#makearteveryday continues, even on holiday!

My sketchbook continues to occupy me each day, even when I was on holiday in Gran Canaria last month.

First a catch-up of the few days before we went.....

Rusting compound over stencil on watercolour background

Fabric collage with stitching and buttons

  

   

Wooden stamp with added pen drawing

Collage lettering on map background

At the beginning of January I thought about leaving it until February before restarting my sketchbook, mainly because of the two week holiday we had planned.  After much though I decided to go ahead and started to put together my art kit to take.  I kept it small, just taking watercolours and brushes, drawing pencils and pens, glue stick and some coloured fineline drawing pens but off course I found that I wanted so much more, particularly acrylic paints and gel medium.

Despite struggling with supplies, I found that inspiration was all around me and I never struggled with ideas each day.   I took photos while we were out, collected ephemera here and there and generally kept my eyes open at all times.

Collage of cut paper - inspired by wind turbines

Pen drawing - no explanation required!

Pen drawing with watercolour

Pen drawing with watercolour and ephemera background

Hexagon shaped collage of guide book picture

Painted paper collage - strelitza nicolai

Pen detail on watercolour background - cactus inspired

Collage of ephemera gathered on day out on a bus

Watercolour with pen - shadows on hotel canopy

Collage of sugar sachets

Tea stained background with collage of teabag packets

Mark making with watercolour using various tools

Pen drawing

Painted paper cut-outs on watercolour background

Paper collage on watercolour background

To finish the month, I made use of some of stash of painted papers.

Gelli printing on book page

Collage of torn, layered and painted paper

Thermofax print of cactus image on acrylic painted background

The sketchbook is becoming very fat now and as it nears the end of the book it is becoming more and more difficult to get good photos.  I am thinking now about what to use when this one is complete to make it easier.

Looking Forward

 I gave up writing new year targets and goals a few years ago and as it made no difference to the amount of creativity that happened during the year, so I see no reason to change!

My plans for the year so far are to take part in Contemporary Quilts Journal Quilt challenge, restart working daily in my sketchbook and complete a 'year of stitches', all of which are underway.

Journal Quilt

This year's challenge is a little different to the previous few years in that there are guidelines for each set of four months.   The first set (January - April) must include a sewing technique, preferably one that you do not usually use so that you are more challenged.   Suggestions given were applique, reverse applique, traditional quilting, EPP, foundation, trapunto, curved piecing, chenille and collage.

Straight away 'curved piecing' jumped out at me as it is one technique I have never used.  I have tried it with disastrous results which I vowed never to repeat again.  If a curve was required, bondaweb and zig zag stitching was the order of the day!

I have also been drawn back to rust recently and together with indigo dyeing I decided that as far as possible I would use the two for each of the quilts.  I discovered rusting powder so no more wrapping fabric around bits of metal!

So, for my January quilt I made two drunkards path blocks using some rust dyed fabric and some very old indigo dyed fabric.  It must be nearly 30 years old as I remember doing it while doing C&G in the 1980s.   I consulted the web for instructions for curved piecing which was worthwhile as the two blocks were made with no unpicking and the seams layed flat!

The addition of free machine quilting in a circle design plus some hand stitching using perle cotton - another technique I intend to use on this year's quilts - completed the quilt top.  For the binding this year I am using a patterned fabric from Jim Holtz Eclectic Elements range called Travel Labels.  Once cut up the colour is perfect for the binding.

     

 Year of Stitches

I have also decided to challenge myself to regular stitching by making a commitment to stitch during every month.  I have seen various challenges on Instagram so went for a circular format divided into each month.

This was the starting point.  It's only an 8" frame so hopefully I will be able to keep it going.  So far it has been very slow stitching but I do have lots of ideas for the next few weeks so I will catch up again at the end of the month.

Finally for this beginning of 2019, I have restarted my daily sketchbook with the intention of creating some sort of art each day.  Once again it will be a mixture of sketching, collage, mixed media, stitching, in fact anything that takes my fancy or inspires me on that day.

So far this is what I have completed....

Pen and watercolour sketch

Collage of sweet papers

Pen and watercolour sketch

Acrylic paint layers

Pen Sketch

Collage of Christmas stamps and lettering

Acrylic paint stamp with watercolour wash

Layer of silk organza of printed photo with machine and hand stitches

Collage of gelli printed tissue paper

September Journal Quilt

This months quilt is inspired by the many cactus we saw in and around the hotel in Gran Canaria. 

