Status Update - Leather Projects

Ok, this is an experiment. Because I apparently find writing a complete blog post painfully restricting and seemingly impossible to complete. I am going to attempt the 'status update' format of Facebook or Google+  for my blog entries. No one reads the long posts anyway, right, if they read anything at all.  It's all about the photos and less than 140 words in today's world. So I am going to write more frequent, but shorter and less 'informative' posts. 

In the last week I've been working with leather. 

I made two miniature leather journals and a medicine bag. 

The leather is all from inexpensive bags of scraps you can buy by the pound. I've never worked in leather before. It's rather tough to sew. You need special needles and thread and tools like a leather punch and a very sharp stanly knife. But it smells sooo good.

I have plans for more journals and bags and possibly jewelry pieces or embellishments. 

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.

Handmade Books

A few years ago I decided to learn how to coptic stitch bind my own blank books.  I had recently purchased a beautiful coptic bound journal with stiff leather covers and it was a rare find. I like the look of the exposed binding. I love how coptic bound books lay completely flat when open. I wanted more but choices were few and far between or too expensive for my budget. so of course I thought, "I can do this myself".  And that is basically true but achieving the high standard I appreciated when I see these books takes practice and quality materials.  Well, I have lots to practice on but quality materials will come later when I've practiced enough. 

I recently finished a number of coptic bound 'practice' books and a couple other books.
This is what I have been doing:  

Other Non-coptic books I finally finished.
Denim fabric covered booklets with colorful painted pages:

In the process for cutting paper to size for the coptic books I ended up with a large stack of accurately cut mini sheets of paper. Something most people might throw away. But what I see is paper for tiny books. I have plans for this paper.

Plans for Mini Books:

2" x 4" sheets and 1 1/2" x 3" sheets

2" x 2" book in progress

Check back later to see the Mini Books completed! They are so cute.

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.

Where is my Round TUIT II

In my last post I summarized my projects up to around June. Now I'll finish that list to get to where I am today, maybe. But I am never doing just one thing at a time and most projects span days, weeks, months, sometimes years. They come in and out of rotation depending on my mood, interest, or outside events like holidays or gift giving moments. Some of what I do is just for the fun of doing it and learning something new. Sometimes I have new materials (paint, yarn, paper, pencils, etc.) I want to experiment with. Sometimes I actually want to make something to use in my home like a bed quilt, place mats, wall art or a photo collage of the family. And holidays, usually Christmas, always inspire me to make something, usually many things. 

June, July, August...

* Tray collage from an old cookie sheet

What do you do with an old cookie sheet that has seen its last cookie? It's still a piece of metal, it should be useful for something. It may be scratched, stained, dented, rusted or you just don't want to use it anymore because you got fancy new cookie sheets. I had one I was using as a shelf on a wire bakers rack. Not pretty but functional. I never really thought about painting it. I think I just automatically dismissed that idea because I didn't think the paint would stick, it probably would scratch too easily and maybe peel off.  But I've been doing a lot of collage with acrylic gels and paper lately and find that combination seems to stick to anything and creates a great surface to paint and do more collage on. So I took that old cookie sheet to my craft room and completely covered it front and back with a base paper collage layer, painted it some and collaged some colorful cutout papers on the top. It actually came out better than I ever expected. It's not something that can be washed anymore, but it can be cleaned with a damp cloth. Acrylic paint is really tough, it's basically plastic. I wouldn't submerge this tray in water but I would have no problem keeping it clean.

* Streets and blocks collage

This was the collage I started back when I was still trying to make something to put the red harts on mentioned in an earlier post. Like many of my mixed medial projects it became something other than I first imagined as I worked on it. I called it streets and blocks because the first layer of papers were squares of security envelope papers and strips of text pasted in a grid like configuration.  I was playing with an idea but didn't know where I would end up. I still had those hearts I want to put somewhere. After several go rounds with paint and auditioning the hearts I settled on color, placement and the addition of some painted string for accents. I don't love it but I'm moving on to other projects. 

* Inktense blocks, butterflies and Photoshop

I don't do watercolor. My self-taught art experiments are typically acrylic paint over a pencil sketch. As a kid I loved to color and I like making art and improving my skills. I dusted off my drawing pencils and colored pencils a couple years ago and started drawing butterflies. They aren't exactly realistic but I was focusing on the wing patterns and colors. That's really what I wanted to capture. To me, the body is just an oblong shape the wing is attached to. While working on these drawings I saw a blog post or something about colored pencils that were water soluble and that intrigued me. I've been experimenting with them ever since. I first got the Staedtler watercolor crayons and the Derwent Aquatone pencils.  Later on I got the Derwent Intense pencils which are, exactly as they advertise, intense color. Recently I finally got the Derwent Intense Blocks and you can use them in so many ways, they are very nice for making watercolor like artwork. 

This butterfly is one of my little experiments. Of course, one of my pictures is never done until I scan it and create a digital composition with it in photoshop. Then I can print it on a card or something else or post it online.  Then I'm happy with my amateur art. 

*Just painting and playing 

I've been reading a number of books on mixed media techniques and acrylic painting. They inspire me to try different things with color, texture, materials and composition. I never know when an idea will hit me. I absorb all the information and wait for inspiration.  I woke one day up with an idea for a collage and was squirting paint on a canvas in my PJ's before I even had my morning coffee. It wasn't suppose to just be a painting, I had planned other layers of papers and paint, but after adding some alcohol inks and acrylic gloss I liked the result and left it as simply a painting. 

I've also been experimenting with texture base layers for my artwork. This painting had a texture layer I created with wall texture compound. Last year I covered a wall in one of our bedrooms with this stuff and created a stucco texture to cover damage and other imperfections in the wall. It turned out really well but now I have a ton of this stuff leftover. I'll be doing more experimenting using this as a texture base layer for paintings and collage. 

*Star Trek fabric

I love fabric and I love Star Trek. How could I resist Star Trek fabric. Of course I couldn't. It didn't matter what I might end up making with it, if anything. If I had it I would make something, eventually. I first got the fat quarter bundle with a sample of all the prints because I wanted them all. Then I decided I needed more of some of the prints because I liked them the best. Finally I decided I was going to make a single bed size quilt with this fabric and bought extra fabric of some prints. At this point I have enough fabric to make the quilt top and a design planned. Making it is on my To Do list. 

*And a few othr things
To be continued...