September and November, 2008 Meetings

A quick catch-up! We had a good meeting in September; Fall was in the air and Barb D. taught us how to do Right Angle Weave, a beading technique. It's very cool and produces a beaded fabric that is very fluid and drapy. We didn't get a lot done as it's time consuming but a wonderful way to embellish! As you can see in the photo at right, Margot was riveted by Barb's demo!


November was fun too - in spite of the snow. We played with a image transfer technique that we learned at Fabrications in October. You simply draw on a piece of Pellon Tear-Away with water soluable oil pastels or crayons and them squeegy some gel medium through the Tear-Away to transfer it like a silk screen.

You can get about 3 or 4 prints from one drawing before it becomes too light/faded. The gel medium leaves it stiff and a bit plastic feeling but it's wonderful for collage work. The photo at left is a print by Link K. this will make a great background for some creative collage building.

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Barb D has an MFA and teaches art at a middle school. I tell you this so you know she is not timid about using her art materials. All my prints were too pastel and too "empty". I need to pay attention to how Barb just dives in and "goes for it". The following two photos are of her "screens" and her prints.
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Show & Tell was fun too!
Linda K had another one of her bags. She has a new one every month and has earned the title "Bag lady". Here is her Tiger Purse.







More later.... Deb H

Back in the Day

Do ya'll remember this? Let me know if any captions need to be edited.

Summer!

Summer is about over; the air has lost it's hot, humid feel and has gained a bit of crispness to it. The leaves will start to change any minute now. This may herald the end of summer and the quick jump into cold and snowy, but life should also be a bit less hectic: more time for art!

July we played with design Elements. These are basically, a small design, created with fused fabric to be used on a larger piece. The technique was learned from Melody Johnson and seriously condensed version of the concept was experimented with in our group.


The one above is mine. Below is Linda J's.




Linda K (above) got a little carried away ;o) And Margot (below) has a good start.


The idea is to work quickly and spontaneously with fabric that has Wonder-Under® fused to the back so you can just tack it all together with an iron. When happy with the final design and placement fuse it all down thoroughly (on a piece of empty WU backing paper, peel off when cool). The element can then be used in a larger design or on a shirt, bag, or journal. I did several of these in a class with Melody at QSDS in 2007 and found them to be quite addictive!

August was hot and humid but the library was well air conditioned and we had fun making fabric beads. Linda K shared her technique and we borrowed ideas from Sherrill Kahn's book "Creative Embellishments". This is great book of ideas for all kinds of embellishing in all kinds of medium. Some of the techniques are quite unique and some of the materials are down right bizarre. The book is fabulous for the adventurous :o)


Alas, I forgot my camera (again!) so, here are pictures of my beads after I got home. Actually, three of the beads were made by my DD, Ashland. She joins us when she can. I have decided this idea has a lot of potential and I had a blast doing them.


My favorite is the chartreuse - of course! :)


Show & Tell!
Barb loves vegetable prints! She is making a contemporary version of Log Cabin (ish) for curtains for the dinning area of her house. This will be a bright and cheery place to enjoy eating :)


I showed off my hand dyed and hand spun wool yarn.


Margot made a quilt for a family member who loves turquoise.


The back is as pretty as the front and the batting is actually a wool bat from Margot's own sheep.


Sandy did a wonderful amall art quilt with raw edges, superb!


And she also did a few beaded buttons. I drooled.


Our next meeting is at the school on Septmeber 17th. Barb D will show us how to do a beading technique called Single Needle Right Angle Weave. If you want to join us, e-mail me for a supply list.

Deb H

A Time Warp

I think there is a time warp that effects this Blog. It seems like I just posted and when I check, it's been months. I need Hermione's Time Turner ;o)

February was a fun dye day but, no one had a camera - oops! Here is some of what I did, I took photos later at home; my laundry room with rinsed yarns and one piece of silk noil, drying.


Some warp I dyed the same night, being wound.


A close-up of my favorite yarn for the night; a Ball of Tofutsie sock yarn that I dyed in my usual palette of teal, green, and purple. Yum!


Barb D did a skein of orange marbled sock yarn that was delicious, I wish I'd gotten a picture!

March was a lesson in color theory. Barb did a great job of explaining the basic principles of color theory, Kay learned a lot!


And then we played with water colors to practice the concepts.


April was a lesson in Abstracting an Image by me. I hope that my audience found the subject as worthwhile as I do. It has so much design potential and don't you just love computers for this?? Here is a couple of examples of quick-and-dirty abstracts via filters in Adobe PhotoShop; the original photo I took of a plant with cool purple leaves.


Same photo with a "notepaper" filter applied by the program.


Same photo with a "palette knife" filter applied and then a "liquefy" distortion on top of that.


Cool, huh? And such great potential as an art tool.

May was playing with monoprinting. Now, that was fun! I was so busy that I only took a few photos but, here is Linda J's two pieces. She did multiple layers of printing on hers.


Here is Margot L pulling a print.


Here are a few of my efforts, a budding Picasso, aye?


And here is Kay S, she is our super achiever. Dang, girl!


The June meeting will find us at the library as school is out for the summer (or will be by then). The program is undetermined as of yet, but it will be fun :o)

Deb H

A Bit Of Catch-Up

Yes, I've been a bit lax in posting... can I blame it on the huge amount of snow we've had so far this year (in Michigan)? Maybe not, but it does effect my satellite link-up so that's not as far fetched as it sounds. In reality, I've just been busy and distracted.


December's meeting was fattening - too many goodies! But we also had fibery stuff to do. In the Nov/Dec 2007 issue (#15) of Cloth, Paper, Scissors, page 32; there were some really cool things that I can only call Spirit Wards. Inspired by a native tradition in Africa, these hanging fabric collages were very fun to make. I must remember my camera more often as the finished items seen in January were impressive. Mine is not done (no surprises there!) but I'll post it if it ever does get finished.


