The challenge (issued last month by myself and another art quilter, Marilyn) for the Art Quilt Group May meeting was “Woven.” Marilyn had the book "Simply Stunning Woven Quilts" by Anna Faustino and was interested in trying some of the techniques. She offered the book to other members for reference on the technique. I added my own twist to the challenge by encouraging use of non-traditional materials or non-traditional applications.
Working toward that end, Marilyn and I did a collaborative piece – to be revealed soon – that came out very well. The collaborative process was fun and inspiring. I would definitely recommend it to others, particularly if you’ve found yourself stuck in a particular style, technique, or color way.
I also did a piece on my own for the challenge. (Fortunately, Marilyn and I started on our collaboration well in advance so had that out of the way.) I had found this black vinyl material when the woven challenge idea first came up. It’s hard to make out in the picture, but there are strips of it in there. To see it in-person, it looks like black patent leather.
To go further in the way of “non-traditional” I did an acrylic painting on acetate (a technique I picked up in college). The painting was then cut into strips and woven in. Sometimes I appliquéd it to fabric strips by zig-zagging over the edges, and other strips were woven in as they were.
The final size of the piece (18” x 58”) was dictated by the size of a canvas stretcher frame a friend had made for me that I still haven’t stretched canvas over for a painting. The warp (long) threads are black crochet thread. After all the fabric and acetate painting strips were woven in, along with a variety of yarns, I went back and wove in some strips vertically over a few of the warp threads to help break up the very horizontal, linear feel.
After removing it from the stretcher, the piece was quilted to felt batting. I kept thinking it would eventually come out with the structure of a traditional quilted piece, but there was so much give because of the looseness of the weaving that I had to settle for thinking of it as a “fiber” piece, which was freeing in a way since it allowed me to stop thinking about tucking in thread ends and keeping it neat.
A backing was applied, and it could have been considered complete as an attractive overall surface design, but it still seemed to need some larger elements for visual appeal, hence the raised circles were added. As usual, my works don’t photograph well to show the dimension, but the circles are raised ¼” above the surface. Additionally, there are glass stones applied on top of the circles, so they’re about ¾” above the background surface.
No comments:
Post a Comment