"All is Wright with the World"

I completed the fiber art piece I was making of my husband and his friend fishing. They were on the North Umpqua River in Oregon at a run called "Wright Creek". It shows two long time friends sharing time on a beautiful river. Hence the name, "All is Wright with the World". It measures 38" wide by 40" high.

"All is Wright with the World"

Techniques used include fabric painting, collage, and raw edge applique. Thanks for visiting my blog!

"No Hitter" - Progress Photos

  This is my most recent portrait piece and I'm calling it "No Hitter." It is based on a photo of my nephew Shane when he was in little league. Here is the photo that I have based it on:


This photo was taken by one of his parents.

I took the photo and traced a line drawing from it. I enlarged the line drawing and used that as my pattern.











My first step is to paint the exposed body parts. I use white cotton fabric for that. Here are some photos of the painting process:




It looks pretty ugly here, but it improves as you keep going.

Here is my palette:



After all the body parts are painted it is on to the clothing. I used a commercial fabric and enhanced it to give shadows and highlights. Here is a photo showing the shadows on the pants:
















I'll show more on this art quilt process in my next post. Thanks for visiting my blog!

My Inner Self Portrait - the ForegroundI

It's A Wonderful Life

I thought I’d show you how I did the jacket, hat and rest of the foreground pieces in this post. The jacket and hat were made from purchased batik fabrics. You can see the jacket fabric below in this photo of my auditioning fabrics. As you can see, its pretty dark, and I had to figure out how to give the jacket some dimension. Normally dimension comes primarily from shadowing. But in this case, I added dimension with highlights.

auditioning fabrics

For the highlights I took some white textile paint and mixed it with blue/green textile paints to create a light version of the jacket color. I thought it worked pretty well to give highlights and blend into the jacket fabric. In this photo you can see the jacket folds and pockets made primarily by painting highlights.

jacket highlights

The hat fabric was a lighter shade of blue/green, so creating shadows was easier. I just painted the shadows as I normally would.

painting the hat

The fish started with a speckled beige fabric that I purchased. I painted the reddish/yellow and maroon tones on the fish body and fins to give definition. Additional speckles were added to the body by flicking paint with a tooth brush.

painting the fish

tail

The shadow of the fish body and my arms on the water is made from organza. I used a couple different organza colors. Fray Block was applied to the edges to help prevent fraying. 

Fray Block

shadow placement

Each of these parts were cut out and painted separately and then assembled. Fabric glues and fusibles were used to temporarily hold them in place. Then I stitched them all down with machine appliqué.

Thanks for visiting my blog!

My Cup Ranneth All Over The Patio - finishing touches

The finishing touches for this piece include beading and binding. I wanted to use beads to depict the bird seed that is overflowing the cup, running all over the patio, and feeding the doves.

Here you see the top with beads laid out in their intended locations. It took a little bit of moving them around, but that is what I wanted. I put some marks on the top to remind my self of what I had in mind, because as soon as you pick the piece up to sew a bead down, they all roll off.

So the next step is the stitching and that's what I did.Here are some close ups showing the beads stitched down.

To finish the edge I used a satin stitch with thread the color of the dark areas on the doves. Here it is with the satin stitching on the edge.

And that's it for the posts for this piece! Thanks for visiting my blog!

Making "My Cup Ranneth All Over the Patio"

This is the first of several posts that I will use to describe how I made this fiber art piece for my Serendipity Exchange group. I have been trying to do a bird themed piece for each exchange for the last year, at least. I want to try to keep it going as long as I can think of ways to configure the theme to birds in some way. 

I have bird feeders hanging from my patio cover, and the finches and sparrows make a huge mess out there, with seed dropped all over the paving. The doves are the clean up crew and come in to collect the spilled seed. I love seeing my chubby, well fed doves and hearing their cooing sound when I wake up. So this art quilt is dedicated to them. 

Below you can see the photos I took of the doves on the patio. I made black and white copies of the photos and enlarged the birds to a few different sizes. I cut out the black and white birds and made some arrangements with them to determine my layout. 

Once I decided on the bird sizes I wanted, I traced the birds on tracing paper and cut the tracings out. This is the cup and saucer I used as my inspiration for the piece. I photographed it and cut out the cup from the black and white printed image.

After doing my tracings I worked on arranging the doves and cup in a 12" x 12" square, which is the size requirement for this Serendipity exchange. This is what I came up with:

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My next post will be about starting the painting on the background fabric.

Thanks for visiting my blog!

Kestrel for Julia

One friendship group I belong to has been working on an exchange of sorts for the last several months. Each person in the group provides fabric to the other members with some guidelines for making a block for that person. Recently I have been working on a block for Julia. She provided us with a floral fabric with a black background and a solid pale yellow fabric. She wanted us to make a 12-1/2 inch square for her, any design, adding two additional fabrics. Julia is a good friend of mine and we have shared stories about birds that nest in our yards for years. She has a pair of Kestrel hawks that nest near her yard every year. She has told me stories about the baby Kestrels flying into her garage and their other misadventures. I decided to make her block with a baby Kestrel as the main event.

Here is the finished block. I added some hexagons because that is another of Julia's favorites. Those were my first ever hexagons!!!

To paint the Kestrel I took a photo I had of a baby Kestrel and traced its outlines onto the yellow fabric. Then I put some "No Flow" over the area to be  painted to prevent bleeding of the paints in the fabric. Here is the drawing on yellow and a photo of the No Flow product I used.

I painted most of the bird with Tsukeniko Inks mixed with textile medium. The bird was floating in mid air so I decided to "ground it" by adding a tree stump. Here  is the bird about 2/3 done with the stump drawn in.

Here is a close up of the stump. Sorry the focus in the photo isn't better. My bad!!!

Here is a close up of the finished bird and stump. I took some liberties with the colors so the bird matched the floral fabric.  I used Inktense pencils to add the darkest values at the end.

I hope you like it and thanks for visiting my blog!

SAQA Benefit Auction Will Begin Soon!

The annual Studio Art Quilters Association (SAQA) fundraising auction runs from September 9th through 28th. It is a great opportunity to purchase fiber art pieces.  I have donated the art quilt shown below, "Nature's Energy Drink II" to this auction. I hope you will check it out and consider purchasing your own fiber art piece! To get auction details click on the link below.

SAQA Auction

Nature's Energy Drink II