I've recently made several lined tote bags, adapting this "Whitney Sews" pattern. I enlarged the dimensions a bit, and used quilting cotton with medium-weight fusible interfacing. (You can click on the photo below to enlarge.) Drop me a note if you'd like to know how I changed the pattern.
February 18, 2024
Working on easy things for a while
I've recently made several lined tote bags, adapting this "Whitney Sews" pattern. I enlarged the dimensions a bit, and used quilting cotton with medium-weight fusible interfacing. (You can click on the photo below to enlarge.) Drop me a note if you'd like to know how I changed the pattern.
November 13, 2023
Workshop with Jane Davies, Part 2 (work on menhirs)
21" x 11" |
And I also keep looking at this pencil sketch that I made during the workshop, in preparation for the large-scale drawing (click to enlarge):
November 11, 2023
Workshop with Jane Davies, Part 1
I spent the last two weeks of October in a workshop with Jane Davies at the Crow Barn in Ohio. The workshop was on "The Elements of Visual Language: A Fresh Look at Abstract Composition," working primarily with drawing, acrylic paint, and collage. You can see Jane's own work here; her youtube channel has many tutorials and online workshops. From sampling these before the workshop, I knew that Jane's methods of working as well as her materials are very different from what I'm used to, but I thought a change of approach would be a productive challenge for me, and thinking about composition is always a good thing. I was also eager to do more work with collage, which I've tried out a little bit before, and which I'd like to use more for making cards. I also thought it could be a useful medium for doing small "sketches" for my second menhir project (the one that will focus on three standing stones), making it easier for me to try out different colors, shapes, sizes, placements than using fabric. And all this held true. I made some interesting work while I was there, using media in ways new to me, and I also made some progress on the menhirs project. And when I got home, I cleared off my "project" desk in my study and set up my collage supplies so they are in easy reach.
Jane's approach was to focus on various elements of composition. An early assignment was to use line only. The first mark I made was the heavy line below. I added other lines, trying out other drawing tools/color:
9 x 12" on Bristol paper |
- The scribbly line work was done in a new method I learned from Jane. I drew line clusters with a variety of implements (markers, graphite) on regular tissue paper. When the rest of the composition was in place, I auditioned various line clusters over the composition, cut out a rectangle of tissue with the cluster I wanted, and applied it to the collage with matte medium. Voila! One gets a line that traverses other materials with no skips or hesitations, and the tissue paper is transparent, so doesn't show. Another benefit of this method is being able to audition various lines; if I had been drawing directly on the composition, I would have had only one chance.
- The prominent looped line and the other solid shapes were cut out of hand-painted collage paper. The paper is inexpensive drawing paper (e.g. white sulphite drawing paper from Blick's), and the paint is artist quality acrylic paint (Jane recommended Golden fluid acrylic paint). (Craft-quality paint does not give as solid a coverage.) Here's an array of the paper I painted:
The different-looking one in the bottom right is just a rectangle cut out of the piece of newsprint that I had on my work-table to catch the paint where I went off the edges when painting 9x12 pieces of drawing paper. When I finished an extended session of painting papers and went to clear off my table, I noticed how beautiful these lines were. I got a half-dozen cards out of that one piece of newsprint. Another piece of newsprint is show below, but this one did not happen to yield such beautiful lines.
September 14, 2023
Simple Sewing
I like to have simple sewing to do, alongside my work on more challenging projects. The intellectual/creative work involved in big projects (like my current ones about menhirs) has, of course, its own satisfactions, but each of those projects takes a very long time (usually years) to see the finished results of the endeavor. Here are a couple of simple projects that I've worked on recently.
When shopping with my sister in July at a quilting store in Phoenix, I saw a Kaffe Fassett fabric called "Twig" that I really liked (reminds me of Matisse cut-outs), but couldn't imagine how I would use it in a quilt.
Cookie said, "Why don't you make an apron with it?" Good idea, especially as I already had a pattern at home that I'd been wanting to make. Although it looks like a dress, this Indygo Junction pattern is open in back, and the apron is put on over one's head.
I made the apron while on an annual quilting retreat with friends, in Plainfield, IL. I also worked on another four-patch posie quilt that has been in the works for a while. Here's a length of the fabric that I cut up to make all the blocks,
Grafic by Latifah Saafir |
August 30, 2023
Progress on "Persistence"
August 13, 2023
My second project about menhirs
My second project based on the menhirs (standing stones) of the Carnac alignments is taking shape. I'm thinking of a very large piece centered on four stones. Here's a small sketch of the configuration that is my starting point.
I put this photo into Photoshop Elements and then traced the outlines of the stones to get a simple drawing:
So, I am now in the midst of working with these shapes. I have enlarged the drawing so that the whole piece will be about 7 feet high. I've pulled some hand-dyed fabric in stone colors to see how these large shapes might look in fabric. I am making progress, but don't yet have anything to show. Perhaps in another couple of weeks.
As I looked at, thought about, and read about these stones, I came to think of them as embodiments of the dead. So I was very glad to come across this statement by Chris Scarre, author of Landscapes of Neolithic Brittany, speaking about the possible meaning of some short alignments (from 3 to 7 stones) at Avrillé: "If these are commemorative or mortuary monuments, they may represent select groups of the deceased, perhaps family or related kin, lined up in rows to face the rising sun." Yes, that's what this new piece is about.
We will never know what was intended by the people who raised these stones, but I have come to accept that it's OK to go with the resonance that the stones have for me, hoping only that my meaning is at least in some consonance with the original practice.
* * * * * * * * * *
As I was putting together this post, I looked back at some earlier works of mine that take on new meaning in the context of my thinking about Neolithic stone monuments. Here's a small work I made in 2018, cutting out and piecing together fabric that I had stamped with bowl shapes. Looking at it now, I see a dolmen, a kind of monumental tomb found at some Neolithic sites.
Stones (Trapezoid) 2010, Hand-painted and commercial cotton and linen, hand-appliqué, machine pieced, hand-quilted, 14.5"x13" |
Two Stones (2016) Hand-dyed linen, couched silk-wrapped paper thread, 22"x11" |
This photo is from this website, where you can also click through to other photos of the piece. And there's a very moving photo of the work in a blogpost by Judith Martin, here.