Madonna & child

Madonna & child
Originally uploaded by judy coates perez

Judy Coates Perez inspires me with her beautiful work. I'm working on a project and thought I would look over Judy's flicker images for inspiration. I found this Madonna and Child image which helped me stop whining to myself and attack an awkward portion of a project.

Exquisite Corpse Textiles: Finished pieces catchup

Exquisite Corpse Textiles: Finished pieces catchup

Please go over the Exquisite Corpse blog to see the completed corpse projects. It is so exciting to see how each player chose to interpret the originators theme/idea. It is amazing that this group of women willingly gave their time and talents to work on projects for one another.

My Square for Leslie's ECRR Round One

Leslie made it easy for each player to know what they could do. She specified that the center two squares should be a country house and that the remaining squares should be nature/country. She also simplified the process of choosing colors because she let us know that the batik background fabric should be our source of color inspiration. The colors were beautiful pastels of lavender, minty green and pale yellow. I was the fifth person to get Leslie's ECRR and when I saw Patti's work, I wondered if I should work on the upper right square instead of having my work next to something so well done. Then I remembered my purpose in joining the ECRR was to learn and grow my skills.





I have to admit when I saw the 1/2" of Patti's cottage square, I was impressed with her lovely work. I had been looking at cottages and photos of cottages for weeks before the project arrived. I had been looking at photos of English cottages with thatched roofs, so it was delightful to see a portion of thatched roof in Patti's square. Well, I set out to try to duplicate the roof that Patti did and that was not an easy task. I bought embroidery floss in colors that matched Patty's roof and worked with blending and long and short stitches, but couldn't get the look right. My stitches just didn't have the random coloration and mine looked to patterned. I finally went to a Needlework shop four towns away and had the shop owner look at the work. He sold me some new variegated hand dyed threads to use and told me yes it was short long stitch. I kept making samples and just couldn't get the same beautiful look. I had to settle for what I was capable of doing.



Patti also used a wonderful stone fabric for her house in pale gray shades. I tried to hand paint some similar fabric with no luck. Finally found a fabric with some shades of gray and colors in the roof that I used for the cottage. I created a stencil to the scale of Patti's stone fabric and lightly stenciled gray over my fabric. Then I did some machine stitching to try and give it more texture.



I added a door with a window over the top. I painted the door and window and added some stitching to give it more definition.



I could see some needle felted wool on the edge of Patti's square so I added more felted wool to blend with Patti's and used it to add a path to the door. My roof looked so crude next to Patti's that I knew I needed to cover it. More needle felted wool to cover the union of Patti's roof with my roof. Then I needed to hide the other side of my roof. I used tulle and water soluble stabilizer to machine embroider a tree. The stitching was so heavy on the roof that I had to paint quilt batting to add under the tree, so there was a more even ground to applique the tree down. I added beads to the tree to decorate it and to tack it down to the base fabric.



I used embroidery floss to add flowers at the foundation of the house and added beads to mimic flowers.


I added the stone fabric to make the chimney because it reminded me of a small bit of stone looking beads seen on Leslie's square.

My Square for Patti's ECRR

Patti's theme was hands and I made several trails for her project. I had ideas like a hand of cards and a hand of bananas and square filled with various definitions of hands. Then I simplified my idea and started working on the subject of human hands. I played around with arrangements of hands and even considered just making patterns with duplicates of hands placed in various directions to fill a square. I drew a hand and filled it with the phrase, Made by hand, in about 9 languages and printed it out on my ink jet printer. I did another hand with definitions of hand. I had just been given Photoshop Elements for a gift and did all the lettering in that program. I had the worst time trying to space the vertical lettering on the fingers. I will share the secret to adjusting the spacing/kerning of vertical lettering in Photoshop Elements. This answer makes me chuckle every time I think of it. You have to select Asian text options and the once in that menu you need to select Tsume and you get a precentage slider to adjust the spacing. Once you have done that you can adjust the vertical spacing. Now I know that makes perfect sense when you think about writing Asian characters, but is that intuitive in English or other western languages?

Then I started thinking about all we can do with our hands and played with images of hands creating things. That lead to the idea that our creativity is in our own hands and finally that the happiness we feel is in our own hands. Simplifying that idea lead to the idea that our joy is in our own hands.

