On the Wrong TIF Track

I went back to the capitol with all good intentions to think about my page-in-progress, but life happened.  My paid employment required some serious attention in the way of unpaid overtime (don't ever tell me government employees don't work hard!) and I had the good fortune to get into a fiber class conducted by Susan Lenz.  If you are unfamiliar with her work, she posts at (and I hope this link works for you because I am usually not motivated to provide this depth of detail, figuring that's what Google is for) http://artbysusanlenz.blogspot.com.

There are five of us in the class, which runs once a week for two hours over the next three weeks.  I have been a big fan of Susan's since 2007 when she participated in an open studio event and I dragged myself up to the capitol a day ahead of time to attend.  Her studio was at the top of my list of sites to see primarily because she listed Inaminuteago as a favorite Web site on her blog.  When the Columbia Museum of Art offered a class conducted by Susan, I jumped at the chance to learn some of her techniques.

Susan promised us we will all have a piece of our own art, matted and ready for framing at the end of the class.  She obviously is being very generous in what she calls art, at least as far as my attempts go.

In the first class on Wednesday night, Susan demonstrated the methods she uses to develop the foundation of a finished piece.  The demo took about 20 minutes, at which point she sent us to our tables to make as many foundation pieces as we could complete in the next 90 minutes in order to get a feel for the techniques.   Yikes!  She made it look so easy and it's really not because you have to think about color and line and texture and overall design and what you want to heap on top of the foundation and...

Well, here are my three foundation pieces.

This one was the first and turned out fairly well because I followed the demo to the letter.  But Susan told us we could mix up the order, so I did that on the last two pieces, which I think did not turn out as well as I had planned or as I had expected (and, yes, the photos should be rotated so that readers don't have to turn their heads at odd angles to view them properly, but I always seem to forget this step before I upload the images.)

I photographed this second piece so that you could see the underlying fabric and how the layering of fibers changes the overall appearance.  The little white dots on the black velvet are burn holes which will accommodate beads or other embellishments in the coming two weeks.

And the final photo shows what looks like a turtle, but started out in life as some paisley-printed velvet in the color palette of the strip to the right.  The underlying fabric was from an old stained tablecloth.

Today, I will find some beads and embroidery floss from my stash to continue work on the piece this coming Wednesday evening.  Susan is providing all the materials for the class, so this is probably not really necessary, but she has been so generous in allowing us to use materials from her own studio that I feel compelled to contribute something of my own to the finished piece.  Meanwhile, I will work on the TIF page if I can find the time.  It might take me an extra week or two this month but I wouldn't have missed Susan's class for anything.

Success - Sort Of

My original plan had been to fuse some contrasting flowered fabric to freezer paper and then copy some of my journal writing onto the fabric.  But I cheated.  I am running flat out with other projects and household chores and I didn't have time to play with this technique.  So, when I was in my local quilt shop on Saturday, I bought some pre-fused fabric that is specifically made to go through an ink jet copier.

Here's the journal page copied onto the prepared muslin.  Wow!  Too easy.  I am thinking I could make my own fabric designs.  For a quilter, this would be heaven, especially if you wanted to work photos or special designs into a quilt.  Now I want to try the freezer paper technique more than ever.

In any case, now that I have the journal page on plain fabric, I am rethinking my design for this part of the project.  Maybe on my drive back to the capitol tonight, I'll come up with something I'd like to try.  

Balance Represented in Fabric

Inspiration of a sort hit on late Sunday afternoon just before I was to leave for the capitol.  I thought that if balance in my life was generated by walks in the garden, writing morning pages, working with fiber and textiles, and reading, then I ought to be incorporating those activities into this month's challenge, even if I was reluctant to share my morning pages.

So I quickly went through my limited but growing fabric stash and came up with some flowery English country garden cottons specifically designed by Moda for quilting projects.  I have just completed my first quilt - a 4-patch - and I wanted to try working with tiny blocks.   I cut and stitched with abandon, not really caring if the points met or the blocks were perfectly square or the seams lined up.  I slapped on a border of some scrap fabric, and lo!  the front of the page.  Here's the result of wanting it done, not perfect:

I decided to work some text of my morning pages into the back of the page.  Here's the wrong side of the Moda fabric that coordinates with the 1 inch squares on the quilted side:

And here's the right side:

I'll use the wrong side of the fabric to print the journal text.  I understand there is a technique for this that requires the temporary fusion of the fabric to freezer paper.  You then run the fused fabric through an ink jet printer.  I've never tried this before, but I'm game.  So, that is the next step in the project.

