Workshop is May 20

My workshop is just ahead.

It is at Bobbie Moon's House
1961 Mar Vista
Altadena, CA

On Sunday May 20, 2018    9 to 4

    I have lots of patterns you can use, or bring your own
photo printed 8" X 10" printed on plain paper.


We will paint it on silk.  Lots of tricks and treats
for you to be successful.















Painting and then applique and stitching.

WEARABLE ART CONNECTION

I HAVE A WORKSHOP IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA COMING UP

I will be giving a lecture and teaching teaching a workshop in Los Angeles area in May.

The lecture will be a slide show and examples of silk painting using photos and drawings as the basis for the design.  There will also be several quilts and wall art using the technique.

 This is an example of a silk painting done from an old photo of my great grand-parents.  I used sepia tones to give it the old photo look.  It does not have the appliqué added yet.

 This is from a simple drawing I had done with added fabrics and stitching,  Simple but fun to do.

Silk painting from a photograph with appliqué and stitching added.  The extra textures give it POP!
The workshop is being sponsored by  www.wearableartconnection.org

A New Show

I
I have the opportunity to be the featured artist for the month of May at the Boulder City Art Guild Gallery (Gallery is in the Historic Boulder Dam Hotel).  I have been very busy making new pieces.  I will be showing silk paintings, silk art quilts, and a few garments.  
Now that I live in the desert Cactus have a new appeal.




These are some of the pieces I have been working on. They are silk paintings with appliqué and stitching accents.

Something else

I have been painting silk and making them into wall art rather than clothing.  I know that is a change for me but how many jackets are already hanging in my closet?  Lots of them.
I was asked to do a gallery show at the Chaffey Communities Museum last year and I worked really hard to make things for the show.  It was a great success which was very fulfilling for me to know people would actually pay money for my work.

This was the title piece for the show.  It was called "Offerings in Silk"

This is a newer piece I have made using some of the new techniques I have been working on.

I will be teaching these techniques for the Wearable Art Connection in California in May

More Pouring

I was at my daughter Sara's in San Clemente basically house sitting while they were gone and only teenaged daughter was home, but not very much.  So I was watching You tube videos on Acrylic pouring and decided to get some supplies and try it.  I poured about 25 small canvas.   And found I was addicted to it.  then I tried pouring a more controlled picture.

 These ocean pours are bigger, about 12 X 24 but I found I could get an ocean feeling with just a bit of control of the paint.

When Sara came home she wanted me to teach her how to do indigo dyeing.  She had napkins she wanted to dye.  There was no way I was going to set up an indigo pot and do it the old fashioned way so I just ordered fiber reactive Procion dye in indigo color and taught her how to fold twist and tie the napkins into patterns.

They looked great and she was happy.  Now all her friends want to make indigo dyed napkins!

Can't blame them.  I may be going to California again with more indigo dye soon.

It's Been a long time since I posted to this blog.
In the meantime I have moved to Boulder City, Nevada and am re-establishing myself, finding new groups, and trying lots of new things.  It isn[t easy to move out of the familiar into the unknown.
It was a very hard decision to make, but now a little over a year later, I'm glad I moved here where I am near to my daughter Lisa and her wonderful family.  I am very involved in their lives (helping with homework, driving to lessons, etc.) and loving it.  I also have lots of time to do "my thing" and I'm discovering so many things I love to do.  I haven't found a Fiber Art Group near by so I have joined the Art Guild here in town and am doing much more painting than I did while living in California.  I'm even teaching a few students and we are having such fun.

Let me show you some of what I have been doing.

This is Acrylic Pouring 

It is liquid acrylic paint and Floetrol or pouring medium mixed with a few drops of silicone oil 

poured onto canvas and let dry.

It is addictive!

I'm Back

     Here's what has been happening.  I moved to Boulder City Nevada last year, and it took me several months to remodel the house, and get settled in.  Then several more months to get used to living here.
       I didn't do much art and was totally without motivation or stimulation although I had a lovely new painting studio as well as a sewing room.  I missed everyone in Southern California and inspiration they all gave me.
       Eventually I started looking for like minded people, but they were hard to find.  I did run into a few women who painted together at the library and they invited me to join them.
       The Chaffey Communities Museum of Art in Ontario asked me to do a show there last June so at last I had motivation to get something going.  "The Magnolias" quilt above was at the show which was great! Not only did I see many friends there, but I sold many art pieces which was very encouraging to me that someone really liked what I was doing.
       When I returned to Nevada I went to work and painted a few new things and got them into a local gallery.  Hooray!

 These are silk paintings with stitching and applique pieces of hand dyed silks.  I spent a lot of time working out how to turn silk paintings and stitching into wall art in a frame on the wall.   Galleries are not sure what to do with a piece you can't just hang on a hook, so now I have jumped that hurdle.

     These are the latest experiments that I have been playing with,  I have been asked by SAA and WAC to give a presentation and a workshop for them next year so I have been working on a new technique where the students will work from their own photos and create silk art in a smaller format (about 8" X 10".  I think we will have fun.  I tried doing these old family photos maintaining the sepia tone with the silk appliqué and was excited about how they came out.

      If anyone is out there I will try and post again on a more regular basis now that I'm working in the studio  again.

Workshop Coming Up

 I will be speaking at The Wearable Art Connection on Saturday August 20 at the Pasadena Museum  470 W Walnut Street,  Pasadena 10 am to 1:30 pm and then doing a workshop on the 21st at New Moon Textiles  9am to 4f pm.  It will be the last chance to take a workshop from me for awhile (or ever), as I will be moving to Boulder City NV in September.  I really am moving, even though I've thought I was for the last 3 years.  It will really happen this time (at least I think it will).

