Still Sewing

I'm still sewing. I don't usually sew this much in the summer but it's been so hot and sunny I like spending time in the craft room in the cool basement. 

So I made another table runner. This one was an experiment in doing a simple row by row tribal design. Not much planning went into it, I simply did each row differently as I went and tried some different ideas. It helped that I had a bunch of coordinated fabric on hand from a previous project idea that I never did. Now I have used up some of that fabric, made something useful, had fun doing it and most importantly, the cat likes it!

But now if I could just decide what to do next on this collage. I started it several months ago and stopped mid point, not sure what I wanted to do next. And I have been looking at it everyday and still haven't had a sudden impulse to do something else to it. But I know it's not finished. 

Thanks for reading. 

Aileen

Lines, lines and more lines

I'm still exploring imaginary topography. 

And now there is color in the imaginary world. 

These random watercolor pieces make a good jumping off point for starting the lines. 

This is before and after adding lines. 

I think I'll do a few more like this. 

These are the next set of papers I plan to topograph. 

Thanks for reading. 

Aileen

Imaginary Topography

I've been sketching some imaginary topographies. These aren't very big and they don't take very long. If I sit and doodle for a couple minutes this is what I get:

Some inspired by real topography, some not so much.

Just playing with shape and density. 

And different pens and smoothness of line. 

And direction, size, shape and spacing. 

I think I'll do some more of these. Maybe add some color and other stuff. Maybe not.

I'd like to end up with a design for fabric but I'm not there yet.

Thanks for reading. 

Aileen

A couple things I did this week

Another mini journal. 

This is the fourth so far and it's hard to see the difference in this photo but the paper in this one has been tea stained. I'm working on an idea for mini memento journals with old looking (tea stained) paper with aged photos printed on some of the pages. That's a story for another post. 

And Christmas dish towels. 

This is the Christmas project I've been working on for weeks now.  It is a dish towel (or four from one yard of printed fabric) I designed and had printed at Spoonflower. There is a much longer story here but suffice it to say I achieved what I set out to do, it just took more time and work than I thought it would. 

Thanks for reading. 

Aileen 

Buried under Purple Choices

I have over 100 different purple fabrics in my collection. I had a plan, many many years ago, to make a purple quilt for my Mom. I decided on a design, bought light purple/lavender fabric as the background and began collecting purple prints for the main design elements. 

The Overlapping Purple Print Design Plan

That was so long ago. I never got that quilt made. My Mom died years ago. But I still have all this fabric and just recently it has been on my mind. With all the other projects I have on my plate right now I don't know why this has come to mind. I don't know why I feel compelled to look at this again after all these years. It's beyond my comprehension. But I'm going along with it and to see where this goes. 

I decided I wasn't going to make the quilt I designed for my Mom but I've gone through every single piece of purple fabric I have and cut one 4 1/2" square from each print. It's been an interesting journey, looking at each one of these pieces of fabric and trying to remember why I have it and where I got it. I know I've had some of this fabric for over 20 years. Some if it seems ugly to me now and I can't imagine ever having bought it. Some if it I can't renumber at all and probably got it when I was subscribed to a monthly fat quarter club. But that was a choice also. I choose to blindly get fabric sent to me every month even when I didn't like a lot of it. But some of the fabric I love and clearly remember where and when I got it. 

At this point I'm playing with design ideas. I think I will at least sew a quilt top. It may never be finished beyond that. I have several unfinished tops because that's the part I like to do. But I haven't decided if I am just going to make it with only one square of each fabric or go ahead and cut more squares. 

Quilt size calculations and new design ideas.

One square of each print could easily be fashioned into a lap quilt or a larger wall hanging. I have enough fabric, if I repeat prints, to go to any size larger I want. But I don't need another bed size quilt and there is a better chance I will actually finish it if I keep it small. 

And now I have this huge pile of trim scraps! Normally it would all just go in the trash but since I've started doing collage art and mixed media, a pile of what used to be trash now looks like a pile of opportunity to me. There are a number of things I can think of to do with this "trash" including collage elements or fabric beads.

 

The purple trims trash piles.

You see here some of the trimmings already stiffened with a mat acrylic medium wash laid out on freezer paper to dry. It's a very easy way to make fabric usable like a paper, stiff enough to cut small shapes with no fraying but still pliable. I do this first when I plan to use fabric as a collage element.

So besides one or more purple quilts to add to my project To Do list, I'll also probably do 'something' with the scraps. I may end up doing that first. Art and collage is so much easier than sitting and sewing for hours and I have a whole lot more wall space for art than beds to put yet another quilt on.

Butterfly Outlines and Indigo Fabric Design

I have all these outlines of butterfly wing patterns I have been sketching on and off for the last couple years.  

I use them as a reference when doing butterfly artwork. I thought one day it might look interesting to create a simple black and white fabric pattern using the butterfly outlines. I just needed to do a few things like create digital and neater complete versions of some of the outlines, import them into Photoshop, clean it up, arrange it and slice and dice that to make it into a seamless repeat pattern.  That's all...  I let that stew in my brain awhile and played with different art apps on my iPad until I found one that had a line I liked and the controls I needed to make the reflected drawing. Once I solved that problem I made a few butterfly outlines.

The next step is to import them into Photoshop (I use PSE8), extract the line objects so I can move them around and change their size or clean up edges. Fairly simple things easily done in PSE. Somewhere along the line though I decided that instead of doing black on white I would do white outlines on a dark background.  I choose a dark indigo blue as the background color. So the next step was to make my butterfly objects white.

Add some more butterflies and throw in a little crosshatching texture with a Photoshop brush tool.

Add some little flowers.

Now I'm getting somewhere.

Now do it all again in a perfect square. Try to make a balanced arrangement, slice it, rearrange the pieces, fill the center, finish the crosshatching and tadah...  

an indigo butterfly seamless repeat pattern.

And I will probably do this all again, make more flowers, add vines and dots, draw new butterflies. This was a first draft exercise. I want to refine it and eventually have it printed on fabric to see how it looks for real.

You can find instructions on the web for creating a seamless repeat pattern.