Here's a photo of the two sides of the page with the binding fabric that will frame the piece when it is finished.

For the back of the page, I've selected part of a journal entry I wrote as I was planning my move from New England to the Carolinas.  It deals with stress, taking one thing at a time, dealing with the unexpected, and making the day come out just right in the end.  I think it sums up the way I see balance in my life - more like serenely coping with the day as it unfolds, less like controlling the outcome through scheduling or planning, even though I do try to plan some things.  Here's the text that will be imprinted on the fabric if I can get the technique to work.  If not, I'll have to figure out if it is worth $10 to have the photo store downtown do the printing for me.  The proprietor does this for quilters in our area but will use a prepared fabric sheet instead of my selected fabric.

And for those of you who are trying to squinty-read the text, I promise to provide the words in 12-point Times New Roman if I can get this TIF challenge to come out the way I envision it. 

Interpreting Balance

Given this month's balance theme, I thought of a couple of design possibilities for another page in my fabric book.  The fact that I can come up with a few different ideas in the course of 30 minutes must mean I'm making progress in translating a concept to a fiber project.  But I will confess right now that all of my ideas seem trivial:  a  scale; a yin-yang symbol; a seesaw.  See?  Trivial, easy.

Which all got me to thinking about how I measure balance in my life.   Am I in balance if every day ends up as planned?  Fat chance!  If I end a month feeling like my life has been satisfactorily split among family, paid employment, friends, education, relaxation and free time, then is my life in balance?  Maybe.   Am I closer to being balanced at the end of a year, decade or quarter century?  How do I measure balance in my life?  And how would I express it in a fiber project if I could define it?

One way I balance my emotions and my schedule is to write morning pages (see Julia Cameron's "The Artist's Way" and my personal favorite, "The Sound of Paper.")    But my morning pages are so personal that I am not sure I want to work them into an art project of any kind.

Another way I balance my creative life is to read something inspirational every day.  Right now, it's "The Last Lecture" by Randy Pausch and Anne Lamott's "Plan B."  The chapters are short enough that I can read for a few minutes and then think about the message as I drive to work or make dinner.

And I walk in the State House gardens almost every day to regain balance after a busy morning at my desk.  South Carolina has one of the most beautiful public gardens, with winding paths and gorgeous monuments.  Even when the temperature is 103 F during these dog days, I try to get out and walk in the gardens every lunch hour if only for 20 minutes or so.

So I guess I do certain activities to put balance back in my life.  I have my daily list of must-do's and the only option is to add additional activities that give meaning to the have-to's on the list.  Hmm.  Looks like I am making myself busier in order to achieve balance.  I wonder what Henry David Thoreau would say.

All this philosophizing still doesn't help me define what I am going to do for this month's TIF challenge.   I am truly drawing a creative blank at the moment, so I guess I need to walk away and fold some laundry or do some weeding.  Maybe the inspiration goddess will swoop down and wave her magic wand over my head while I'm busy with one of the must-do's. 

For Once, Finished Early

The page I created for the July "Half Way Mark" challenge is done, and once again, the results turned out better than I had planned.  Maybe I expect too little from myself as I begin each TIF challenge or maybe it's true that when you show up at the craft table, some creativity goddess takes over and guides your hand.  In any case, there's a smile on my face.

The back of the page was to have three compasses stitched off-center.  But the design needed something.  There was too much blank space.  It was like the page was saying, "Get me out of here as fast as possible."  Since I really wasn't in any hurry and certainly didn't want the page to give that impression, I started to play around with sayings or phrases to embroider onto the empty space.  In the end I settled on scattering some fussy cut flowers from the border.  I stitched five of them to the page and embellished them with some beads.  But then the flowers looked like they were somehow unconnected to the compasses, just sort of floating around in space (see, I did learn something from my introduction to drawing class and March's TIF challenge), so I took a few more beads and scattered them randomly between the flowers and the compasses.  The compasses did not receive any beading (don't think I didn't try, but beads just didn't go with the zigzag stitches and the fabric imprint.)  I used dark blue and turquoise beads at the center of the flowers, bugle beads radiating out from the flowers' centers, and yellow, bronze, and clear beads as the connectors between the compasses and the flowers, with a few red and turquoise beads thrown in at random for accent.

Now, I know some of you are sitting there saying, "Maybe she should have been in a hurry to get out of there as fast as possible because I still don't know what she is trying to say with the flowers and the compasses."  Well, I guess an obvious message is:  Fiddle with the design until you're happy with it.  The Freudian message probably is:  She had no direction at the start, so what makes you think that in two weeks she got one and found her way?

