Field trip to San Diego

We went to San Diego for a five day weekend and had a great time. The skies were hazy just about the whole time, but I was glad to get away from the 90 degree heat in Denver.

We did some easy hikes around Torrey Pines State Park. We saw some dolphins and a seal from one of the beach overlooks.

We went to the zoo. I used to love pandas when I was little. I even had a stuffed animal panda named Tsunami.

We ate too much. This was a red tortilla encrusted chili relleno at Prado.(This was amazingly good, except the cabbage).

We watched some surfers. The water was freezing.

We went to the San Diego Botanical garden. I have started an art quilt of water lilies so needed to take lots of reference photos.

We walked around the Balboa park area. There were quite a few museums, but we just stopped in the Timken.  In an area between the main drag and the zoo, there is an artisan area. It was really quite cool as most of the spaces were studios as well as shops, and there were quite a few artists working (an oil painter, a collage paper artist, etc.). I bought some handspun wool yarn that was silky soft and kind of kinky/curly.

And of course we walked on the beach and stuck our toes in the ocean.

Framed Day of the Dead skulls, Part 1

Michael's finally has some Halloween stuff coming in. I picked up a bunch of these paper mache skulls. They also had some ornate frames in the clearance section, so I picked some of those up as well.

I cut the back of the skull off so that it would lie flat in the frame (I left "tabs" to be able to attach the skulls later on).  I glued some paper behind the eye/nose/cheek openings so that I could fill them with paper clay. Paper clay need a surface to stick to and will not attach without something behind the opening. I mixed some matte medium into my paper clay so it would adhere well. After the paper clay dried, the skulls were gessoed and painted white. I will work on adding day of the dead touches to the skulls next week!

Foiling stamped images on fabric

In my last post, I showed some fabrics I had stamped with a skull stamp I had carved. I also used this stamp to stamp foil glue onto some fabrics. I had a hard time finding foiling adhesive at Michael's, I used Plaid glitter and foil adhesive, which was the only one I could find there.

Per the instructions, after waiting 24 hours, I ironed my Mylar foil onto the glue. The results are pretty poor. My feeling is that there was not enough adhesive on the fabric. I will probably try the glue again using a stencil instead, or find another glue.

This is probably the best one. This was a commercial fabric I over-painted and sun-printed on with Setacolor paints.

This was a marbleized fabric. This foiling looks horrible.

This one was on a Tshirt but the foiling looked very patchy.

I used Lumiere bronze paint to paint over the image.

Not super fantastic, but I will definitely wear it.

CO mixed media club, July meeting

For our July meeting, we used the new Speedball water based block printing ink for fabric to print soft cuts. Soft cuts are stamps/print blocks cut from linoleum, carvable surfaces fabricated by Speedball, Marvy erasers, etc.

We had carved some of these in a previous meeting so this was our chance to actually print with them if we hadn't done so before.

Sue Clarke's, I believe this stamp was actually made from sticky foam shapes attached to a substrate (printed on a book page).

Sue's print from Gayla's carved stamp.

Sue Clarke, Lots of layers, including a gelli plate print .

Sue Shenk's lovely flower garden

Gayla's prints from her carved block.

Gayla's prints in a different colorway. "Laundry line" carved stamp by Simone.

Simone's test print of some new stamps.

Simone's print on a Tshirt.

The start of Sabyl's print on a Tshirt.

Sabyl's test prints, her Tshirt looked like the one on the left when it was finished. 

Laurie's prints

This one was on a hand dyed fabric and looked really cool.

Enid's leaf print on patterned fabric. I wish I had a picture of her other print, which kind of reminded me of a quilt block pattern.

I spent a lot of time carving this skeleton stamp during our meeting, but love the results, printed on vintage linens.

The ink has to dry for a week but says it is permanent after that time. I will probably iron them anyway.  I printed some of my skulls with foil adhesive and will show the results after applying the foil tomorrow.


We had a fun day and had great results!

Copying a plastic skull with spray foam

So I saw a video online by Dr. Kreepy where he made copies of a plastic skull using spray foam.  I thought I would give it a try.

Here is my spray foam and my skull.

I cut my skull in two using a heavy duty Xacto knife. I cut a square in the backside to spray the foam into.  I rubbed the inside with petroleum jelly so that the foam would not stick to it.