Now, I had spent so much time playing around with all those ideas, that I ran up to the deadline and ended up finishing up my final square the night before I needed to mail to the next player. I had beaded a hand with the word joy off the background fabric. I simply appliqued the beaded hand on the background fabric. I did tear up some of the silk fusion Patti sent and attached it with beading and dark blue silk flowers, but I didn't like it and took it out. Having more negative space seemed like a better choice than having poorly designed elements. The only thing that tied my square in with the other squares were the colors that I used. I tried to use some of the same colors that were peeking out from the edges of the already worked squares.

Now you might be thinking I had a difficult time, but you would be wrong. I really enjoyed exploring all the ideas and trying the various approaches to the idea of hands. I used anatomy books and drew hands daily for about three weeks. I referenced doll making books and tried making just the hands. I learned so much that I am sure I will go back and explore the subject of hands again.

Joy is the gateway to Nirvana.

Buddha

My Square for Bev's Exquisite Corpse

Working on Bev's Exquisite Corpse was exciting because my square was the last square in her project. On the far right you will see the background fabric, a nice plain loosely woven neutral fabric. The clues on the square to the left of mine were Sara's painted background, a nice light muted purple color and some felted green fabric and a lovely leaf with a sheer background. All those were great inspiration for working into my portion. My first step was to paint the background a pale metallic purple, which looked rather flat.



The second step was to use a deeper purple, color cued from a gauze showing on the bottom of Annie's square, and use a leafy stencil to added over the metallic background.



Third step was to join into the lovely leaf from Sara's square. I cut out a blue leaf shape from my hand dyed silk organza scraps and embroidered it down with cotton embroidery floss. I tried to use stitches that looked as much like Sara's as possible.



The fourth step was using my felting machine to add some colors along the bottom edge that might create flow from the felted fabric along the bottom of Sara's square. I didn't have the colors that she used, so I used the Colorhue silk dyes to make some white roving match Sara and Annie's colors. I used single strands of cotton embroidery floss to add some small flower like shapes and beads. At this stage I had only worked on the right stage and bottom of the square.



The fifth step was stalled as I tried to make a decision about adding either a dragonfly, spider or another insect. I liked the idea of using a dragonfly, because I could use another transparent fabric like Sara's leaf. Then I made a decision that a spider and web, could be a nod to crazy quilting and putting a modern spin just might be fun. Keeping up the metallic tone of the square, I couched down silver threads for the base of the web and then machine and hand stitched the other parts. I knew Bev had two young children and thought a spider they could adjust somewhat might appeal to them. So instead of using thread, I used very thin wire and beads to make the spider.



The sixth step was going to the top of the square and trying to blend my square with Annie's square above. Most of what I saw was wool roving in a nice green and some purple and of course the purple gauze. I used a hand needle felting tool to work the wool roving over the gauze and added some green and purple beads. Looking back I think the roving was too neatly pushed in and needed to be loosened up.

The seventh step was going in and pulling out some parts and adding the silk flowers with beading. I didn't have flowers that matched, so I hand painted white flowers with fabric paints. I think adding more leaves like Sara's would have given more balance to the square. My square felt a bit lopsided color wise. My hope was that whatever was in Annie's square might add some balance, since I could see some green in the 1/2 inch poking out.

The happiest part of working on this project was that I finally had a square that flowed into the work of the other players. And I did take photos of this square.

My Square for Annie's Exquisite Corpse

I loved the theme for Annie's Exquisite Corpse and enjoyed all the conversations with friends and family on the subject of the Seven Deadly Sins. I played around with all kinds of ideas for the sin of greed. Greed seems to be the sin that leads to all other sins, because when we believe that we don't have enough or need more of everything the balance in life disappears. The next inspiration came from Annie's background fabric, a fabric with corn images on a black ground. I wanted to have that fabric as a main component in my square. Then I found the Ibsen quote and it fit so beautifully with the theme of greed and the background fabric.

