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

Busy Fall!

Hi all,

Well, I'm a bit late but here is September's post.

September's meeting found us back at the school in our fabulous art classroom. Ah, home! We were a small group this month and our topic was art journaling. Not as in "journals as art" but as in "journaling our artistic efforts". So, not the pretty little journals, memory books, and picture books that are a work of art in themselves, but the kind that you use to track (journal) all of your artistic thoughts and ideas. It appears these kinds of journals can fall into the first category as well, but are really a way to think through a project, help us with our bazillion issues that have to do with just plain being a working artist (whether professional or hobbyist) and a place to collect all those ideas that just need to get written or drawn down. The photo above is a journaling aid I picked up at Borders. It's a pre-decorated, small journal that you are supposed to write down your thoughts or art ideas that are spurred by the accompanying card deck of art related essays. These types of journaling aids are ideal to get you started if you are not sure how to proceed with one and to break-up a creative "block".

But most of us use journals to plan out art projects and write our own essays to get us through difficult points of art or creative dead-ends. We scribble ideas down in quick sketches, write a brief description of a concept worth developing and paste in pictures from nature, magazines, the Internet (whatever) that inspired an idea. Here are some of the journals that we shared;

From very neat to very messy to very colorful. But they all do the job!

That's all for this month!

Deb H

August Meeting!

Our last summer meeting was August 15th at the library. In September we will meet at the school in our marvelous art classroom! The agenda for Setember is not finalized yet, but it will be geat!

So, for August we had a lesson on some of the elements of design. Cathy A led us through a few eye opening exercises. The first one was to draw a posed figure without looking at our paper in 10 seconds. I will NOT post my results of that exercise. They were hugely funky and not in a good way :oP"""""
Next we sectioned off our paper into six boxes and crated lines to express certain concepts or emotions. <--- From top left to bottom right they were; feminine, overheated (I could relate to this one, sigh), angry, cheerful, masuline, and relaxed. Here are the results of my efforts.

Next, we did the same type of thing using color. ---> Our words were; fresh, tired, energized, slow, road trip, and Birthday. Here is my 20 second rendition.

Lastley, we divided our page into three sections and cut up magazines. We pasted images we liked into the three sections and then decided the emotions the mini collages brought to mind. <--- Here is my cut-and-paste. It was great fun (felt like grade school :o) and I learned that my "art language" is definately COLOR, as opposed to line or image, to create a feeling in my work.

We all had such different results, I should have remembered my camera so I could post others work. It was very revealing and I'm off to do some more, there is always more to learn!

I have managed to update our meeting dates on the side bar. Come join us if you are close!

Until next month! Deb H