What’s Faster than Fast Art*?

Fabric sketching?  Scrap scribbling?  After the previous timed and improvised Pollack-inspired piece [see Art Inspired entry below], I wanted to try something with larger structures, more composition, or possibly an image.  The June to July NoNaMé challenge was just such an opportunity.  We would each start with a standard 9”x12” sheet of craft felt.  Then, using a timer set for just 15 minutes, improvise by positioning and sewing down scraps of fabric.  When time has expired, after a moment to review, an additional ten minutes could be used to add more fabric or sewing on embellishments (such as couched yarn, etc.).  Finally, any hand embellishment was allowed with no time limit since beading, etc., is seldom a quick task.

For me, always on the lookout for the unusual finding that might be included as an embellishment in an art quilt, I came across an interesting piece of rusted metal on the sidewalk on my way to work one morning.  The small, crumpled object, I speculated to be the center of a desk fan grill, suggested a many-legged spider.  I collected it and started imagining a project, something web-like, for the NoNaMé challenge.

When I got around to the challenge, I started with a light blue piece of felt, not my usual colorway, but maybe it would look like sky.  The challenge was extra challenging since I was working on a friend’s sewing machine which I was unfamiliar with.  Unable to achieve the timely results I wanted, I switched to my portable machine right in the middle of the first 15 minutes.  As luck would have it, my machine was experiencing technical difficulties, so I switched back to my friend’s machine; let’s just say there were some stops and starts in that 15 minutes.

Even as the timer went off, things weren’t looking great.  I wasn’t getting the web effect I was looking for, and the fabric choices weren’t good.  I decided to add more scraps and couch pink yarn for the web.  Before I knew it, 10 minutes was up.  Not good.

Oil pastels, acrylic inks, and metallic dimensional paints were to enhance the piece and increase the contrast, but it still wasn’t successful, in my opinion.  Here’s that first piece.

Time for another try.  For this round I wanted to create an image.  Timer started, I grabbed and roughly cut fabrics into the shape of a face, then nose, eyes, mouth, and a shock of bright green hair!  A young female began to emerge.  Switching to the free-motion foot and dropping the feed dogs allowed me to zip all over the surface to secure the scraps.  My friend, who was working alongside me, said the girl looked like she belonged in the Highlands, our local pseudo-Bohemian area that boast an eclectic mix of people.  Thus the piece would later be titled “Highlands Girl.”  After a long break, I came back to the piece and finished it up with more hair, a shoulder she’s glancing over, and other scraps for her clothes and back.  Ding!  Ten minutes was up.  She was finished out with oil pastels and colored pencils for shading.  Here she is.

Things seemed to be going better, so why not a third try….  The focus was on creating the overall shape.  This one went the most smoothly and had very little embellishment after the combined 25 minutes.  It’s almost full circle to the Pollack-inspired, overall piece, but the composition suggests some larger movement/shape.

One point of the challenge was to test our intuition for color, form, composition, etc.  Another was to loosen up and see where things would go, or possibly to be inspired to a more involved idea based on an improvisation.  Since the first “web” wasn’t a suitable home, I decided to create a more intentional piece as a home for spidey.  Here it is.  Note spidey was painted with acrylic paints -- sometimes rusty just isn’t the way to go.

I borrowed an idea from a fellow NoNaMé member for the web.  That is, I put #5 pearl cotton in the bobbin and sewed the thin lines of the web from the back of the piece (prior to addition of batting and backing).  Before I was able to do that, I first marked where I would sew by sewing the web from the front with black thread in the bobbin.  Then, when flipped over, the black bobbin thread served as my sewing guide as the pearl cotton, via the bobbin, was being applied to the front.  Batting, backing, sew, flip, close, minimal quilting, beads, crystals, done.  I’m happy with spidey, and I think he’s happy in his upgraded home!

*“Fast Art” is simply placing raw-edge fabric on a background, pinning all pieces, possibly securing the smallest ones with a dot of glue, then securing everything with free-motion stitching.  One option is Noriko Endo’s technique of covering the whole surface with fine netting and stitching over it.  Lately I prefer to skip the netting since it does bring down the overall color and character of the fabric surface.  Plus, the final quilting is another opportunity to secure the surface design fabric pieces.  I call this “fast art” as opposed to more constructed and planned works that typically take much longer to complete.  The Route 66 cactus piece below is an example.