Time, Chaos and the Tip of the Iceberg

What happened to March and April?  I have been busy, just not with craft projects to post about. I got into a serious spring cleaning project and totally sorted and reorganized all my cloths, shoes, linens and blanket storage areas. I picked a ton of stuff to clear out and loaded my car trunk with everything nice enough to give away and hauled it all to Goodwill. The remaining items were either trash or to be recycled as rags, or craft materials. I've made many rugs from old sheets, curtains or t-shirts in the past. It's a good feeling to be organized even for a little while. Life always tends toward chaos so this exercise will be repeated again sometime in the future. 

After enjoying the contentment of being organized for awhile I started on my next big project that I have to admit has been planned for a couple years! The goal is to paint the kitchen/dinning room (all one large area) and laundry room. I knew I would need about a month to do it and it would be disruptive and physically tiring for me so I've procrastinated for as long as I can. I had to start it no matter how I felt or what ever else was going on. That's a lot of wall, odd spaces (like behind the fridge), a lot of small and large items to move out of the way and a lot of woodwork to paint on hands and knees. I started in late March and I'm still not done. I was being overly optimistic to think I could get it done in a month. I can't work on it every day. I have bad days (bad weeks) when I can't do anything that physical and I have to rest a day or more after doing something very physical. So the project drags on but now that I've started I will finish it. Eventually. 

So that's what happened to most of March and April and on into May. But I do take time to work on some crafts because they make me happy when everything else feels like work and drudgery. 

I've been working on some fabric designs to print at Spoonflower. I've done a little of this in the past and while I'm still learning how to make the most of this service, I put together files to test print my designs. The fabric prints never look exactly like the digital file. The colors look different, the edges are fuzzier, some colors that are distinctly different in the digital file look nearly the same color printed, and this time some of my design detail was completely missing in the printed fabric version.

This is a one yard piece of Kona cotton fabric printed with designs I'm working on:

This is a collection of indigo prints I designed.  I'm happy for the most part with these but the background color printed as a solid blue and it is suppose to be a scratchier aged looking background. That detail in the digital file was completely lost in the printing process. 

I designed this simple half square triangle geometric using my favorite colors. (digital version)

This is the final printed version of the colorful geometric design shown above.  This photo doesn't show how nice it really came out. 

This is a collection of half square triangle quilt design elements that I use when designing new quilt patterns.  There are 256 different elements and it's a fascinating design process that has intrigued me for years. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with this. I just wanted to see it printed on fabric. 

And this is a sample of a pattern I'm trying for a topographic or contour line fabric. In this case the fact that the fabric print comes out just a little fuzzier than the digital file actually helps the appearance  of the design. I'm encouraged by how this looks in this rough form. 

More recently I just sat down and did some sewing. I just feels good to finish something I can use right away.  My husband thinks I'm a little late in getting this done.  I told him I was actually early. 

This is a Christmas table runner. 

I think of end products as the tip of the iceberg. So much of what we do has hidden behind it hours of planning, training, trial and error, time and energy, skill, practice, repeated efforts, anxiety, frustration, maybe even pain and suffering. The thing you admire in the end is the sum total of all that went into it.

Thanks for reading. 

Aileen

Multitasking Projects

When I was working in my profession, multitasking was an essential skill for success. While working with dozens of technical professionals across multiple projects with several different computer systems, operating systems, programming languages and systems to contend with, multitasking was the only constant. It's what I've always done. It's what I still do. Even though now I am spending most of my time on hobby activities I will switch between multiple projects in any given day. From the outside it may look unfocused and haphazard but I make forward progress in most things over time. My craft spaces are well organized and I can switch between projects easily and it works out well because I can accomplish more than one thing at a time, there is no wasted time. For example, some artwork and collage work required breaks in time to allow for drying or pressing.  I can sew or work on digital art during those breaks. I also get tired hunched over a sewing machine too long or my hands hurt after hand quilting too long or I get tired standing over my art table too long. Switching from one task to another let's me keep working on projects but allows me to choose what I feel up to doing that day or hour. 

