A New City Scape

Building Ideas

I have been asked to teach an art quilting class at Flying Geese Fabrics in Tustin. The class will be taught in the fall, giving me time to make a sample to hang in the store and get class sign-ups. I brought in art quilts I have made and the owners of the store liked a city scape I had done previously of Seattle. I decided to make a new city scape using fabrics from the store, and based on "The OC". I thought this would have more appeal than Seattle for those of us that live here. Its also a good excuse to make a new piece.

I have lived in Orange County for many decades and have several favorite buildings and areas I love. I searched for images of these areas on the web, and pulled out photos of my own. This photo shows some of the buildings and cityscapes I used to give me ideas for my design.

My next step was to meld these ideas together into one drawing. I made building cut outs and reduced/enlarged them on copy paper. I cut these out and then started to arrange and re-arrange them until I got a design that pleased me. The drawing below shows my intended design. It is a little heavy on the right side, so I intend to add more to the left side to balance it. But, its a good start and has most of the elements I want. On to the next step - enlarging the drawing to full size. Thank goodness for Fed Ex Office.


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Design Drawing

Soul Food City - Serendipity Exchange

Soul Food City finished front

 

One of my favorite art quilt subjects are city-scapes, so I based my "feed the soul" themed piece on a location known for its soul food, New Orleans. I drew the city sky line, with some liberties taken, on a piece of purple fabric. The outlines of the buildings were machine stitched. I shaded the shadow side of the buildings with Inktense pencils.

 

The purple strip was placed on a mottled background fabric. I wanted to use colors that evoke the feeling of a city known for Mardi Gras.

 

I outlined some of the mottled shapes with thread painting to depict the puffy vaporous clouds that hang over the city.

 

Reflections of the buildings are shown in the water with thread painting as well. I liked the look of some of the raw edge threads hanging down so I left them there, using glue to help them stay in place. Some beads were also sewn along this thread line since this is a town known for beads at Mardi Gras. The edge was finished with couched yarn.

 

Some photos showing these details are below. I was shooting for a postcard kind of feel with the center section.

thread painting and threads hanging

You can see the beads above the threads in this photo.

clouds and yarn edging

Here is the puffy, vapor filled cloud shape, with echo quilting around it.

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SAQA Auction Piece - Natures Energy Drink II

Nature's Energy Drink II

 If this looks familiar it is because I made one a few months ago for my Serendipity exchange group. That was Nature's Energy Drink I.   I wanted to make something to donate to the SAQA auction, so I decided to make a second one and send it to them. This is the finished product and it was sent off to SAQA last week.












I started this by doing a painting on fabric using Tsukeniko Inks and Inktense pencils. The fabric was already variegated, so I made that the background. I drew the image with Frixion pens. If you haven't used these, you can draw on fabric with them, they don't bleed, and the ink goes away with the heat from an iron. Next I painted the image. I mixed the inks and pencils with aloe vera gel, which is my favorite fabric painting method.

painting before quilting

Once the painting was done I sandwiched it and did the machine quilting. You can see the details of the quilting here and in the top photo. After the quilting I added eyelash yarn, and did a satin stitch on two of the edges. The final step was beading on the flowers and around the beak of my hummingbird. I hope someone likes it well enough to purchase it at the auction!


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Beading Detail

Transects In Time

This art quilt was previously referred to as "Lithologic Landscape" and has now been renamed "Transects In Time". I am glad to report that it is finished and delivered to it's new owner. It will hang in the Regional Water Quality Control Board office in San Luis Obispo.

The Regional Water Quality Control Board is charged with protecting the waters of the State of California and this art quilt shows the breadth of their responsibility. It depicts common human activities, some of which have the potential to impact the subsurface soils or groundwater, or surface waters such as lakes.  Surface activities include commercial businesses (diners, dry cleaners, shoe store, sporting goods, bakery, gas station, etc.), recreational lake usage, oil storage, farming, and residential use. A cross-section of the subsurface is also shown. In this depiction, one of the oil storage tanks has a leak that has impacted the subsurface.  A groundwater well has been installed to monitor this leak. One commercial business, a dry cleaner, also has a release to the subsurface.

Different fabrics have been assigned to represent various soil types including sand, silty-sand, silt, clay and bedrock. The leaks are made with beading on the fabrics. The oil leak uses yellow-orange beads and the dry cleaner leak uses red-orange beads. The shape of the beading is intended to be similar to how the chemicals would travel through the subsurface.

oil spill leak and well



dry cleaner leak

A variety of fibers are used to represent different subsurface lithologic layers, including velvets, cottons and metallic/poly blends. Surface features are made primarily with cotton fabric, with tulle overlay in some areas. Embroidery and beading are used through-out to add details.  The landscape has been mounted on black quilted fabric. The overall size is approximately 28" x 48". It was a fun challenge and its very satisfying to have it done.



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A Budding Artist

This is artwork my niece Megan made for me. She loves making artwork and plans to be an artist when she grows up. I'm planning to start collecting her work now.

I love the incorporation of texting symbols in a 3-D fashion, as well as her use of vibrant colors. Keep your eye on this girl, she's got talent!

Mellow Yellow is Done!

Mellow Yellow

My delphinium piece is finished and here it is. I am calling it "Mellow Yellow". It is one of eight pieces in a traveling exhibit called "Delphinium Field" created by Artistic Expressions, an art group I am a member of. This exhibit will travel to all of the Mancuso quilt show and events this next year. I have a link to the Artistic Expressions blog on this page. If you click on it you can get the travel schedule for the exhibit and see the entire collection of delphinium themed fiber art pieces.

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Delphinium - Machine Quilting

background quilting

 I have sandwiched the Delphinium quilt and have been doing the machine quilting stitching on it. On the background I chose to stitch around the embroidered flowers that were on the background and then stitch curling shapes and leaves in the other background areas.











pitcher and foreground stitching

On the foreground fabric I stitched around the ribbon appliques that were on the fabric. The pots were stitched to emphasize some of the 3 dimensional appearance or just to add something interesting to look at when you got close up to the piece.




flower centers stitched down


In the flower areas I stitched in just the flower centers with a thread that matched the color of the centers. I wanted to allow the petal area to puff out a bit so I did no stitching on the petals.

In this photo you can see the large flower area has stitching in the centers, but I have not stitched the flowers in the lower right yet. I think it makes a big difference in the appearance.




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