For the construction I was inspired by some videos of Hilary Beattie that I have been watching on You Tube.   She is really a great inspiration and I have admired her work for some years.  She is also a very generous artist who openly shares her way of creating not just in workshops she runs from her studio but also on the internet.

Using her methods, I printed and dyed some fabrics inspired by the spines and form of the cactus.  Using the fabrics I arranged a collage of shapes, together with photos of the cactus.  I did minimal machine quilting around the square shapes but added hand stitching to reflect the spines of the cactus.

  

I think this is definitely going to be one of my favourites this year.

Collage for a change!

Just for a change I have abandoned  fabric and threads and have completed a collage, still under the theme of "Seen From Above".

A few months ago I bought a Gelli Plate so have been experimenting and watching demos on You tube!   For anyone who, like I used to, thinks that you can do mono prints on a sheet of glass so don't need to spend, let's face it, quite a lot of money on a Gelli Plate .... well you're wrong! They are superb so if you need convincing try to get on a course or see a demo in person to be convinced.

Having produced a large stack of printed papers I had to do a collage so used the isle of Portsea as my subject.   We go to Portsmouth quite a bit so it seemed appropriate.

I started by painting an A3 piece of cartridge paper with orange acrylic as the background and then used various printed paper for different areas of Portsea, leaving small spaces in between all the pieces so the orange showed through.  I used the same orange acrylic to paint the edges of a canvas frame and then collaged blue printed papers as the sea surrounding the island.

To use up the left over pieces, I made some cards!

Journal Quilts

I have yet again signed up for Contemporary Quilts Journal Quilt Challenge and for this year the only stipulation is that they have to be 12" x 6" and you have to decide at the beginning of the year whether you will work in portrait of landscape.   I decided to work in portrait and this year I am going to create mixed-media quilts.

I thought long and hard about a theme but as I was completely stumped on this, I will take something from the month to inspire my design.

For January, I went for the weather and although at the time we had not had any snow, I did have some photos I had taken a few years ago which I wanted to use.   I started with a grey background which I discharged snowflake designs with a thermofax screen. To this I added snowflakes printed on to fabric and paper using another thermofax screen and snowflakes cut from lacy paper, Angelina fibres and film together with one of my photos of snow and icicles in black and white.  I also wanted to add some text so I wrote 'let it snow' on some tissue paper and this became part of the design.  I edged the two long edges with some lace and after binding I stitched white beads in to the inner edge.

   

I used Valentines Day as the inspiration for February and created a design based on love and hearts.  The base fabric was started by printing a red design with a Thermofax screen but as it was rather too bright I placed some lacy paper over the top to tone it down.  The heart in the centre was made by bonding various red fabrics and threads with bondaweb and then bonding red organza over the top. This was then machine stitched to a piece of card which was in turn mounted to a piece of dyed fabric.  I again included some text which this time were the lyrics to "A Million Love Songs" which I printed on to hand made paper.   The tags at the bottom are painted price tags which I over printed and then wrote the words.  Finished with ric rac, buttons and beads which were again stitched around the edge after the binding was added.

 

 

 

    

Two small quilts

I'm making the most of the free time I have before the Christmas rush arrives!

I've recently signed up for DMTV and have been inspired by some of the videos I have watched.   If you have never seen or heard of these excellent videos, have a look at Design Matters website which is run by the very talented Linda and Laura Kemshall.

I have long been an admirer of their work and inspired by their use of quilting which is often much more dense that I would ever do!   I also love the printed fabrics that Laura sells under Fingerprint Fabrics.  I have purchased some in the past at FOQ and have recently bought a couple of pieces of map fabrics for using in my "Seen From Above" series.

One of the videos I was inspired by was about using your own printing blocks to create first papers and then fabrics to use in collage.

So using the map fabric - an old map of London - and some simple stamp made with foam blocks, I created two collages in my sketchbook which I then translated into small quilts using my own dyed fabrics which I had printed.   The use of a rectangle for the stamps was to reflect the buildings which would be seen on a map of a different scale.  

On the first one I quilted around the rectangles and then bit the bullet and did some much more dense free quilting on the map area.  I left a couple of areas unquilted for variety.   As with my earlier quilt in this series, I quilted the title of the quilt on the right side which I intend to do with all my creations in this series.



Seen From Above - Suburbs I

     

For the second one, I again quilted around the rectangles first and then machine quilted vertical lines over the map areas.



Seen From Above - Suburbs II

     

Each quilt measures about 12" x 16".