The front of the page remained pretty much as it was last weekend.  I tried some scattered beads but decided against them, thought about embroidering something at the right side of the page, but then realized that this is where the grommets will go so that the page can be inserted into the book.  In the end, I just sandwiched the the cotton batting core between the two pages and stitched on my border.  I did not quilt the page, although when the page was done, the grid lines of the foundation fabric lined up perfectly on each side (what an Act of God!), so I did consider it.

This project was good practice for the quilt I'll be starting on Monday - a gift for a friend who has had (and is still having) a run of extremely bad luck in her personal life. I am hoping that maybe the palette Sharon selects next month will agree with my quilt colors.  I can't imagine that the theme will!  :) 

Moving Along the Road to Anywhere

Good morning, dear readers.  I'm getting this project done more quickly than any other I've set out to do in this challenge.  I spent part of an evening earlier in the week cutting maps out of the hiking fabric I purchased.  I kept one map area with the compass intact and pieced in additional map parts until I was happy with the layout.  I was going to hand stitch the pieces onto the background, but decided to try out the zig-zag stitch on my sewing machine.   The effect is interesting and I like it a lot, although it is impossible to see on the following photo.  The extra space on the left side of the page is to accommodate the book's anchoring posts.  I will mark the fabric and do a buttonhole edging around the post holes.

I decided to do a different design on the back of the page.  Since I generally develop patterns that are fairly symmetrical, I opted to experiment with an off-center layout.  I fussy-cut compasses and again played with the positioning until I liked the effect.  Here's the final product, also appliqued onto the background with zig-zag machine stitching.

I had to come home for an eye doctor appointment, so I raided my stash while I was in town and picked up some batting to sandwich between the two sides of the page.  The other pages I completed are fairly hefty, and if I don't add some additional fiber to the page, it will seem flimsy compared to the others.

I was also going to embellish the map page with beads or heaven-knows-what, but I haven't been able to come up with any ideas that I think will work at this point in the project.  I also haven't decided if I should quilt the page or just leave the batting loose.  Since this is an experiment, I am willing to take one step at a time, although adding beads or other embellishments will be a lot easier before I install the batting.  Maybe over the weekend I'll just think about what road I'll take.  Seems like I am at a circle/rotary/round-about.   Isn't that just what I should be expecting on this road to anywhere?

Any Road Will Get You There

I have decided that the reason I am astonished by Sharon's challenge each month is that my mind does not operate on the same plane as hers.  I remember years ago, I saw a comedy routine in which Jonathan Winters was handed a wire coat hanger and asked to turn it into a prop.  My mind immediately thought, "Well, hang up clothes, silly."  Mr. Winters on the other hand proceeded to think of at least 7 things he could use the hanger into for.  That is the difference between linear thinkers and the more creative types.  However, over the years, I have learned that you can nurture and develop creativity, even if others seem to be born with it and consequently have to work less hard at it.

So, Sharon says, "Half way there,"  and I think, "WHAT?!?!?"  After giving myself an afternoon to calm down, and instead of immediately going to the color palette challenge for July to do more of the same, I spent several hours thinking about what it means to be half way there.

First thought:  I'm not half way anywhere.  When I joined the challenge, I wanted to have fun, use up stash, and just see if I could persist in meeting a monthly challenge in the event that I wanted to enroll in an on-line course.  Practice, so to speak, for a future day.   So, if there's no destination in mind as far as projects or techniques are concerned, you can't be half-way there.

Then, I got a bit perturbed.  Is everyone else in the challenge half way there?  Am I the only one wandering aimlessly through this challenge?  

Anyway, the more I thought about it, the more the following saying kept springing to mind:  "If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there."  So, I decided to use a map theme this month and do a page for my growing fabric book.  I know that this project is not the most original idea, but it does seem to fit the challenge.  And although I did not set out in January to make a fabric book, it does seem like I am on that road.  So if the journey is the important thing, then I guess I'll stick to that road until a signpost points me elsewhere.

I went to the store to look for fabric that had maps printed on it.  I thought this would be easy - Not.  I managed to find some quilting cotton with a backpacking or hiking theme.  I first thought I'd embellish the fabric with embroidery, but then decided to fussy cut the maps and the compasses and make my own design for the page.  I selected coordinating fabrics for the back of the page (the plaid) and the border (blue flowers).    I really like this better than just using a map background.  The compasses imply direction and the maps, destination.  Wow!  Fate or what?

Next week, I'll try to find time to lay out a design.   Oh, by the way, the colors in the photo are true.