Cow quilt

Earlier this year, I decided to make a cow quilt. Not a quilt with a cow on it, an art quilt shaped like a cow. 

Meet George. She is roughly 5'6" high and 6'6" wide.

George is raw edge pieced, with fused and stitched circles.

She is mainly recycled fabrics. Her rump is a curtain, you can see the metal grommets for the curtain rod. It was a patterned white-on-white fabric, but I painted the diamond shapes with acrylic paint. In order to get the paints to blend, without bleeding into the unpainted sections, I mixed my acrylic paint with clear aloe vera gel.  Below is a picture of what would happen if I had used water instead. The aloe vera worked very well. I did not add anything else to the acrylic paint as it is an art quilt and cannot be machine washed. I did iron the painted sections to help "set" the paint, with a teflon sheet between my iron and the fabric. It did "smoke" a bit and smelled a bit funny, so I turned down the heat a bit to medium high. I do not think this was toxic, but don't take my word on it. I should have put on my respirator.

This fabric (below) was a purchased solid white twill. I stamped the fabric using a washer. You can see the post about stamping this fabric here.

The top white section is a white cotton tablecloth. The colored belly section is a puddle painted piece of polyester sheer curtain.  My blogs on puddle painting can be seen here and here (not the same fabric, just the technique).

The fabric that looks like small dots (shown below in the middle and used for some of the legs) is a textured curtain. It was white and I lightly rubbed Shiva paintsticks over it, which only painted the raised parts on the fabric. After letting the fabric sit for a few days, I ironed it to set the colors.

I did have a full size paper "pattern" of the overall cow, but just used that to figure out my piecing.

 

Once all the pieces were sewn together, I pinned it to some batting and free motion stitched it, outline stitching the patterns on the fabrics.

I came into textile arts from a mixed media background. I will be the first to say that I will not pass any tests regarding having a beautiful back side on my quilt.  I did not want to have a binding around the outside edge, and did not want to have to turn down the curved edge of the fabric on the back side, so I used the "pillowcase method" which involves laying the backer fabric face to face with the quilt top, sewing all around but leaving an opening in one section, in order to turn it right-side out. Before turning it, I did add some iron-on stiff interfacing at her head and rump so she would not sag when she was hung.  I then turned the quilt right-side out and sewed 1/4" from the outside edge, all around the quilt. This is really too big a quilt to use the pillowcase method, and there are some wrinkles and folds in the backing fabric.  But she is a beauty on the front side!

Summer Art Market in Denver

For many years I have participated in the Denver Art Students League Summer Art Market the second weekend of June.  I was working hard to have new pieces for the show, and so my blog was largely ignored for the last month.  Also, I was working on a large art quilt and did not want to post the progress, but wait until it was finished.

I went to Denver the weekend before last and stayed for over a week. It was a blast, I had so much fun at the art fair, with my friends, doing things around town, seeing a concert at Red Rocks, and going to Denver ComicCon. I feel like I stuffed a month worth of things-to-do into one week.  And Denver had a lot going on.

I am going to do a couple posts of things I did, places I went, etc. I am going to start with the Summer Art Market.

For the last year or so, I've been doing cow gelli prints and have kind of been cow obsessed.  This year I decided I wanted to make a cow art quilt. Shaped like a cow. Big like a cow.  I started it in January and finished it the day before the show.  Here is a picture of George in my tent at the show. I will do a nicer picture later, after I iron some black fabric to use as a background.

 Here is a picture of George and I, so you can see how big she is.

Why is she named George? I love my cow quilt and I was reminded of the old Bugs Bunny cartoon where Daffy Duck meets the Abominable snowman, and the snowman scoops him up and says, I will call him George, and I will hug him, and pet him and squeeze him.  That is the way I feel about by cow quilt. I will do a separate post, probably next week, of all the fabric and techniques I used to create it.  I have at least three other big cows I would like to make.


Here is the other side of my booth.

Here is a street shot of the show. I had a fabulous time, met a lot of people, and sold some artwork. Win, win, win.

