A Bird, A Book, A Show

 I'm thinking about birds a lot. It's the season for that. On our recent trip, my husband took some bird photos that I love. This one - a Red-winged Blackbird - really grabbed me.

Then there's the annual Bird Art exhibit that is part of the Great Adirondack Birding Festival at the Paul Smith's College VIC the first weekend in June.

Mix those things up with Jean Wells' book - Journey to Inspired Art Quilting - that I have been exploring, and I have something to push me along with a new piece.

Stay tuned for how the bird fits in.









I also have to tell all my Adirondack buddies that we now have a greatly expanded selection of beautiful fabrics right here in Saranac Lake, at Beth Gallagher's Piece by Piece Studio. Go see for yourself!

Have You Seen an Art-O-Matic?

This girl is admiring the little piece of art she got from the refurbished old cigarette machine purchased a few years ago by two forward-thinking artists in our town - Todd Smith and Matt Burnett. in this photo, it was placed on the sidewalk for one of our summer art walks, and the crowd was literally lined up down the street to put in their $1 tokens to get a piece of art created by our local artists. Artists were asked to create little works of art of a size to fit into a little box the size of a pack of cigarettes. Great fun for all, and a nice PR machine for all of us in the Saranac Lake arts community. In some places it is called an "Art-O-Matic". We named ours the "Smokin' Art Machine". Very Cool.

This summer, Matt is going to set up the Art Machine at the Wild Center - the natural history museum of the Adirondacks. Another Very Cool part of the Adirondacks. The pluses of having the Art Machine there include having the machine indoors all summer with someone trained to maintain it (i.e. knowing when it needs a gentle nudge to get the tokens down the chute and when it needs a vigorous kick).

So, the reason for me to even bring this up is that Matt invited local artists to make more little pieces for the machine. I didn't have too much time, and I decided to try something I kept thinking about but have never done - making some fabric collage and cutting the collage into little pieces to fit into the Art Machine boxes as I was preparing for our long trip in April and early May. Here was my process:

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I fused fabric scraps to a canvas backing.

Then I stitched over the fabric pieces.

 Once stitched, I flipped the collage and marked the sizes I needed. Then I cut them apart with my rotary cutter. When I turned them over, I was delighted with the little rectangles. Each one was a little work of art! I packed them up for our trip, along with my embroidery supplies and decorated each piece as we covered the miles. Can I part with them now?!

Synergy Pieces 3 & 4

 

I've been traveling for the past two weeks. Loads of inspiration and images to work with. But as Ron drives (how nice is that?!) I've been stitching. Cathy and I continue with our small art pieces based on photos that we take turns sharing. This lovely fall photo from Cathy was tweeked a bit by me to increase the color saturation, which sent me right to the polka dot fabric in my stash. I fused the tree trunks on then couched some old rayon floss for the branches. More small colorful pieces of fabric were fused on for the colorful leaves. Fun!

The photo below is one of mine that I have been playing around with for awhile. I love those contrasting colors in that sweet Japanese mortar.

And this is what I am doing with it - embroidering those lines in the bowl.

Synergy Piece #2

 

Here is Cathy's photo for our weekly Synergy project. I was leaving for a couple of days, so I experimented in the car with a glue stick and the only piece of junk mail I had. 

 

Here is what I tried in my sketch book. It's a blurry photo - early spring roads! It was helpful 

to work with the design issues this way. Below this is the nearly-final piece, embellished with some embroidery. The butterfly needs a little work.

 

Interpreting a Photo in Fabric & Threads

Between a wonderful trip to Oaxaca, Mexico and the more mundane stuff of life, I have a head full of ideas and images and a calendar too full of To Dos.

But a friend and I started a weekly project together, as we try to generate ideas for our joint exhibit coming up at our gallery, NorthWind Fine Arts, in September. The idea is that each week one of us chooses a photo we have taken that we really love and share it on Wednesdays. Then she interprets the photo in watercolor and I do it in fabrics and fibers.

The photo here is one I took of the ARIPO gallery doorway in Oaxaca. The sight of that blooming jacaranda tree at the back of the gallery's courtyard  against that blue sky woke me right up one morning as I walked to my breakfast cafe.

I loosely interpreted the image with several fabrics and some hand embroidery, which I have been itching to do recently, incited by the fabulous blog "And Then We Set It in Fire..." The lavender jacaranda flowers are done in French knots - a favorite stitch.

Daily Practice Redux

I'm back to a Daily Practice (How do I let that slide? So important!!), using the exercises and gorgeous images from Jean Wells' book Journey to Inspired Art Quilting as my initial guide. The photo above of the orange peppers and knife with a Japanese dish was already in my journal. I drew some of my ideas on how I would turn the photo into a fiber piece, using Jean's exercise on Journaling to get me started.

Lots of other projects happening now as well, which I will include here in bits and pieces. Below is a fabric and digital photo collage I completed last week, now framed under glass and hanging in our gallery, NorthWind Fine Arts. The beginning of this piece - the torn-and-sewn pond lily photos on fabric - began as one of my Daily Practice experiments last March.

Putting It Together

 The four pieces of printed photo are now laid out on turquoisey blue cotton, layered over thin cotton batting and a heavy cotton backing, and I have stitched along the flow lines of the photo with grey, turquoise, and lavender thread.

I'm learning lots from this project about how my sewing machines moves - or not - over different thicknesses and textures.

Below is one of four grey linen borders. I layered the same cotton batting beneath. I sewed the first two borders on first, before quilting them by machine. Then I learned something else - do most of the quilting on the borders BEFORE adding them to the central panel!

Only a couple more steps to go!