Some of the indigo pieces from our Creative Ladies Luncheon Salon last Friday.
I like the radiating spokes on this one.
Folded. A beautiful gradation.
Moons...some clear nights, some cloudy...a lot to think about.
There are more. Some might even appear in current work. Some might even appear on Etsy. We'll see...still thinking about it.
This is my indigo dye bucket bubbling away ready for dyeing cloth. The bubbles on the top are called the plume and it carried the extra indigo dye that has not yet been released into the water. You remove most of the plume everytime you do a batch of cloth and add it back to the bucket when you are done.
Here we are ready to go. Holly, Louise, Karen, Mimi & Nan.
We wrapped wet fabric around pvc pipe or crunched it into balls or folded and clamped it. Here's Karen dipping some cotton wrapping around a 2" pipe. The water underneath the plume is green and the fabric will look green when you first take it out of the water but it will turn blue when exposed to oxygen in the air.
Here's a closer look.
This fat-quarter of white PFD was wet and scrunched into a ball and dunked in the vat. You can see where the top is just starting to turn blue as it hits the air.
You can see the cloth in the basket by Holly's feet. It included cotton PFD (prepared for dye), old white table clothes ready for a blue adventure, and pieces of wedding dresses that were left over from a quilt that Karen Eckmeier did for a Breast Cancer Awareness raffle. We didn't dye it all but we had quite a few pieced when we broke for lunch.
We left them in the sun to dry and do their blue magic while we had a bite.
Onion and spinach quiche, tabouli, red pepper humus, salad, mushroom brie, fruit salad, roasted garlic baguette and a delicious holiday bread from Bantam bread. YUM!
When lunch was over it was time to unwrap! Nan, Mimi and Karen got to it!
Fabulous!!
Here are some of them drying on the lawn.
Blue hands and happy faces. We had a grand time. We are holding a piece of cloth that will be a scarf for Nan as she heads off to Argentina in a few weeks. The fabric is soft and silky - even prettier in person!
My haiku for the day:
Ancient Indigo.
Modern women
Dipping cloth into history.
Indigo is among the oldest natural dyes (extracted from plants) to be used for textiles and India is believed to be the oldest center of indigo dyeing in the Old World. Blue dye is mentioned on a cuneiform tablet from Mesopotamia in the 7th century BC. Although associated with "blue" jeans, for me indigo is always tied (pardon the pun) to the Japanese art of Shabori. Shabori cloth is crunched, folded, tied (as in tie-dye) to form patterns on the cloth. Read more about indigo here: Indigo and more about Shibori here.
Karen wrote the book on layered curves, Holly (I made the story telling stool for her) made them go in both directions and framed them with more curves, and I'm going to teach the class at Common Threads. The center is made from a fat quarter of Ricky Tims fabric and I used a second fat quarter for the backing and rolled it around to the front for a self binding. I'm thinking everything from wall hanging to tea mat. There will be more...
This definitely comes under the "how cool is this category?!" Any artist (or wanna be artist) can join the sketchbook project. Just go to their home page and sign up by Oct 31st and have them send you a sketchbook. You have to choose a theme. There are some fun choices. It's just a jumping off point for your art. I chose SECRET CODES. ohooo!
Then fill your sketchbook and send it back by January 15th and in March they go on tour. The thousands of sketchbooks will be exhibited at galleries and museums as they make their way across the country. They will be visiting sites in Brooklyn, San Francisco, Austin TX, Portland ME, Atlanta GA, & Chicago IL.
After the tour, all sketchbooks will enter into the permanent collection of The Brooklyn Art Library, where they will be bar-coded and available for the public to view. You can have your sketchbook scanned and be able to view it digitally. If you go to their site there is a CNN video about the project.
So I'm going to keep you posted with my SECRET CODES sketchbook. It will keep me inspired and hopefully on target... and now all I have to do is come up with some codes to go with my secrets!
