Creative Flow vs. a Damn Mess

May 20,2018

            When does creative chaos cross the line? My sewing studio is not big. So, do I interrupt creative flow to put things away or do I let things pile up till there is no horizontal surface that is not covered with clutter. My “design wall” is about 5’x6’ and above a bed. Things that I might pin there but have no room for end up on any remotely horizontal surface. My other design surface is a drafting table. I have a large cutting matt on the table and do some cutting there. (I did, however, discover the wonders of the dining room table when framing work for a show. It now has 2 cutting matts, foam core, matt board, needle nose pliers and all kinds of non-dining stuff on it.) When my drafting table is no longer visible I finally have to stop and clean up.

            Someday my studio will not have a guest bed or a fish tank that holds one fish that has inexplicably lived more than 8 years. I dream of replacing the bed with a six foot table, raised up to make cutting easier. Or maybe the dining room will just become so buried under art paraphernalia that we will just start using the leaf for the kitchen table when there are dinner guests.

Printing Fabric

May 18, 2018

I put aside my quilt while I finished 2 other pieces where I was exploring some techniques and ideas that I may incorporate into this piece. I have been wondering what fabric to use for the trees and branches that will impose a second grid on the image. When I’m walking in the woods I like to focus on the details that are framed by the many branches. It is important that the fabric be tree-like, but also abstract. I tried using some Chinese painting techniques on my gelatin plate, but was not happy with the results.

While mulling a solution I went on a walk. There on my path was a large piece of bark from a fallen tree. I took it back to my studio (along with some other finds). At first, I tried pressing the bark into my gelatin plate. The resulting image was too dense. I decided the best way to create the fabric was more like a rubbing. I put the fabric directly onto the bark and rolled my brayer over the top. The raised areas caught the paint. Now to decide whether to go for the drama of black and white or to use the tan and black.