The downside is that when I try to write a post about what I have been doing it is always about multiple things. Because that is what I have been doing in a week, heck even in a day. But the secondary upside is it is more like cross training. Work I do in designing quilts may give me an idea for a collage, a collage may end up as a book cover, bookbinding may spark an idea for Fabric design or a quilted piece may end up as a book cover.

This is my current round up of activities:

A new indigo butterfly fabric repeat print. I created new flower shapes in the ArtRage app on my iPad, pulled all the elements in a little tighter, filled the blank space more with flower elements and increased the number of butterflies. I like this one and it has given me ideas for using other iPad apps to create the basic elements of another fabric design. 

My first little book and what am I doing wrong? It's still cute. Everyone who sees it likes it. But there is a problem. See the little ribbon. I didn't plan on putting that on the book. I had to add it to hold the little book closed. It kept popping open. I put it under heavy weight for a day, even hammered the bound edge some, but the top cover keeps popping up. I don't know if it's my binding technique, the weight of the binding string I used, the size of the signatures, or something else. So I decided to do a few experiments to eliminate possibilities. First I rebound it with different size string.  What you see here is the second binding. That helped some but didn't solve the problem. Rather than remake this one a dozen times I made several little books with simple cardboard covers varying the signature page count and string size. This is just one of many I've made and I still have not completely resolved the problem but the smaller the string size I use the less the problem becomes. 

This is terrible, I took it apart and did it over.

 This is better but still popping up some.

 Finally, this one is lying almost flat.

 The next set of little books are even smaller.

Purple scraps collage. Remember that pile of scraps from a previous post? Well, this is the beginning of something.  I still don't know what yet but these are some initial collages of some of the scraps I saved and they are sure to be scanned and then cut up and used some other way.

Digital Collage of Fabric and Paper Collages

Tarot card bags. One crochet with a cotton and silk blend yarn and  the second is a scrap patchwork bag that is lightly padded.

 Front and back.

Color test fabric and new geometric pattern. More color testing of Spoonflower cotton fabric and I'm working on a design for a multicolor geometric print.

One yard multicolor test print.

 

 My favorite colors and what I'm working on a design for.

Color codes.

Where is my Round TUIT?

This is simply a list of all the blog entries I intended to write but never got around to doing. Why? I don't know. I either didn't have a good enough photo, or I couldn't think of what I wanted to write, or I was busy making something else that I would eventually not get around to writing a blog entry about, or I was busy reading a book, doing housework, or surfing Pinterest.  It doesn't really matter. Most of the time I just forget to do it and get sidetracked doing something else. Which makes me ask myself, "Why am I writing this blog anyway?" and if I cared about it "Why do I procrastinate on writing these entries?".  When I'm motivated and care about something I get it done. So this is something I should think about.  In the meantime, this is a list of things I have been doing over the past several months. I'll include a short description for each item and a photo if I have one. Here goes.

January thru June 2014

* Embroidered quilt pieces, red heart quilt pieces and a Quilted Eyeglass case

These are simple scrap quilt pieces that I have been working on, on and off now for awhile, building up a pile of 'things' to make other 'things' with. The eyeglass case is one 'thing' I made from the other 'things', the embroidered quilt pieces. I think I posted a photo of this to Facebook.

* Sky Photo Book, digital collages, and digital art

This is the result of my 2013 365 day project. I took a photo of the skyline out my front kitchen window everyday for one year. I put all those photos in a photo book I made on Shutterfly for myself and I created digital collages of all the photos and then used those photo collages to create digital art in apps on my iPad. 

* Icicle ornaments with red and blue colored copper wire

This is a continuation of the icicle ornaments I was making for Christmas 2013. Even after making several and giving them as gifts in 2013, I still had several vintage glass beads to use on more projects. I found some beautiful red and turquoise colored copper wire to use instead of simple silver and copper colored copper wire and wire forms for snowflake shape beaded ornaments. 

* Wire wrapped tree of life with pyrite beads

I really like the wire wrapped tree-of-life pendants and ornaments I've seen and I keep making them trying to get better at it. I've seen so many beautiful ones on Pinterest, they are all very inspirational and I have a few design ideas I want to try. I choose pyrite for this one because it was a gift for my son's birthday and I put 20 beads for his age and made it into something that could be a key chain if he wanted to use it that way. 

