Sculpting with Cheescloth Workshop with Mary Pal

Back in October 2015 I organized and attended a workshop with Mary Pal, an internationally known artist who makes portraits and landscape quilts with cheesecloth.  Here is my piece from the class at Kitchissippi United Church.  I took a photo I had taken of a White Breasted Nuthatch and have interpreted the tree in painted cheesecloth.  Then I drew the bird on fabric with watercolour pencils and hand embroidered in some details.  The background is hand painted white cotton with textile paint.  I just have to finish this.  I have a lot of unfinished pieces that I want to finish and mount on a canvas for Fibre Fling in April 2016!

Here's a close up of the bird so you can see the detail:

Please leave me a comment and/or let me know what you're working on. 

Stamped fabric

I made a few more foam stamps using the Magic Stamp blocks pressed onto some natural plant material that I found.   The top one is made of dried up Echinacea flowers and the one below it is made of a pine branch.   I used opaque textile paint on navy blue fabric.  These stamps are a lot of fun to make because they are your own unique design and the great thing is you can use them whenever you want on whatever surface you want.  I sometimes stamp on recycled tea bags to make greeting cards!

Piece for Stittsville Library show

For the last few years in November Out-of-the-Box has had a show at the Stittsville Library.  This year the show theme is "A Way with Words".  I made a piece using the word " Bird".  I sewed together hand painted fabric scraps and printed the white fabrics with my hand carved stamps.  The show will be hanging at the library until the end of November.  At the bottom you can see my new Cardinal stamp which I just carved.  I used a photo and carved it using Speedycarve rubber.   My piece measures 16 X 20 inches and is mounted on a painted canvas.

Here's a closer photo of my machine stitching.

New stamps

I made a few new stamps the last few months.  These are both made using the Magic Stamp foam blocks and pressing them onto a surface while the blocks are heated up. Natural shapes make wonderful stamps.  For the background fabric I often use fabric that I've coloured before using leftover textile paint.  The first stamp is made from a pattern on some packaging material.  The circles are about three inches in diameter. The second stamp is made from the brown fiddleheads left in the fall after a fern has grown in the summer. My collection of stamps is growing...

Eco printing in August

I hadn't done any eco printing since the workshop in June so when we had a cool spell earlier in August, I did quite a bit of eco printing on watercolour paper.  I bought a roast pan at Canadian Tire and got to work.  I collected some plants in the woods nearby and at a friend's place outside Ottawa.   I printed them on 90 lb and 140 lb watercolour paper.   Here are some photos of the results.

 This one is a Purple Aster plant.  Colours came out well.

This one is Wild Raspberry leaves.

 This is Wild Grape leaves on a branch.

more in August

Next I took a zen doodle and transferred it to fabric with a Sharpy marker.  I plan to add pink borders and continue the piece into the borders.  It took a lot of time to fill in all the details but it has potential I think.  It measures 18 X 24 inches so far.

August art

On the August long weekend I starting working on a few things.  First of all I took out my Rayna Gillman book called Create Your Own Free-Form Quilts.  In it she teaches how to cut up fabrics and sew them together into strips and then sew the units together into beautiful quilts.  There's something so freeing about just sewing together strips and seeing where it takes you.   I have a lot of my own hand painted fabrics so I cut up some of them and made a small quilt top.  Here is the result of that.  It measures 19 X 20 inches right now.