I'm doing an on line class with Jude Hill of Spirit Cloth. It's about story telling with cloth and I have learned two things about myself already. The first one is that even though I might have lot of ideas, I don't really know what I'm going to do until I start - "show up at the canvas" I call it when I am going to paint. And that even though I am afraid of things not turning out well, they will never turn out at all if I'm not willing to take that risk.
That being said, here's a bit of last nights work. I've been reading Anne Morrow Lindberg's Gifts from the Sea. The sea, tides, the circle of life, our relationship with ourselves and each other...
We'll see where it goes. There is a story in there someplace.
This is the center block from a crazy quilt pillow class I'm going to teach at my favorite quilt shop Common Threads. It's a great idea for any one who would like to do a bit of hand work this winter in front of the fire but doesn't want to attack a larger project. It has a nice variety of stitches and you could easily combine several blocks for a wall hanging. I enjoyed doing it so much, that I can feel another one coming!
I love hand work, I did a repair two years ago on a quilt from the 1880's. It belonged to the artist, Cleve Gray and his wife, Francine du Plessix Gray, and it had been in his family since it was made. It took over a year to do the repair and it was delightful to work on it. The quilt it self was stunning!
Here is the finished quilt over Francine's sofa:
Here's a picture of the quilt taken before I started. You can see that some of the blocks were totally shredded. There had been some previous repairs and a few of the blocks were in good shape. I replaced the fabrics with with silks and satins of comparable type and matched the original colors where I could by peeking in the seams or any place that might have been covered so we could see the originals. I wish now, that I had taken more and detailed pictures of each block.
I'm so glad I got the oportunity to work on this quilt!
My wonderful circle of friends. We do fiberart and friendship just about better than anyone! Soup and salad, creativity and inspiration, tragedy and triumph, stories and secrets, time and again I am thankful that you lovely ladies are in my life! I feel truly blessed!
I don't know how I would have gotten through this year without you!
My hand painted fabric...
I have all this lovely fabric that I painted and it's time to play with it. So I made this mini-quilt. It needs some borders but it's a start. I want to try it with black, too. Maybe on point. For this one, I think I will quilt the circles on the white fabric and maybe into the color part. It only took a few hours and it was the first time I've played in a long time.
It makes me smile. What makes you smile?
Another in our wonderful round robin book from our Artist Dozen.
I love the cover and the potential in the word "if"
Mary's page, I love the photo...
Kim Bohem's page, with a lovely drawing and her own poem!
Kim Dubay's page with a Child's Garden of Verse, wonderful!
Terry Fryer's page, with a picture from Squam!!
These are the grand pages of from Heather, the pockets and poems are marvelous!
And my own page... always a bit of fabric and paint and my own favorite "if" question.
What would you do if you knew you could not fail?
I read art blogs on the internet almost everyday. They are wonderful and inspiring and intimidating. So many people pumping out great amounts of creative endeavors with apparent ease while I sit here and procrastinate for yet another hour.
Jude Hill from Spirit Cloth posts new work almost every day and quilts on the train commuting to work. Her work is personal, delightful and fearless.
Elizabeth from Be...Dream...Play is also prolific - it's a treat to see her art journal pages sing out - her photography is grand!
Thousands of artist pumping out art everyday and posting it for all the world to see. How do they do it??
I spend time thinking I don't have enough time to do art, then I walk around thinking that I don't have the right supplies, that my idea isn't good enough or has been done before, I make tea, read some blogs and put in some laundry and before you know it, hours have passed and I am still shying away from doing the "work." It's the useless inner chatter that stops me dead in my tracks. The mini-quilt above has an Eckhart Tolle quote on it that says "All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness."
No-mind. Don't think. Step up to the canvas. Let go of the end result and begin. Play, enjoy the process. Just do it!
**Some good news! If you have read the post before this one about Smudge and have been picturing him running - keep up the good work! We have had some leg stretching and tale wagging - good signs! Run, Smudge, Run!