* Collages with painted paper, Blue Butterfly, Orange Butterfly, Flowers and Butterfly

Last summer I posted photos of butterfly collages made with fabric, paint and some paper. I'm still drawn to the butterfly theme in artwork and explore different ways to represent it.  In the last year I have been doing some mixed media painting exercises I found in books and on line and I've compiled a large collected of painted papers to use in collages. I've completed three more butterfly collages done in paper and paint on canvas and each time I do one I learn a little more. 

* Collage with Big Leaf

One day, a couple summers ago, my husband came in from doing the yard work carrying a big leaf (9"x6") full of holes. It was cool looking and he thought I might want to use it in some project. He knows by now that almost everything I touch I can find some use for and the more mixed media work I do, everything becomes a 'potential' subject, tool, element, etc...  I wasn't sure what to do with it at first but I definitely wanted to use it. So to preserve it for future use I first painted it with acrylic paint and used it to stamp some prints on sheets of paper, then I basically glued the entire holy leaf onto another sheet of white paper with clear acrylic gloss medium and set it and the stamped papers aside, ... until this year. I was sorting through some papers and came across that leaf and stampings and had an idea for a collage. This was one of those instances when everything else I was doing was put on hold until I finished the collage with that Big Leaf. 

* Spoonflower fabric, hunt for the reddest red

I love the concept of what Spoonflower does, design your own fabric and have it printed out. How cool is that?! Awesome! I was so excited when I found their site a few years ago, I immediately joined and set about preparing some of my quilt designs in Photoshop Elements (PSE) to try out their service. I even researched how to correctly create a seamless repeat pattern and created a test print file of what I was working on to have printed. I ordered a print of that design on a quarter yard of fabric and anxiously waited to see my design printed on fabric. Sadly, I was disappointed. Not In the quality of the print or the fabric, but in the colors. I use a lot of primary colors, especially red and black in my designs, and all my reds printed orange and some of the other colors shifted. I knew they had a color code guide for their fabric printing but I was hoping I wouldn't have to get that technical in my PSE editing. No such luck. At that point it didn't look like even changing the color codes in my design would print a Red I would be happy with. I didn't want to go through multiple experimental prints (they all cost something) and more PSE edits. I decide to wait. Spoonflower was bound to improve in multiple ways over time and I would feel more like doing all the technical work to find the color code and print match I was looking for further down the line. 

And that's what I did this year. I purchased a print of their new, improved, color code chart and created a repeat print pattern in PSE8 using their codes of all the reds I wanted to test and all the primary colors I was likely to use in a design. I'm happy to say it turned out beautiful and there are multiple 'reds' that meet my design needs. I haven't done any more with this for now but I am working on some Christmas fabric designs that use bright colors, including red, and I am curious to see how they would come out. 

* Simple placemats

This is one of those boring, simple, but satisfying craft projects. I had one of those "Why am I making this so complicated?" moments one day when I was working on a patchwork placemat. I'd had this big idea of a patchwork design I was going to use when making a set of placemats. Well, halfway through the first of four I suddenly got bored, or tired or realized this was going to take longer than I was willing to commit to something as functional as a simple placemat. They get spilled on, stained, washed frequently, etc.  Duh, they are table protection, just placemats. This is not a wall hanging project or a decorative tabletop quilt piece, it's just a placemat. So why am I approaching it like something special? That's when I decided to KISS (keep it simple stupid) and use colorful pieces of fabric from my large collection of fat quarters and just layer, machine quilt, and bind uncut pieces of fabric. What a concept!? As a quilter, for years (decades!) I've been cutting to pieces countless yards of fabric and sewing them back together. You'd think I'd get tired of that.  Well, in this case I did. There are many beautiful fabrics that stand alone and don't deserve to be cut into little pieces and that's what I went searching for in my collection. Now I have multiple beautiful, colorful, interesting placemats and didn't overwork myself making them.

Well, that catches me up to July, I think, and seems like a good place to stop today.