Work for Stretching Art

I had a wonderful time at Festival of Quilts. I was looking after the SAQA stand rota and basically organising what was happening there. I met a lot of people and made friends with people I had only met before. And the best thing of all was that I was well the whole time! I was very tired on Monday, but not exhausted. It seems the relief from the stress of not even having to think about planning the schemes of work for teaching in the year ahead has already made a difference!

Anyway, I promised some photos of the work I sent for the Stretching Art Exhibition at PNQE ( I keep having to look it up...Pennsylvania National Quilt Extravaganza - or Quiltfest, I guess it is also called.)

I wanted to carry on exploring work with translucent fabrics. This show gives me good opportunity to do that. Firstly because it is about Stretching Art and secondly because the motivating factor is that the resulting pieces hardly weigh anything! So, I don't have to pay a fortune to ship them to America. I learned this trick when I sent Endless Possibilities for one of the shows.

The theme this time was Foundations. What came to mind for me was the idea of a foundational course to give knowlege in something. Sometimes titled English 101 and so on. So, I decided on Sewing 101. I was going to do 2 pieces with variations on that title, but the second one morphed into Pattern Drafting 101.

So here is Sewing 101: Seams

A bit about the design development:
On the seams piece, I wanted to explore a variety of seam treatments as a design element similar to pojagi.

For my little sketch just to see seam placement, I wrote seam names along the lines. This looked like a good addition, so I decided to use it in the whole piece.

Carefully writing the words, all was going well until a momentary lack of concentration. I had changed the placement of the piped and lapped seams but wrote it as the sketch.

SO! What to do?

So, I decided to make a little cover for the name with the new name and see what I thought. I decided it actually worked to highlight the name. So, I did it to all the seam names, not just the piped one.

and Pattern Drafting 101: Adaptations

A bit about the design development:
For the pattern drafting piece, I wanted to include half scale samples of pattern adaptations which are used on a basic pattern piece to create the various styles. I looked through my books to find a few that might be recognisable, but that also were foundational in that they covered some of the basic adaptation techniques. I also wanted them to give an interesting design together.

I wanted the pieces to reference the tissue purchased patterns are from. But I don't have much of pattern tissue. I gave nearly all of my patterns to the National Needlework Archive. I do have one old pattern I had used to cover my drafting folder when I did C+G, but I didn't know if I had used it up or what. Anyway, some of the transparent paper fabric was nearly the same colour. A bit too transparent, so I used several layers. I cut the patterns out with a soldering iron,

and spot welded the layers together.

When you need to add additional paper to a pattern you are adapting, you glue or tape it into the gap. So, for this, I used another layer of the paper fabric and again spot fused it.

If you think you would like to see the other pattern adaptations close-up, let me know in the comments. The example above is the leg-o-mutton sleeve.

I arranged the patterns on the already layered piece and then used another layer of the paper fabric over top.

This was not the final placement
It seemed a bit static and like it wanted a bit of something else to give movement. So, I found I still had a part of an already cut section of that pattern I had used for the folder. I cut words, symbols and lines from the pattern tissue. For this I placed it between the bottom layer (silk organza) and the lowest layer of paper fabric. It kept these pieces from standing out too strongly.

So, there you are! If you are anywhere near the show; 13-16 September, 2012, do go and see my work and tell me what you think.

UPDATE: I have linked this in to a new feature on Nina-Marie Sayre's blog. Nin-Marie had a cool idea to invite artists to show what they're working on. The links will show up every Friday. Go see what others are up to. Leave a comment.