I found an image of corn and positioned the image under the Ibsen quote and printed it out on silk organza. All I could see of Annie's square was the white handmade paper, so I tried to lighten up my piece and use paper in my square and have it relate to what I could see of Annie's. Still going with the them of greed, I thought it would be humorous to use a dollar bill as an element in the square. I tried all kinds of paper folding, to try and form a husk to go with the corn, but didn't find a good fold. (Oh, I should mention that I did not use real dollar bills, since that is illegal. I scanned a dollar bill and printed it on a light weight paper.) I made extra copies and sent them along to Bev, just in case she wanted them. I folded the "dollar bills" into prairie points, just because I thought it was a humorous nod to greed. (You get it...prairie points....money...Oh, well...The point being money doesn't make us happy. Yes, I guess that was a reach.) Next I took some eyelash yarn to create the corn tassel, just because I had bunches of the stuff in my studio and never used it until the Exquisite Corpse projects.

I didn't take photos of my squares for the Exquisite Corpse during the first round. So thanks to Annie and Sara for the photos you have seen displayed so far.

At another time, I will post some of my other squares created in the exploration of Annie's theme. Hint, I used turnips going along with the corn themed background fabric and the idea of harvesting what we need and not being greedy in what we share.

Painted Threads: Mixed Media Painted Fabric in Atlanta

The blue title on my blog comes from Judy Perez's blog, where she mentioned the online Color Theory class and showed some example student work from a workshop in Atlanta.

The photo above is titled Seaweed and is by Judy. I enjoyed Judy's image with the kelp seemingly floating and moving in the water. Yes, is is a simple image, but the movement and coloring draws me to this work. Judy is offering an online Color Theory class after labor day. The use of color in her quilts inspires me and learning from someone like Judy will be exciting.

Painted Threads: Mixed Media Painted Fabric in Atlanta

Paula's work on Sara's ECRR

Paula''s work
Originally uploaded by Guerilla Embroidery

My square for Sara's ECRR project was an exercise in using elements I had never used before. I took an ecru lace and dyed it orange. Then I added sequins and beads to embellish the lace. Sara had included some sequins in her package of goodies, but a friend had just given me sequins, so I hunted through and found some that worked with Sara's colors. I had never used sequins before. Next I added buttons, and experimented with different ways of adding beads to attach the buttons. The next section was all pin weaving and I had never tried it before, but I had been collecting fibers in Sara's colors for weeks before the project arrived and I wanted to include as many of them as possible in some way without it looking totally mad. I had no idea how long it would take to weave just six inches. I used crochet cotton for the warp and them fuzzy yarns, embroider floss, woolly yarn and even some yarn with little chunks of chiffon sticking out and oh, yes some metallic embroidery floss for the weft. The last step was adding some beads on top of the pin weaving.

The wait is over!

The tantalizing part of participating in the Exquisite Corpse is the waiting for the return of the project. My gratitude to each one of the corpse mistresses who worked on my project. I have been wondering what techniques and ideas each woman would use and those half inch clues revealed from the passage of other women's projects didn't give enough clues as to each woman's style or techniques.

The first square I uncovered was Bev's and what a surprise. She had no way of knowing that our beach is covered with rocks at low tide. I love the colors she used for her hand painted rocks and it was great the way she made them blend into my square with the light edging fabric.

My Square

I was going for something abstract with a few literal bits thrown in. The light frequently bounces off the water covered beach and makes objects appear to sparkle, so I used beads and metallic threads. My image was one small portion of a sketch done at the beach. I drew the image on silk organza and used it as a guide for my free hand machine embroider. My pencil sketch didn't have any color, the colors came from the many images of objects I have found on the beach during my walks. After finishing the machine work I went back with embroidery floss and added some hand embroidery and beading and just one shell.

Leslie's square

Loved the colors and free form of Leslie's square. When you look closely she has layered a sheer fabric over a portion of the square that looks like water washing over the surface. Leslie used some of the most calming and refreshing colors. I enjoyed seeing her use of turquoise on the diagonal from Sara's square on the opposite end.

Patti's square

Patti used shells and fibers that gave the feel of seaweed and foam and many shapes and colors seen on the beach. I liked the way she picked up the seaweed green colors from my square. I never tire of picking up shells and bits from the beach, so her square kept me looking for treasures.

Annie's square

Annie's square really does have the appearance of some elements washing up at the edge with foam and seaweed. I like her abstract less literal interpretation.

Sara and Bev's squares and Sara's square

Look at that vibrant turquoise Sara used.