Adding Shiva paintsticks to a whole cloth quilt

Last month, I had sewn up some whole cloth quilts, roughly 16" x 20", using some ice dyed fabrics. I had quilted and then painted two of them, which can be seen here.  I have two more that I had started, and I worked on one this weekend.

Here is my quilt with stitched clouds. I wanted the clouds to be more defined, so I decided to add white at the top of each cloud.

I used a white Shiva oil stick and a stencil brush to apply it.  After removing the waxy coating from the stick, I rubbed it on a piece of freezer paper.  Then I rubbed the stencil brush into the paint and then applied it to the fabric.  I could have used the oil stick directly on the fabric, but it would have been more opaque than I wanted.

Here is the finished piece.  After letting the paint air dry a couple days, I will iron it to heat set it.

I still have one more whole cloth quilt to finish, it has big pink flowers.  I have done the free-motion stitching, and will probably add some Setacolor transparent paints to enhance the colors. Off to the studio to finish it!

Patchwork tree fabric collage

I have been working on some blue patchwork backgrounds recently.  I have specific ideas for each.  I finished one of them, which is pictured below.

A couple months ago, I was at Sabyl and Susan's studio, and Sabyl was working on a wood cut of some tree trunks and the stark simplicity of it was beautiful to me.

For days afterwards I was looking at the bare winter branches everywhere I went. I was a bit obsessed. When I started working on my patchwork backgrounds, I knew one of them would be of bare branches.  I love the stark contrast of the trunk and branches against the bright blue sky. 

Painted art quilts

I have a bunch of ice dyed fabrics, but was kind of stumped what to do with them.  I thought I'd make some quilts (roughly 16"x 20") and brayer paint on them.  Could be a tragedy, or could be cool, right?

Here is my first one, I really hate this Jade Green color. I do not free motion quilt very often, and I can tell how rusty I am, on these jaggedy looking swirls.  I drew one line of the swirls before I started quilting (not that it helped), but I didn't have much of a plan other than that.

I did measure these circles vertically so they would go from big to small (I drew lines with spacing at about 1 3/4" at one end and 1" at the other), but did not draw the circles ahead of time, or the horizontal spacing.

Here is my work station. I just brayered the paint on. I did not clean the brayer between colors. This took a lot of paint. The amount shown in this picture is laughable, it would probably only cover 2" x 2".

It looks pretty cool.

Here are the swirls. I really like it and think my swirls look better painted, for some reason. When I started, I thought I'd make them white with a hint of color, but I really liked the mix of colors. I may add more paint, and/or hand stitching.

Here are the circles. I do like the mix of colors, but find the pattern kind of boring.  I am thinking of making a much smaller art quilt and mounting it in the middle, leaving about a  4" border all around.

I really like the look of these, but I am somewhat sad that more of the ice dyeing isn't visible. I thought more of it would show adjacent to the stitched lines.

I already have two more quilts made, but think I will try another technique with them, maybe break out the Shiva paint sticks for those.

What do you think?  Do you think the swirly one needs a bit more work?

Mounted fabric collages on canvas

Previously I had made some fabric collages, which you can see on this post. I added some hand stitching, which can be seen here.

I wanted to mount these to canvas to give them a more finished look. Here are some of the finished pieces.

 Here is another detail of my irregular embroidery.

 I added a "bed" of dyed cheesecloth, and stitched some coral on top (from a bead store).

For this one, I had done a back stitch around the coral, then added the gold ribbon, couching it on by hand.  This gold piece isn't cord, it some kind of woven gold tubing, so I put a dab of fray check at the ends.

 Back stitch

I was thinking of adding more to this piece, but my friend Simone likes it "as-is", so I did not add any hand stitching.

It's amazing how the canvas makes the works look more finished and complete.

Red coral embroidery

I have been adding some embroidery to the fabric collages I had made.  I started with this one, and did a back stitch around the stamped coral image.

Here is a close-up.

I loved the way the back looked, even more than I liked the front. I loved the jagged free-form look of the stitches.

So for the next piece, I did my back stitch on the back side, so the jagged irregular stitching would be on the front.

I love the way it turned out.