I taped the skull back up with duct tape.

I sprayed the foam inside.  Over time, some of the foam would expand outside of the hole in the back and I would cut off this excess. At the end of day one, everything looked good and extra foam was not coming out.

 I walked away for three days and came back to this. Ack! My foam expanded and blew out the tape on the mold.

 

He's a bit misshapen.

 But from the front he doesn't look too bad.

I will definitely try this again, but use way less foam (I had filled it up about 90%) and add more duct tape to prevent it from blowing out the mold again.  I also left it to dry in the hot garage thinking this would speed up the drying time, but I think I will bring him in the house to dry the next time around.

Tie dye Tshirts now in my Etsy shop

I have added about ten of my tie dyed Tshirts to my Etsy store, here is the link if you may be interested! I hope to put some of my art on Etsy as well, in the near future.

 

Day of the Dead Mosaic

I am working on some Day of the Dead inspired mosaics. Here is one completed piece. I had quite a few handmade polymer clay tiles in my stash, but also included some store bought ceramic and glass tiles.

The center image is a old printing plate. The center girl has a three dimensional skull head, and I though the other girls needed skulls as well so I painted over them. The frame was meant to have tiles around the outside and has a separate frame edge for a photo in the center, but I glued the printing plate over that opening.

This really motivates me to make some more polymer clay tiles (until I remember all the difficulties I had with polymer clay!).

Field trip to Cherry Creek Art Festival

Every year on Fourth of July weekend, Denver hosts the Cherry Creek Art Festival.  I try to make it every year.  This year I found the art to be more my style than the last one I went to. There were quite a few mixed media artists which always appeals to me. There were some fiber artists, mainly with artistic scarves and jackets, but the art quilter was my favorite fiber artist there.

I thought I'd post the names, and websites if available, of some of the artists' whose work I enjoyed.

Terrie Mangat, art quilts. Website. Terrie had some lovely large quilts of florals and still lifes. They had a ton of texture and included traditional piecing along with less traditional methods.

Amy Gillespie, fiber/wood. Website. Amy stacks cut pieces of felt into abstract and landscape images and imbeds them into custom wood "frames".

Dolan Geiman, mixed media. Website. Dolan had this fantastic buffalo head made from metal pieces, as well as a three dimensional owl.  He had some assemblage guitars which where really cool.

Brad and Sundie Ruppert Website. Mixed media. Fun signs and portraits made from wood and found objects, with lots of color.

John Whipple, sculpture and painting. Blog. And Lynn Whipple, mixed media. Website and Blog. This husband and wife team have been at the festival for many years. John has an article in the current Somerset Studio magazine.  Lynn has been featured in it before as well. Fun and quirky.


I cannot find the other person I wanted to include here. He made wood furniture, mirror frames, etc carved out of wood and then completely covered them with color coordinated bottle caps.  I looked through the whole Cherry Creek Festival website and cannot find his name or a picture of his art.  It was really fun and colorful.

Making skeleton fabrics

I had used a plastic (flat) skeleton to make skeleton shapes on fabric for some art quilts last year, and thought I would do it again to make some pillows. I pre-cut my fabric a bit larger than what I will need to make the pillow (18" to 20" for a 16" pillow).

I had some Tumble Dye dyes that come in a spray bottle. I set my plastic skeleton down (he has hinged joints so you can see his pose changes on the fabrics) and spray the whole cloth, which are shown on the left side. Then I set another piece of fabric next to the first, pick up the skeleton and flipped him over, dye side onto the fabric. This was a little tricky as he was a bit drippy and his arms were flopping around.

I think they are great. The last time I did this I used Setacolor paints in spray bottles and I think the outline images were a little sharper, but very similar results.

The Tumble Dyes have to air dry then go in the dryer for 20 minutes. I will probably wash them after that just to make sure the dyes are set. I used 100% cotton for most of these, but there are some of unknown fiber content and I need to make sure the dye doesn't wash out of those. The packaging for the dyes did not specify a fabric type to use, so I hope they all turn out fine. I did make solid fabrics (just spraying ink to color the whole piece of fabric), for the back side of the solid colored ones.  One Tumble Dye spray bottle did one outline fabric, one transfer print fabric, and one piece of solid-ish backside fabric, but sometimes it was a stretch.

I'll show you the final pillows, hopefully next week!