Meanwhile... January we decided to play with an idea from a new book called Creative Embellishments for Paper, Jewelry, Fabric, and More by Sherrill Kahn. We made beads and "windows" by melting page protectors. These were fun, if a bit stinky in a closed room in 6 degree (F) and snowy MI. Of course, if you can melt page protectors, what else can you melt?

The top photo is a "window" created by sandwiching fabric strips, bits of peacock feather, and some tiny silk oak leaves from the floral department of (cringe) the "J" place, between two layers of Page Protectors (or Sheet Protectors depending on which brand); the top loading plastic pages you keep in three-ring binders. All this was hit with a heat gun until it started to melt together.

The second photo is beads created by rolling cut strips of the Page Protectors around a steel rod (BBQ skewer in my case), wrapping it with hair ties and melting it with the heat gun. One bead is plain, in one I rolled up peacock feather and in the third, a sheer fabric.


So, if you can melt one kind of plastic... The beads above are a plastic wrapper that came off a 4-pack of Campbell's soups. These seemed to work best if wound loosely (lower right) and they cooled quite shiny.


Next, this bead was a strip cut from one of those flimsy water bottles. I wrapped it with a sheer synthetic fabric which burned quite impressively when the bottle plastic curled away from it. Ack! This plastic seemed to be a favorite as it cooled/hardened more clear and shiny than the Page Protector beads which became quite cloudy when cooled but it was harder to get to stick to itself.


Lastly, I did a quick thing with Shrinky Dink as I have never seen it before. I have to admit, that was memorizing!


A glittery gel pen that I scribbled on the pre-shrunk plastic with stayed sparkly. Other people played with some very cool stuff like Fun Foam and turned out some really neat things. Hopefully they will share pictures with us.

Show & Tell
Linda J did some more sun printing with Setacolor paints.


She also did a beautiful quilt with lots of circles and curved piecing - very nice!


February we are going to torture wool and silk with dye :),
Deb H

November 2007

Our November meeting had us working on more ATC's (Artist Trading Cards). Some of us were making refrigerator magnets for gifts, some were making cards, others were just building our ATC stash so we can trade. Several of us brought finished ones to show off! Here is a picture of the ATC's that are done.

Sandy O is very prolific and here are some of hers

Some more of Sandy's

Some of the other's

and some more

And Linda K was wearing an adorable doll pin she made

Linda J had continued to explore the Flower Pounding technique we worked on in October. She did much more pounding, using the last of the fall color in her yard on cotton and muslin treated with Alum. She found the muslin seemed to work the best at absorbing the flowers and leaves' color. She then took a permanent black fabric marker and outlined her results. Very stunning!


A detail.

The weather has turned nasty cold here and Thanksgiving brought our first snow of the year (as usual), I hope it won't interfere with our next meeting - we are going to play with Spirit Wards from the latest issue of Cloth, Paper, Scissors!

Deb H

October's Meeting!

EFF met at the Library this month due to a last minute school schedule conflict. Since it is so close and the library is so accommodating to us, it was just fine. They didn't even complain when we made so much noise, you'd have thought we were remodeling the meeting room! More to follow...

Several of us just got back from spectacular workshops. Linda J was at a four day workshop in North Carolina at the John C. Campbell Folk School called Playing with Curves taught by Pat Meinecke. She showed us her wonderful quilt-in-progress with all kinds of perfectly pieced curves and circles. She was delighted with how much she had learned.

Margot L, Linda J, and me (Deb H) just got back from workshops at Fabrications Fiber Art Retreat. Margot took Del's class and showed us her mixed media creation - a 3D floral that was very cool and contemporary. Linda was in the fabric painting class with Desi Vaughn and showed us a huge stack of really wonderful painted fabrics using a multitude of techniques, lots involved sun printing. Some of these just knocked our socks off! I gave a quick recap of my class with Laura Cater-Woods and showed the quilt that they have seen sooooo many times before because it was stuck and I just couldn't figure out how to save it or move it forward and I liked it enough not to trash it. It's on the move again - yahoo! For Show & Tell, Kay S had a needle felted witch's hat with needle felted flowers and a vine and leaf wandering the peak of the hat. It was lay-down-and-dye (pun intended) adorable! Sorry, I had my camera and forgot to take pictures at this point - oops!


But before we called it a night we tried our best to annoy the whole library. We tried a little leaf and flower pounding. We all agreed, this is the best way to take out any and all aggressions :o)

Being a last minute idea, inspired by the lovely fall leaves here in Michigan right now, we did not have time to pre-treat our fabric properly. We did have a roll of PhotoFabric cotton twill by Muttonhead (Blumenthal Craft). It's a pretreated fabric that is backed with paper, you can feed it through your printer to print on fabric and it makes the printer inks permanent once rinsed in cold water. We tried it on that and after pressing with a hot iron, removing the paper backing and rinsing in cold water, then drying with a hot iron, it seems to be permanent. I guess only laundering a few times will really tell how much, but.... How often do you wash wall art anyway?

None of us produced art here but we did discover some interesting facts;


all plant matter should be very fresh
leaves and flowers that had more "juice" transferred a lot easier (even with just a rolling pin)
leaves and flowers that had too much "juice" gave water-color effects
to appease library staff who are troubled by the noise, invite them to join in the fun
it's better to hammer on leaves and flowers than people whom you are angry with ;o)


This may not replace regular dyeing and painting for me but it does have a lot of potential for a surface design technique.


Whew! I'm all caught up, see you next month!

Deb H