I'd love to have you join me for the lecture or the class.  You will learn at least 10 ways to embellish and use threads of all kinds in your work.

This is crazy patch done with bobbin work on the machine.

I Haven't Forgotten

I haven't forgotten how to post to my blog.  I've just been off playing.  I went to Hawaii with kids and grandkids and came home with a sore throat which later became "sick in bed for 5 days."  You can't spend two weeks with grandkids and not catch something vile.

So now I'm feeling better and back to business.  I had to send some entries off to SPIN for their show this fall and as I was going through things I came across this silk painting I had done several months ago.  It was from a photo I'd taken while in Cuba and now I really like it.  Why do things look better a few months (or years) after you have given up on them and put them away?

 Another silk painting done last Spring, but revisited and now I love it.  Surely I can do something more with the techniques I tried in this one.

 I have been using silk painting as the base and then free motion machine embroidery over the painting just in little touches.  Notice the fine lines drawing of leaves in the background, that is free motion stitching with varigated thread.  The challenge was keeping the fabric to stay flat after I took it out of the embroidery hoop.  I tried several kinds of stabilizer and have finally found the system that works.  

You can see the embroidery in the painting on these details.

I'm loving this technique.  All I need is more time to dedicate to it's possibilities.
By the way I will be the speaker and workshop presenter for WAC on August 20 and 21.  I'll be doing a trunk show on Sat the 20th and embellishing techniques workshop on Sunday 21.  Come and join me.
I will post more about it in a few days.

Back at it

I have been in Nevada for the past two weeks checking out how it will be to live with my daughters family.  The answer?  Great!  I have been contemplating the move for a few years now and things just weren't quite ready.  Now I think I am, but there are still many things to do before I really go.  Like clean out the garage.

So let's talk about what I have been doing these last few weeks.

 Do you remember that I used this image as a demonstration in the last session of class?  Well I made it into a quilted pillow and I really like it now.  I extended the design by quilting beyond the circle and it worked out really nice.

s

 Here is the next thing I've been doing.  I had painted these leaves on silk, so then I thought,  "What if I add a little free motion machine embroidery to parts of the painting.  I knew I would need stabelizer so I went shopping for something that I thought would work.  It didn't!  See all the wrinkles after I took it out of the hoop and then washed away the stabilizer it was very pulled and crinkly and no amount of ironing helped.

 next plan.

 Then I used an iron on knit stabilizer and a layer of wash away "Sulky"  It was better, but still not as good as I wanted.  IN the detail below you can see the wrinkles are fewer and not as bad as before.

 On to the next try.  This time I used another brand of fusible very soft knit stabilizer  by "Floriania" recommended by Alex Anderson for "tricky fabrics like silk"  Then I added another layer of a firm tearaway and I had the best results so far.

 Very little wrinkling after tearing away and such.  I also tried pre-shrinking the stabilizer before I applied it.  So far This is the third try and it is getting better.  This time I also used some background stitching of leaves to give it a bit of dimension.  I  used a variegated thread so It would kind of give variety to the stitching.  I went back and added stitching to the one before.  But found that adding the stitching first was the best way.   That was a no-brainer.

 Here in the details you can see the stitching and the embroidery.  I'm excited about the concept of the silk painting and the free motion embroidery for accent.

 I will be framing these as wall art so am hoping to get even a better result when finished.

 This time I have two layers of stabilizer and it is smooth,   I will let you know if this works after I do the free motion embroidery and remove the stabilizer.

Detail of the painting and the drawn background leaves without any stitching.  By the way I painted the background silk before I put on the gutta lines, so there are fewer gutta lines showing in the finished pieces.  You can see the effect better a few photos back.
I'm having fun.  I hope you are creating and enjoying it also.  Let me know what you are doing and any comments about what I am doing also.

What have I done lately?

The theroy was that without the class to get ready for I would have more time to do my own art.  Well, the reality is without the class I was doing nothing!  That is until I realized I had a challenge for Surface Art Association to get done before the April meeting.  The title of the challenge is "Branching Out"

That is pretty broad so I decided to do something I almost never do and that is an art quilt of political commentary.  That is my way of "Branching Out"

 This is a more detail view

This is the wider view of the unfinished quilt.  It is silk painting and photos printed on fabric and appliquéd onto the silk.  The title is "Crisis"  and it is about the situation in the world and the refugee problem that we are facing with something like 16 million displaced persons.  I will finish the quilting and binding today I hope.

Some paintings

I went to Santa Barbara for two weeks of painting the week after my last Claremont Class.  It was supposed to make the fact that I had "retired " that much less painful.  It gave me something else to think about and that was good.  This week we will see how I deal without the class to prepare for.

Before I went to SB I was to decide what my series would be about.  Since I had been on many trips the last two or three years and seem many different oceans of the world I wanted to paint "The Feeling and Impressions of the different oceans."  I enjoyed the workshop and learned a lot, but was not sure I was successful in my series quest.  I will keep working on some of the paintings to see if I can refine them a bit.

 I had taken photographs, but the instructor asked me to put the photos away and just paint from the memories and feelings I had ov the various places.  This was the Pacific Ocean at La Jolla, CA

 The Pacific Ocean along the Oregon Coast

 Pacific  Coast of Costa Rica

 Caribbean in the British Virgin Islands

 Hawaii along the coast of Kauai

 When I went to Cuba because we were Americans we could not do the things tourists could do one of which was get in the water.  This is "Don't Go Near the Water"  It looks inviting, but stay away!

 Looking down off the boat in the Caribbean.  Belize

 Atlantic waves off the Carolina's

 Pacific swells in the Northwest

The family at the beach in Laguna.  I'm under the umbrella.