Quilting is big! Whether it is for a practical purpose or a part of the explosion in art quilts, women and men all over the world are into quilting. They are throwing out the rules and letting their imaginations go wild. Pretty much anything goes in the world of quilting today from raw edge applique to paint to far too many options for embellishment to list. And, its a lot of fun!
Just in case you are not yet aware of how big quilting really is, watch this video-the number is huge!
September is here it's time to get back in the studio. I had a wonderful summer with my husband and kids spending three weeks travelling in Europe. We saw ALOT, I think we put somewhere between 5000 and 6000 km on the rental van! Months of careful planning and now it's only a memory and of course lots of photos. I hope to use some of these for inspiration over the next year.
September allows for a fresh start and this has meant a clean up of my studio space to remove a lot of unnecessary junk that was just cluttering up the place. Creativity needs room to breathe! Now I have one table for pastel work and one table for textile work. No more fighting!
These are two pieces I am working on at the moment, one in pastel and the other in fabric.
I lay down the fabrics and then sewed them onto the backing in a random sort of "doodling" manner. I am going to continue my "doodling" and see where it leads.
This pastel piece is done on Wallis sanded paper. It started out as a garden scene, but I was unhappy with it so I decided to try washing the pastel off in the sink, toning the paper with an acrylic wash and starting over. Wallis paper will not only accept up to 25 layers of pastel, but you can wash it off and paint over it with a variety of wet media. This was a good time to try it as I had nothing to lose! The pastel does wash off but some staining of the paper remains which is why I decided to tone the paper with an acrylic wash.
Unhappy with my garden scene I decided to just let my imagination run free and this abstract image was the result. I think it has an altered landscape appearance. Of course, while I was in the experimental mood I decided to also try a new technique for fixing pastel paintings by steaming them. Steam fixing is method I found in The Pastel Journal, Issue No.53 December2007, used by an artist named Dennis Rhoades. He uses a steam iron with distilled water, holds the iron about 2 inches above the painting and moves it back and forth until the painting is very wet. Then he lets it dry. I still have a bit of flaking of the pastels but it is an interesting method and it does not seem to darken the colours the way fixatives do.
Apparently Degas used a variety of techniques- underpainting, various fixatives and steaming methods, he applied liqiufied and powdered pastels and applied pastels with a brush- to create his paintings. There are many more new tricks to try out this year!
And that's all for now. Happy painting!
What I'm Reading |
| Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee I just finished this book after having purchased it in June as a holiday read. Dense, but very readable, it provides wonderful insight into the life of this famous American author of “Age of Innocence” and her many other novels about American society in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. Growing up in Old New York society, followed by extensive travels through France, Italy, Germany, and Britain, fluent in French and then living for many years in France as an expatriate during and after WW1 provided her with a wealth of inspiration for her novels. A very prolific writer, she also wrote many short stories that were serialized in magazines. She was a great friend of Henry James and many other writers of the time as well as an avid gardener creating lavish landscape designs at her different homes in New England and France. She challenged conservative social norms by writing about social issues like divorce, adultery and sex. If you are at all interested in the ‘writer behind the book’, you will find this a fascinating read! |
