07 September 2009

Gettin' messy

Today was a rare free day in the studio with nothing more pressing to work on than some 4" squares for a swap for my art group on Thursday evening.

First though, I played with printing on big sheets of white paper. Anyone who knows me knows how "all out" I go when wrapping presents. I love to use beautiful paper, make unique gift tags and add sumptious, funky or unusual ribbons. A special someone has a birthday coming up this week and I couldn't resist making my own wrapping paper this time. I used stamps that I had made and acrylic paint to print designs all over the paper. Delicious! Wouldn't this make a pretty fabric?



That done and drying, I started on the 4" squares. I can't show you how far I've gotten but I can say that I'm using some of the same layering techniques that I used on my bricolages, on fabric this time. Here's my assembly line all set up and ready for the first painting step.



I realized AFTER I had cut all of the fast2fuse squares and ironed on all the little pieces of fabric that I could have ironed a big piece of fabric to a big piece of fast2fuse, painted it and then cut it into 4" squares. Oy.

An intrepid group of about 35 art quilters and fiber artists meets each month and we discuss all sorts of topics of professional interest to artists, we have challenges and creativity prompts, we mount a group exhibit, and we learn from each other and laugh a lot. Over the summer 29 of us have been working on 4" squares to trade with each other. We agreed to keep our work secret until the due date and after everything's swapped on Thursday night we can all reveal the art on our blogs, Facebook and websites. I'm so looking forward to seeing what everyone else has made!

Based on a few of my fellow swappers' blogs (Melanie has help with hers, scroll down to the bottom here) and Facebook status updates (I'm looking at you, Natalya and Vivien, lol!), I'm not the only one working on these today...

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ah, nothing like a deadline to get those creative juices flowin! Wish I could be part of your group - sounds like fun!

Karen L R said...

You can do it, Jane! Looking forward to seeing you Thursday night. Who's driving?

Vivien Zepf said...

Oh oh, I'm reading -- not working on my squares! Off I go (since I'm guilty as charged and not done yet).

Natalya Khorover Aikens said...

Vivien interrupted my work on the squares to go read your blog. So you can blame her when I show up at the meeting with wet glue on my hands and squares... ahem...

my croft said...

I'm so glad I'm not the only one who cut the squares first and developed a production plan second (or, in my case, fourth). . .

but it's good to being doing something -- howsoever haltingly -- after such a long hiatus.

wv: suchawns
(as in "suchawns an idiot. . ."
me, not you; never you.)