dyeing bits of wood.

As I said, this is an old post, whose pictures seem to have disappeared here.   I think I was using Flickr at that stage and off course, if you just have a basic account, as you add more pictures, once you get over 300, pictures disappear from the beginning.
You may see some old post cropping up as I edit them - I'm not sure whether they get reposted or not.

Happy creating!

The foundation of it all

I have decided, whilst I have been sick, to start a new project to help me stay organised.
I'm calling it my Textile and Mixed Media Sampler Project.  Or TAMMS for short.  Some people may remember that I started my blog to keep me on track with my art.  As usual, I started with good intentions, but got distracted along the way, as you do.
Each month I am going to post about different categories of Textile and Mixed media techniques.  I have broken the techniques up into categories and I will have one post on a technique in each category per month.  I will also link to previos posts on techniques that are relevant.

The categories are:
Foundations - the base I start work on
Fabrics and textiles - the stuff I use
Surface design - What I do to the surface of my media
Fabric manipulation - the way the media are changed to create dimension and texture
Embellishments - The little bits that decorate the work
Machine work - including free machine work and other sewing
Hand work - Embroidery and couching and such
Finishing - The way that the piece is displayed
Design - elements and principles that go into a piece of work

Each month I will use what I have made to create one or more collages and journal quilts.
At the same time, I am putting all this into an interactive database with pictures, reference and some videos, so that when I am finished, I will have a wonderful resource.

Anyone out there can contribute to the project, on my facebook group, Fibre art and free machine embroidery., which I originally set up to host tutorials, but haven't done so, yet.  The page is open for anyone, but I do not want any advertising or politics, please.

There are no rules as such, and no committment to producing anything (except for me of course), but your contributions and examples of your samples are welcome.

I planned to begin on the first of November, but what's a week anyway, so here is my first post on,

Foundations.

This month's foundation is painted batting.  Batting scraps are something we all have and paints of one kind or another are usually about or easily obtained.
I have also monoprinted on batting here.

Here is my piece of batting, about 9 inches square, rinsed in water and wrung out before starting.

For this sample I am using watered down acrylics in bingo marker/dabber bottles, but fabric paint (I would not use watercolour) could be used and a little sponge to dab the paint on would work fine.

I started with purple, dabbing it on the smoothed out batting.

Then I kept going with the other colours.  Although I overlapped the colours, I tended to keep each colour in a particular area as you can see.

Then I scrunched up the batting and rolled it around to blend the paint a little.

This is after rolling it around.  on the left is the scrim side (most batting has a very light non woven on one side which the fibre is needle felted into, this is called scrim) and on the right is the other side, which has blended nicely.  I even like the way there are white areas, where it was not totally wet in the initial dousing.

Here it is after drying.  I can be very impatient, so I ironed it between two piees of my fabric for dyeing, and it left nice little pale dots of colout all over the cloth.  Two for one!  You will notice, that I have opted for a more subtle colouring than what I began with.  This is why I used damp fabric, to allow the paint to spread and move and thereby become more what I would like a foundation to be.  This is the base layer, which may or may not be seen in a finished piece, so needs to be less vibrant.
There are probably as many ways to paint batting as there are bloggers out there, so make it your own and do it your way.
Sorry about my photos today, they seem a little more blurry than usual.  I will have to check the camera.

So that is my first post on FAMMS.  I must tell you I do not have any finished piece in mind at present, but one will occur to me over the next few weeks, I'm sure.  Have a go and post your batting picture in the group, or not, it's up to you, but-

BE happy creating whatever you do.